By Frank S. Washington
DETROIT, MI – I heard this hissing when I got out of my 2013 Buick Enclave test vehicle. My heart raced faster as I checked around the three-rowed crossover and discovered a chunk of metal or glass stuck in the left rear tire.
The second smartest thing I did was not pull the debris out of the tire; I wanted to get the vehicle home, which was about a mile away, where I could deal with the tire in the relative comfort of my driveway and not the parking lot of Tar-jaay (Target).
By not extracting the tire piercing object, air continued to hiss out versus gush out of what would have been a sizable hole in the tire. Still, I was in a rush. I was driving aggressively without being aggressive trying to get home.
The Enclave’s 3.6-liter V6 responded nicely with 288 horsepower and 270 foot-pounds of torque. I wasn’t weaving in and out of traffic but there was a rapid lane change or two. Steering was quick and responsive and there was not any noticeable body sway. That’s saying something for a sizable utility vehicle.
The high seating position of the Enclave gave me a clear view of the road in all directions. I turned the satellite radio off and thank goodness nobody called. I had connected my smartphone to the Enclave’s Bluetooth system but that was not the time to chat with anybody. I wanted all my attention on the road as well as the vehicle. The Enclave’s slick interior, comfortable seats and soft touch points on the dash and the doors didn’t come into play in that situation.
There were a couple of times I was tempted to turn a red light into a stop sign but I didn’t. Still, I approached intersections with stop lights swiftly. My Buick Enclave’s brakes responded nicely, I didn’t need to apply an abundance of pressure on the brake pedal.
I kept checking to see if the Enclave was listing to the left but it wasn’t, at least not noticeably. The tire monitor system didn’t alert me to low air pressure in the punctured tire until I had been sitting in my driveway for a few minutes.
That’s where I made my smartest decision. I sent “Macho Man” on vacation and immediately reached for the owner’s manual.
My test vehicle had three rows of seats and I thought it was a good bet that the spare tire was under the vehicle and not in it. And I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time trying to figure how to get to the spare or figuring out where the jack was located.
As it turned out, the jack was a behind the wall panel on the driver’s side in the cargo area that I probably never would have found without the directions in the owner’s manual.
The third row seats lowered with one pull on a release cord. The head rest automatically folded, providing enough space for the back of the third row seats to create an almost flat cargo floor and that’s where I laid the owner’s manual to read more instructions.
Then I had to find the winch nut under a flap of carpet in the cargo area and use the socket wrench on the jack arm to lower the spare to the ground. That nut was the same size as the lug nuts of which the Buick Enclave had six.
It was windy it was cold and there was a frigid drizzle sporadically coming down. However it could have been worse. There could have been snow or ice or slush or all three on the ground. There’s no neat way of changing the tire on a utility vehicle.
That’s a downside of all three-rowed utility vehicles, changing the spare tire is not a snap. And those tires, in this case Michelin P255/60R/19s, are a lot of rubber. Thus, the spare is most likely a donut as it was in the case of the Enclave. That’s not something you want to ride around on indefinitely.
Sometimes driving can get down to the basics. My Enclave’s rear seat entertainment system, all-wheel-drive, the second row skylight and power front moonroof, heated and cooled front seats, navigation system, power liftgate and all the rest of its creature comforts could not have mattered less. It was how much trouble I was going to have changing the tire.
Swapping an air filled donut for the Buick Enclave’s flat tire was laborious but not problematic. It passed the things can go wrong test quite nicely. With options, the sticker on my tester read $52,160.
Frank S. Washington is the editor of AboutThatCar.com.
This was printed in the June 30, 2013 – July 13, 2013 Edition
