Inside, the Encore is certainly much nicer than the Trax. It has a soft-skinned dash, soft-skinned door uppers (both front and rear), and cloth-wrapped pillars. Leather upholstery is standard once you move beyond the base “Convenience” trim. There’s a Buick IntelliLink infotainment system with seven-inch touchscreen display and OnStar 4G LTE with Wi-Fi hotspot capability. There’s ice-blue ambient lighting and classy-looking gauges with glowing red tracers that follow the needle around the dial. There’s a standard leather-wrapped steering wheel, remote locks with keyless entry, 18-inch alloy wheels, and cruise control. My test car’s Premium trim upgraded the audio to a rich-sounding Bose system, and it came with optional navigation system and a moonroof, plus some flashy-looking chromed alloys that are apparently no longer available.

It all sounds pretty good, and it actually looks pretty good too, at least when taken on its own. But if you happen to step into the Encore after spending a week in a Cadillac ATS like I did, or if you climb aboard after coming straight over from trying out an Audi Q3 or Mercedes-Benz GLA, the Encore’s less refined aspects are instantly apparent.

There’s a lot of coarsely textured rigid plastic making up the lower panels, and the ebony woodgrain trim in my tester looked entirely unconvincing. The infotainment interface is baffling and tedious to use, with the screen too far away to be useful as a touchscreen (it honestly never occurred to me to try touching it). The more conveniently located rotating controller knob, on the other hand, is a study in frustration. It has a scroll control in the middle, but this is only active in the navigation screen – other screens require you to rotate the outer ring to step through all the available commands in perplexing order. You then have to press the outer ring – an action that requires two fingers – to select a command. The centre console is absolutely festooned with buttons, so locating the all-important Home and Back buttons takes a while at first.

The nitpicks don’t stop there, either: The front seat squabs are too short, and I found myself more perched on my seat than actually sitting in it. After two hours on the highway, I was squirming around a fair bit trying to stay comfortable. The seats have partial power with correspondingly partial driver’s side memory, but the recline control is manually operated and awkwardly placed. While remote locks may be standard, proximity entry and push-button start aren’t available, so you’re left wielding an old-school key. I also found that the transmission could be a wee bit jerky on initial takeup and when shifting, and I’m not a big fan of the thumb-operated manual shift control atop the gear lever.

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