This Regal is a royal pain.

• Author: Neil, Dan
• Position: Buick Regal Gran Sport

As the name suggests, the Buick Regal Gran Sport sedan is supposed to be sporty, and sporty is supposed to be fun and -- stay with me here -- it is fun, as in "fun" furs and "fun" jewelry. It's a gaudy, throwaway piece of plastic that looks OK in dim light but is a bit frightening by the light of day.

Not the sort of car you bring home to mother.

Regal is Buick's player in the red-hot sporty sedan niche, up against rolling stock such as Eagle Vision, Mazda 626 ES and perennial heavyweight Ford Taurus. Residing on the same platform as the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and Chevy Lumina, the Regal's Gran Sport edition includes "Grand Touring" suspension, a 3.8-liter V-6, 16-inch Goodyear radials, an automatic braking system, leather-wrapped steering wheel and a wide assortment of map pockets, vanity lights, body-panel moldings, grille treatments and cup holders.

Sounds OK, doesn't it? Well, in some ways it is. It's got terrific gray-leather seats. It accelerates crisply, and the GM Hydra-matic 4T60-E transmission -- the same found in the Cadillac Seville STS -- provides seamless shifting. Handling is in all ways adequate. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the platform.

But, please, somebody call wardrobe.

Few interiors are quite as ghastly as the Regal Gran Sport's. Bedecked in the hokiest of plastic wood-grain and pseudo-chrome trim, the inside of the Regal Gran Sport recalls nothing so much as a mobile home.

Or a '60s GTO. A big, straight, black shift lever dwells in the wood-grained console that leaps up between the front seats. This is almost exactly the same console found in summer-of-love-era Bonnevilles and Camaros, though I think the wood grain was more convincing then.

The whole car has a clickety-clack, plastic feel. The automatic door locks shut with a noisy rattle. The shift-knob button gimbals around in its mount. Even the windshield wipers -- not usually a source of concern in Buicks -- seem flimsy.

There is a functional side to aesthetics, and that perhaps is the most worrisome thing about the Gran Sport. Sure, some might like a little chrome here and there, but I fail to see how anyone can appreciate its nearly useless instrument console. It peers out from a clamshell-like opening in the dash. On the left is a brace of indicator lights. Front and center, about the size of an apple, is the speedometer and its mate, a tachometer. Both are nearly unreadable because they are so small and are blocked by the steering wheel.

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