2010 Buick LaCrosse CXS is an American Lexus

Fighter pilots call it "target fixation" when you become so focused on a single adversary that you lose situational awareness and fly into something large and obvious, like the ground. Buick's 2010 LaCrosse -- a near-luxury, mid-size-to-large sedan -- was built to put the cross-hairs on a single bogie, the Lexus ES350, and I'll tell you right now, it blows the Lexus out of the sky. Pow. Parachute. Smoking crater.

Oh, you can quibble over one detail or another. The LaCrosse's roof A-pillars are huge and make it hard to look through a corner on a tight, two-lane road (it's also possible to lose sight of pedestrians in crosswalks). There are moments that the cabin, with its Aqua Velva-blue ambient lighting, thick chrome instrument bezels, luminous LCD screens and spread of glowing buttons, looks like the flight deck of some drug-addled dirigible.

But no fair appraisal of this car can conclude anything but that the Buick is as good as or better than the Lexus in every way: It's as dead quiet, as thoughtfully designed, as this-minute in its technology. My top-of-the-line CXS had a 3.6-liter direct-injection V-6 under the scalloped hood, a six-speed Aisin automatic transmission, continuously variable suspension damping with Sport mode, Harman/Kardon sound system, touch-screen navigation and adaptive headlamps. Out the door at $39,195.

And yet with all of the semiconductor circuitry, servos, gadgets and displays, the LaCrosse feels deeply, foundationally sound. All is hushed and serene. Everything is damped. The whole car feels packed in ermine. It is an American Lexus.

But is that enough? In other words, has benchmarking the ES350 -- Lexus' bestselling sedan, by the way -- left the LaCrosse blind to challenges from other competitors in this segment? After all, the ES350 is a tarted-up Toyota Camry and enjoys its place in the market primarily because of the aspirational updraft of the Lexus brand. Personally, the ES350 bores me like nothing since "The Fountainhead."

How does the Buick stack up against, say, the Hyundai Genesis or the Infiniti G37 sedan, both finely tailored, tech-sodden sedans with rear-wheel drive? What about the brilliantly executed Acura TL, with its torque-vectoring all-wheel drive? The competition among near-luxury, mid-size sedans makes a Cuban cockfight look tame.

Born in a blizzard of pink slips and a tsunami of tears, the Buick LaCrosse -- the first new car launched by GM since it emerged from bankruptcy -- has to be more than on par with some middling Lexus. It has to be fantastic.