Can China help make Buick cool?
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Here's an intriguing insight GM design chief Ed Welburn (pictured, center) let slip at lunch today: When many of GM's young designers start playing around with design concept sketches, a lot of them end up as Buicks. Not Corvettes. Not Caddys. Not Chevy trucks. Buicks.
Yeah, I was surprised, too. Enclave aside, Buick is now the old man's brand in the GM domestic portfolio. Slightly sharper new threads can't disguise the fact the Lucerne and LaCrosse are basically hangovers from the numb, wallowy, indifferent mush GM car plants churned for much of the past two decades.
So what is it about Buick? Welburn, a lifelong Buick fan (his father had a Bill Mitchell-era Riviera), thinks it's because of Buick's storied design heritage. After dross like recent LeSabres, Regals, Centurys, it's easy to forget that GM's first concept car, the Y-Job, was a Buick styled by Harley Earl, or that Bill Mitchell's 1963 Riv was one of the absolute high watermarks of 1960s auto design. Period.
Welburn could be right. But what's more interesting -- and, I suspect, what really has GM's hot young designers juiced -- is the way Buick is morphing into something completely unrelated to its past.
As we reported earlier today, GM will unveil a sedan concept at the Beijing show in a few weeks' time. It will be called Invicta and will likely hint at the forthcoming 2010 Lacrosse replacement, a car known internally as GMX353 and built off the next generation Epsilon 2 architecture.
The Invicta follows last year's Riviera concept, one of the stars of the Shanghai show, and like the Riviera, was largely styled in GM's Shanghai studio. Buick is GM's hero brand in China, accounting for about one-third of the million or so GM vehicles the company sells there. That explains the Shanghai styling connection: Buick's future depends on designing cars that primarily appeal to consumers in what will soon be the world's largest auto market.
Buick is morphing into the world's first Chinese-American brand. And wouldn't it be ironic if Shanghai's sharp new Buicks helped make one of America's iconic auto nameplates cool again?
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