- After a long silence from its corporate parent, Buick will get some love this week when a “Buick EV concept” will be revealed and Buick-GMC boss Duncan Aldred will discuss the brand’s future.
- Late last week, Buick’s Chinese media site posted a press release announcing the company will reveal the Electra-X (pictured above), its first electric SUV concept, at the Buick China Brand Day in early June.
- In China, Buick offers a broad portfolio, including the GL8 minivan and the Velite 6 EV station wagon and all-electric Velite 7 subcompact crossover.
Tomorrow, General Motors will share its plans for the Buick brand, which was incorporated in 1903 and five years later played a starring role in the creation of General Motors. Buick doesn’t have the same cachet as it did in 1938, when the auto industry’s first concept car rolled out of GM’s studios under the leadership of Harley Earl: the stunning Buick Y-Job.
Today, Buick doesn’t even have a sedan, coupe, hybrid, or battery-electric in the US lineup—just gasoline-powered crossovers that aspire to be luxurious but share their underpinnings with mainstream Chevrolets and tend to blend into a sea of five-passenger utilitarianism (seven-passenger in the Enclave). The entire lineup is four vehicles: the Enclave, Encore, Encore GX, and Envision. For the 2023 model year, the lineup shrinks to three models with the Encore’s departure.
After a long silence from its corporate parent, Buick will get some love this week when a “Buick EV concept” will be revealed and Buick-GMC boss Duncan Aldred will discuss the brand and its future. A Buick EV makes sense because GM’s Ultium battery architecture was designed to support EVs already in the pipeline for its three other brands—GMC, Cadillac, and Chevrolet. If this new Buick vehicle remains only a concept, then the brand has a questionable future in the US market.
On February 13 of this year, Buick declared on Twitter, “We’re going all-electric!” then went on to add, “This summer we will show you our dreams of a groovy electric future.”
So that time has come and Buick has been long overdue for a compelling product that gives the brand some stature and creates some excitement in the home market. Sure, the brand has traction in China, but GM has a spotty track record with brands in specific regions. Daewoo and Holden, for instance, no longer exist, while Opel and Vauxhall now fall under the Stellantis umbrella. Opel supplied Buick its last compelling product—the Regal and Regal GS, which barely lasted two years before getting the axe in 2020. Let’s not forget the Cascada convertible, which came from Opel in 2013 and lasted six years in the US.
Need more evidence of Buick’s unstable footing? Take a look at GM’s letter to shareholders and an accompanying 40-page deck of slides when earnings were released in February. The grand plans for Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC—particularly the electric vehicles—featured prominently in both documents. Buick didn’t even merit a mention.
For the past few years, it seems Buick has languished in the same way Oldsmobile did before GM pulled the plug on that storied brand in 2004. When General Motors killed off Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, and Hummer during its 2009 bankruptcy, skeptics may have been wondering why and how Buick made the cut.
It’s still around because it’s popular in China: Buick has sold more than 10 million vehicles in China since its introduction by GM’s Shanghai Automotive joint venture in 1998. The brand delivered 820,000 vehicles last year in China, while Cadillac and Chevrolet each sold about 230,000. For context, Buick sold 180,000 vehicles in the US last year, well below Chevrolet (1.4 million) and GMC (482,000), but better than Cadillac’s 118,000-unit tally.
In China, Buick offers more and different models, including the GL8 minivan now in its third generation and the Velite 6 (battery-electric compact station wagon also sold as a plug-in hybrid) and all-electric Velite 7 subcompact crossover similar to the Chevy Bolt. The portfolio is much broader in China, with the Excelle, Verano, LaCrosse, and Regal sedans, along with the vehicles we get in the US—the Envision, Encore, and Enclave.
Is GM positioning Buick as a China-only brand, eventually discontinued in the US? Within GM’s North American manufacturing footprint, Buick barely has a presence: Only the three-row Enclave is manufactured here (at the Lansing Delta Township plant in Michigan), while the Encores come from South Korea and the Envision is manufactured in China.
Most interesting is the way General Motors communicates about Buick in China and the US. Late last week, Buick’s Chinese media site posted a press release announcing the company will reveal the Electra-X, its first electric SUV concept, at the Buick China Brand Day in early June.
“The Electra-X will offer a sneak peek at future Ultium-based EVs for Buick in China. Defined by the brand’s all-new design language, the Electra-X features distinct and forward-looking styling, along with an airy interior,” the announcement read.
Is the Electra-X destined for the US as the vehicle we’ll learn about tomorrow? We’ll find out soon enough, but there’s no mention of it on Buick’s media page for the US market. In fact, there hasn’t been a post about Buick product on the US media page since last June’s announcement about updates to the Enclave.
Instead, Buick’s last press release on its media site was to highlight female athletes as part of Buick’s #SeeHerGreatness campaign. For several months, Buick has been tweeting extensively about the achievements of female basketball, hockey, and soccer players and focusing on disparities in compensation for female athletes. Every brand wants to be popular with women, but Buick is pushing particularly hard in this direction.
For decades, Buick has populated the awkward “near-luxury” space, along with Acura (both selling in small numbers), because it stood in Cadillac’s shadow for so long within the GM stable. But most high-end shoppers have their sights set on BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Audi, and Tesla. Cadillac struggles for a seat at that table, which makes it even harder for Buick to stay relevant in the US.
Soon we’ll learn about the plans for Buick.
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