Looking again at that Buick Excelle, if ever a car needed a chrome window surround, this is it. Add that and drop the spoiler and you'd have a nice upscale-looking C-segment car.
I wonder... If this Buick way of thinking is to possible shore up sales in the Buikc/GMC dealers. After all, Pontiac would have been the volume seller at the Buick dealerships, and now that Pontiac is long gone, Buick is trying to introduce some lower priced and smaller sized vehicles?
That might be part of it. I think another big part of it is that they're trying to attack the mass-market audience from two angles. Chevy seems to me to be aimed at your typical buyer of mass-market cars: someone who wants some simple, practical transportation at a good price with good fuel economy numbers, etc. Buick seems to be targeting your typical VW owner, lower-end Acura-owner, higher-end Mazda owner, etc: someone who is willing to pay a bit extra for subjective virtues, like interior materials, sound deadening, and suspension tuning.
I'm not a huge fan of chrome window surround, but I totally agree with you on this one.
3 things that confound me about Buick:
1) Why is Buick so popular in China?
2) Who is supposed to be Buick's target market in NAmerica?
3) Does anyone really like the Buick badge?
I asked my co-worker (who recently moved from China to Canada) about this. He told me that in China for a long time the local car makers weren't very good (and they are still playing a huge amount of catchup right now) so import brands were considered valuable. BMW, Volkswagen and Buick seem to be considered popular and worthy cars there.
There is a combination of differing expectations and standards as well as a different lineup compared to the North American cars. I guess the idea of a big car was very popular in some quarters of China and Buick had big cars. Another factor is that there is still considerable animosity towards Japan in China despite 60 years of peace so the Japanese brands have had a hard time making inroads while the American brands did not have such problems.
What's interesting is that GM Shanghai is now seemingly taking the lead on the Buick brand and the lead is translating into good cars in both China and in the US with Opel making up the other piece of the puzzle.
As for target market... I think they want to target someone like myself. Someone who is younger, still has disposable income, and is probably a working professional of some kind (I'm almost there I think). That said, most of the new Allure's that I've seen on the road were still driven by older folks but the move to smaller cars will attract my interests.
