Due to clever advertising (see below) the sales of Buick automobiles
exploded in the 1950’s, and by 1955, sales reached their all-time high of 737,879
units. Two years later, sales had been cut in half, and the brand was well
below third-place Plymouth.
Buick Motor Company has a long and proud history, going all the
way back to 1903. For
many years, the bulk of Buick sales were in the United States, but General
Motors has long had a presence in other markets. The first Buick sold in China
was to the Emperor of China in the 1920’s
The Chinese market has expanded rapidly in recent years, and it recently became the largest auto market on the face of the planet.
In 2006, Buick sales in China surpassed Buick sales in the United States for the first time, and the gap has widened considerably since then.
For the first nine months of 2009, Buick sold 312,798 cars in China, and only 72,389 in the United States. As a result, when Buick redesigned the Lacrosse for the 2010 model year, the design studio that did the work was in Shanghai, not in America. Sales continued to tumble after 2009, but by 2019, had INCREASED to over 150,000. Roughly 90% of those sales were from its three SUV models, only one of which is made in America. The smallest version, the Encore, is made in Korea, and the mid-sized version, the Envision (see below), is made in China.
The Envision is not the only Chinese-made car that you can buy
in America, since the Cadillac CT-6 plug in hybrid and the Ford Focus are also
made there.
Volvo, the venerable Swedish
brand owned by the Chinese multinational automotive company Geely, was the
first automaker to export from China to the U.S. with the S60 Inscription in
2015. Except for an assembly plate in the doorjam, you never would know. It
worked so well Volvo opened an assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina on
June 20, 2018. The plant will produce the sleek new S60 sedan initially, and
according to Automotive News, the XC90 crossover by 2021. This marks the first
time a Chinese-owned automaker assembled cars in the U.S.
Interestingly, Oldsmobile, Pontiac and
Saturn were canceled while selling at North American volumes far higher than
Buick is now. Olds, in particular, was posting comparatively robust sales near
a quarter-million a year when it was handed its surprise death notice in late 2000.
Saturn and Pontiac had dipped below 200,000 in yearly sales and did not survive
G.M.’s bankruptcy in 2009. If
not for the Buick name’s esteem in China — Communist Party leaders once favored
lavishly appointed Buick land yachts — it is possible the brand would have been
abandoned when Buick City was.
If you bought a new Buick today, you might notice that the
name “Buick” is no longer on the car. The only brand identifier is the “tri-shield”
logo that was first introduced in 1959.
In the near future, it’s possible that you will no longer to
buy a Buick sedan at all, since production will likely shift to 100% SUV models – and they
will no longer by called Buicks, since the “Avenir” name could be the new moniker.
Avenir is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed
by Adrian Frutiger in 1987 and released
in 1988 by Linotype GmbH. The word avenir is
French for "future". As the name suggests, the family takes inspiration
from the geometric style of sans-serif typeface developed in the 1920s that
took the circle as a basis, such as Erbar and Futura.
Frutiger intended Avenir to be a more organic interpretation of the geometric
style, more even in color and suitable for extended text, with details
recalling more traditional typefaces such as the two-story 'a' and 't' with a
curl at the bottom, and letters such as the 'o' that are not exact, perfect
circles but optically corrected
Somehow, “wouldn’t you really rather have an Avenir” just
doesn’t have the same ring to it as the old saying, and people might as well
say, “you know, it’s just not my type”.
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