SHADES OF 1963 The 2007 Riviera concept car, conceived in Shanghai.
THE idea of creating a new Buick in a design studio in China, as General Motors has done with the 2010 LaCrosse, is not as loopy as it might sound. Buicks have a certain cachet in China, dating back some eight decades to when the emperor bought one.
But today’s commercial imperative is more compelling than nostalgia: sales of Buicks in China first outpaced sales in the United States in 2006, and the margin is considerable today. For the first nine months of 2009, for instance, Buick sold 312,798 vehicles in China; in the United States, it sold 72,389.
In 1997 General Motors established two joint ventures with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation in China. One was for manufacturing. The other venture, for design and engineering, is the Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center. The center has done the engineering to adapt various G.M. global models for the Chinese market.
It was logical, then, to expect that the Chinese designers and engineers would eventually take the lead in developing a new vehicle for both markets. That became a reality in July 2006 when Ed Welburn, G.M.’s vice president for global design, gave the Shanghai center an assignment to develop a design study for introduction at the 2007 Shanghai auto show.
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