Flint Expatriates: Buick Town East

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Buick Town East

The 2007 Riviera concept car that was born in China.

Flint Expatriates has written about China's love affair with Buick before:

"Of course, G.M. isn't exactly picky when it comes to lovers these days. The automaker is as desperate as a balding, recently divorced, middle-aged guy hanging out at the White Horse Tavern with an unemployment check burning a whole in his pocket.

And today The New York Times has a good piece on how G.M. ended up designing the new LaCrosse in China. Clifford Ghetti writes:

"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."

Read the entire article here, and go here for an interactive graphic on the new LaCrosse.

1 comment:

AnonymousNovember 3, 2009 at 12:25 PM
The Japanese also had a love for the Buick. Gary Godin might remember hearing of a special refitting plant that they built quite sometime back for millions of dollars. The cars would be shipped over there and the body parts would be refitted,fenders,hoods,trunk lids and you couldn't get your thumbnail in the gaps afterward. They did like those LeSabres. unclebuck
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

DMCA Notice

Flintexpats.com respects the intellectual property of others.

If you believe that your copyrighted work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement and is accessible on this site, you may notify our copyright agent, as set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). For your complaint to be valid under the DMCA, you must provide the following information when providing notice of the claimed copyright infringement:

* A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed

* Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of the infringing activity and that is to be removed

* Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address

* A statement that the complaining party "in good faith believes that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or law"

* A statement that the "information in the notification is accurate", and "under penalty of perjury, the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed"

The above information must be submitted as a written, faxed or emailed notification to the following Designated Agent: Attn: DMCA Office, Flintexpats.com, 418 Anderson St., San Francisco, CA 94110, gyoung@flintexpats.com.

WE CAUTION YOU THAT UNDER FEDERAL LAW, IF YOU KNOWINGLY MISREPRESENT THAT ONLINE MATERIAL IS INFRINGING, YOU MAY BE SUBJECT TO HEAVY CIVIL PENALTIES. THESE INCLUDE MONETARY DAMAGES, COURT COSTS, AND ATTORNEYS’ FEES INCURRED BY US, BY ANY COPYRIGHT OWNER, OR BY ANY COPYRIGHT OWNER’S LICENSEE THAT IS INJURED AS A RESULT OF OUR RELYING UPON YOUR MISREPRESENTATION. YOU MAY ALSO BE SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTION FOR PERJURY.

This information should not be construed as legal advice, for further details on the information required for valid DMCA notifications, see 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3).