Buick to get busy with EVs, brand chief says
When General Motors revealed its ambitious battery-electric vehicle plan last month, the automaker called it a multi-brand strategy. But Buick likely will play a prominent role in the early stages of the 20-product rollout. “Buick will play a huge part,” says Duncan Aldred, vice-president sales and marketing at Buick-GMC.
WardsAutoand its forecasting partner AutoForecast Solutions expect Buick to receive an EV off the Chevrolet Bolt platform in 2019. It likely will be a package similar to the Buick Encore compact CUV and, as such, the first product in GM’s EV blitz for the retail market since the Chevrolet Bolt arrived late last year.
GM last month pledged two new EVs in the next 18 months and 20 electric or hydrogen-fuel-cell EVs by 2023 as part of an all-electric future for the Detroit automaker.
But if Chevy is the tip of GM’s EV spear with the Bolt, consider Buick the shaft.
Buick is GM’s second-best-selling brand globally and the No. 4 brand overall in China, where government regulations in the world’s largest market will demand 10% of an automaker’s sales by 2019 carry a New-Energy Vehicle score linked to the production of zero-emissions and low-emissions vehicles. It rises to 12% in 2020, while Beijing continues to formulate a timetable for phasing out the internal-combustion engine in the future. This article first appeared in WardsAuto.
