Buick-Badged, China-Bound Chevrolet Volt Spied Testing In Chicago

For some reason, the Chinese like the Buick brand. As a Pontiac fan, I don't. The wrong brand survived in my view.

 

Well, if you had been buying Pontiacs instead...

 

If Pontiac had been building hybrids & EVs instead...

At least @Bill the Engineer is building a Pontiac hybrid.



Firebrid: The Prius v Powered Hybrid Convertible | PriusChat

 

I was until I couldn't....






I drove the Sunbird GT through 2010, at which time they stopped making Pontiacs. I drove my wife's Gen-II Prius after that and she got a 2010 Gen-III.

I actually looked at using a Volt under the Firebrid. The fit was all wrong and the technology was inferior to the Prius.

 

Hey, that third car looks familiar. Almost like a Firebrid raising from the dead.

 

Being Chinese, I don't know why China likes Buicks. I'm partial to Oldsmobile myself. Grew up in the back of a Cutlass Ciera. Sister had a Cutlass Supreme Coupe. I always remember the soft pillowy ride and lament the terribly unreliable starter on every one of our Oldsmobiles.

This Velite looks identical to the Volt to me.

 

GM's too late attempt at differentiating their brands was too make Pontiac the sports car one. I parked next to a G6 the other day; it was one of the very few non-German RWD sedans available at the time. Then time ran out. The Volt was still in development, and performance hybrids without a plug still aren't big sellers. So neither could have saved Pontiac.

The only reason Buick didn't get axed was because of China sales, and GMC survived because its 'professional grade' marketing was so successful, around a fifth of owners would go to Ford over Chevy.

Well then, you should have been selling them in China.

They just had different goals. The gen2 Volt could get better fuel economy, perhaps matching the gen3 Prius, if it used the engine from the Malibu hybrid. With the goal being to provide a near BEV experience with the flexibility of a range extender, doing so would have driving its price up.

Did you consider one of the performance hybrids available at the time for your project; a RX/Highlander, LS 600h, or the first Accord hybrid?
Or even a straight BEV conversion?

My first car was a hand me down 1986 Park Avenue from my grandfather. I still think it was one of the best cars I've had. We might of had an Olds at one time. I do remember a Pontiac, but only that it was a four door sedan. We had a Pinto, a Super Beatle, and the '60s Mustangs would have been hard to forget.

I remember that the Buicks and Oldsmobiles being hard to tell apart back then. Same with many of model twins being sold. Brand and model differentiating is much these days. You can still tell to some degree, but taking the models too far apart reduces the advantage of the platform sharing. New GM seems to have struck the right balance between Chevy, Buick, and Cadillac designs. Most companies and stuck with or cut back to just two brands in a market.

 

The other hybrids that were in my budget did not have the right wheelbase, and/or the suspension was too tall to fit under the Firebird fenders.

When the Firebrid is finished, I promised my wife I'd make her an all-electric BMW Z3.

 

i had a cutlass and intrigue. got the notice of 'not your fathers oldsmobile, and not yours either', right after buying the intrigue. that moved me to ford taurus which i dumped for a loss as soon as a 2004 prius became available.

 

I went Taurus to Prius by a more circumvent route, with a Matrix in between for a short time.

The Taurus was a '96, and I would call it a tank in dependability. Got it new from the same grandfather that gave me the Buick. In about a week, when I was rear ended by a minivan. The van's hood was buckled, but we lived in NJ, and I was under 25, so it was decided that going through insurance would cost too much, and my damage looked superficial.

Years later, I realized that that impact had just slightly twisted the cars frame, and nearly all the car's quirks and issues could be attributed to that. The only thing I would say was an issue with Ford quality was with the exhaust differential sensor. Those also suffered early deaths in the Ranger and Sable.

We had the car for about 8 years, and put over 130k miles on it. In that time, it was rear ended again(with less force), and came just too close to a telephone while taking a turn during that time.