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1. GM Shows Off Buick Avant Premium Small Car Concept

Buick Concept Cars

If you weren’t sure GM was serious about small cars, especially small Buicks, the latest creation presented on the company’s new Design Lab Web site, a small Buick three-door hatch called the Avant, should convince you.

In researching the project, GM came up with six exterior ideas and four interior schemes and apparently settled on a three-door hatch designed to be as accommodating as possible. Along with the sleek styling, the Avant offers a trunk floor that extends out of the rear hatch to bring your luggage to you, a “micro pergola” roof that uses small vanes to vary the amount of light let in, doors that can either swing open or slide forward in tight spots, and a driver’s seat and controls that move from the center of the car over to the traditional left-hand driving position when other passengers are in the car.

Right now, the Avant exists only as a computer-generated design idea, but Buick has already hinted that premium small cars are on the way. Depending on the feedback GM gets through the Design Lab site, it’s possible we’ll see some of this design turn up in future Buick concepts, and maybe even on a production car some day.

After you’re done looking at the pictures here, take a look at this video GM created that illustrates some of the Avant’s key features, then head over to the Design Lab and let GM know what you think.

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SHANGHAI, Sept 2 (Reuters) – General Motors Co [GM.UL] said on Wednesday its China vehicles sales in August jumped 112.7 percent from a year earlier, paving the way for a more than 40 percent rise in sales for the full year.

General Motors, which competes with Volkswagen AG and others globally, in August sold 152,365 vehicles in China, its second biggest market, it said in a statement.

From January to August, the Detroit automaker sold 1.11 million vehicles in the country, up 49.6 percent from a year earlier, it said.

“We are now looking at a market of 11.5 to 12 million vehicles, up from 9.1 million units last year,” said Kevin Wale, president and managing director for GM’s China operations, referring to China’s overall vehicle market.

“We expect GM sales for the year as a whole to rise by more than 40 percent from 2008.”

China’s auto market, which overtook the United States as the world’s largest in January, has been a leading bright spot in the struggling global auto industry as government incentives spurred a pick-up in demand.

GM has been among the major beneficiaries of the initiatives, with its China vehicle sales hitting monthly records since January.

Shanghai GM, the U.S. automaker’s flagship car venture with SAIC Motor Corp, sold 63,303 models in August, up 99.6 percent, it said.

Monthly sales of the Chevrolet brand came to 23,771 units, up 99.4 percent, with Buick sales up 102.8 percent to 38,905 units.

SAIC-GM-Wuling, a three-way commercial vehicle tie-up between GM, SAIC and Liuzhou Wuling Automobile, came to 88,711 units in August, up 122.6 percent.

GM had said it planned to roll out 30 new or revamped models in China up to 2014 from 2009, including 10 Buick and Chevrolet models this year and next year.

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The Cadillac, code-named XTS, is expected in 2011 and will replace the front-drive DTS and rear-drive STS, the sources say. The X in the code-name suggests that all-wheel drive will be optional or standard.

The car is part of an emerging strategy for Cadillac that mirrors BMW’s three-car lineup of small, medium, and large. The CTS would be the medium-size car, and a new small Cadillac also is expected in 2011, sources say.

GM has made little secret of the new flagship, showing a drawing of the concept to dealers at a meeting last month in Detroit. Details are emerging about its platform and production site.

The new flagship may be assembled at GM’s Oshawa, Ontario, plant, the Canadian Auto Workers union says.

GM told the CAW last month that the Oshawa plant will be getting two new midsize sedans, says Chris Buckley, CAW Local 222 president.

While the specific models were not revealed to the CAW local, “there is a very real possibility that a Cadillac will be built in the city of Oshawa,” Buckley says.

Oshawa will produce a hybrid, short-wheelbase sedan in the first quarter of 2011, and a long-wheelbase sedan will go into production in 2013, said Jennifer Wright, a GM Canada spokeswoman. She declined to reveal the brand of the new models.

The Cadillac sedan will be developed on GM’s new global midsize vehicle platform, industry sources say. The first U.S. vehicle developed on that front-drive platform is the 2010 LaCrosse, which goes on sale this month.

But sources say that platform will be modified, creating a car that is 1.5 to 2.0 inches wider than other vehicles developed on the same platform. The LaCrosse is 73.1 inches wide, already about a half-inch wider than the CTS.

A source says Cadillac wants the cabin comfort that buyers expect in a luxury vehicle. Overall, the Cadillac sedan will be about 200 inches long. By comparison, the redesigned 2010 Mercedes-Benz E-class sedan is 191.7 inches long and 75.9 inches wide.

Still to be determined is whether all-wheel drive will be standard or optional on the Cadillac XTS.

The Oshawa car plant produces the Chevrolet Impala and the Camaro on separate lines. Buckley says the line for the rear-wheel-drive Camaro is flexible and can assemble rear-wheel and front-wheel-drive vehicles.

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The decision was made Aug. 14, after GM earlier in the week showed the SUV and other future vehicles to consumers, dealers, employees, analysts and news reporters, Vice Chairman Tom Stephens said yesterday on a company blog. One blogger called it “hideous” and users of Twitter dubbed it the “Vuick.”

“We were all struck by the consistency of the criticism,” Stephens wrote. “It didn’t fit the premium characteristics that customers have come to expect from Buick.” He didn’t elaborate on the vehicle’s shortcomings.

The decision to cancel the Buick was based on all of the input, face-to-face, blogs and tweets, Christopher Barger, GM’s spokesman for social media, said in an interview. No matter how they expressed it “they just didn’t like it.”

The plug-in hybrid technology that was to be used for the Buick SUV will be applied to another vehicle that Detroit-based GM will discuss soon, Stephens wrote. GM had said it would begin selling the plug-in hybrid version in 2011, after the gasoline- only model began sales in late 2010.

“It’s obviously a sign of a faster GM and a GM more open to outside feedback,” said Jim Hall, principal of auto consulting firm 2953 Analytics in Birmingham, Michigan. “It also suggests there were already concerns inside the company about the product.”

Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson has said he wants to transform GM to be more responsive to customers and make speedier decisions.

Dubbed ‘Vuick’

Negative feedback spread on Twitter Inc.’s site after users began calling the vehicle a “Vuick,” a reference to GM’s Saturn Vue that provided the basis for the Buick. It looked more like a retread than a fresh design, they said. Detractors began using the “#Vuick” name as a hash tag — an indexing tool on Twitter that lets users quickly find messages on the same topic.

Rebranding a mediocre model with a new name was typical of the “old GM,” blogger Joel Feder said last week on his Twitter account. He called the car hideous and a crying shame. “#Vuick must die,” Feder wrote.

Twitter, used by Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears and the British monarchy, lets users post 140-character messages. The speed and popularity of the San Francisco-based service has turned it into a source of breaking news and consumer trends.

Twitter had 20.1 million U.S. users in June, according to research firm ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia. That made it the third most popular social-networking site, behind Facebook Inc. and News Corp.’s MySpace.

Other Small SUV

GM still plans a different small Buick SUV that it referred to as the “baby Enclave,” Stephens said. The Enclave is a sport-utility vehicle built on a car platform with three rows of seats.

Buick’s U.S. sales peaked in 1984 at 941,611, according to trade publication Automotive News. By 2008, that total had dwindled to 137,200 units, a 26 percent drop from a year earlier.

The brand is popular in China, where Buick sedans are used to chauffeur Communist Party leaders. Sales surged almost tenfold from 2000 through last year to 280,255, consulting firm IHS Global Insight Inc. said.

Fuel Efficiency

Hall said the plug-in hybrid system that was going to be used for the canceled Buick SUV originally was intended for the Saturn Vue, part of a brand GM is selling. Adapting the system to another SUV will probably mean added costs and reduced performance because the likely candidates, the Chevrolet Equinox and GMC Terrain, are larger than the Vue, Hall said.

“Bottom line is they probably can’t afford not to do it in some form” with the new emphasis on vehicles powered by electricity, he said.

GM, which is 61 percent-owned by the U.S. Treasury after a government-backed bankruptcy, is introducing models with greater fuel efficiency as federal mileage requirements rise 35 percent by 2016.

The plug-in hybrid system that would have been used in the Buick SUV shares some technology with the Chevrolet Volt car, which is powered by lithium-ion batteries that can be recharged through a household electrical outlet. The Volt, an electric- drive vehicle with an on-board generator, is scheduled to go on sale in November 2010. The Buick would have been powered by its electric motor or gasoline-burning engine.

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The automaker canceled plans for the vehicle, which also called for a plug-in hybrid version, after potential customers invited to G.M.’s testing ground last week said the model did not have the premium characteristics they expected from Buick.

Thomas G. Stephens, G.M.’s vice chairman, wrote Wednesday on a company blog that it did so after “listening to feedback from customers, employees, dealers, media and just about anyone else with an opinion.”

“In the past, this would have been a several-month process,” he said.

At an industry conference on Aug. 6, General Motors announced plans to introduce the five-passenger Buick crossover in 2010 and a plug-in version of the model in 2011.

The Buick was expected to be the first commercially available plug-in sport utility vehicle by a major automaker and to follow General Motors’ heavily promoted Chevrolet Volt plug-in car.

The plug-in hybrid technology will be applied to another vehicle “at no delay” and G.M. will discuss the plans soon, Mr. Stephens said.

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