General Motors will introduce a crossover vehicle under its nameplate in 2010 and plans a plug-in version for commercial customers in 2011 that will be available shortly after, Brent Snavely reports.
The gasoline version has a 2.4-liter direct-injected four-cylinder engine delivering 30 mpg or more on the highway. The front-wheel drive plug-in version will use a modified version of GM's two-mode
hybrid system, combined with lithium-ion battery cells and charging technology developed for the Chevrolet Volt.
"One of the things we wanted to do is bring the age of the Buick customer
down, and we thought one of the things... we could do to do that would be to add this advanced-propulsion technology onto the Buick brand," says Tom Stephens, GM's vice chairman of global product
development.
Writing in the
Los Angeles Times, Dan Neil says
that the 2010 Buick
LaCrosse CXS is a good start for GM's long road to recovery. The automaker's engineers and designers set their sights squarely on the Lexus ES350, he says, and the result is a car that "blows the
Lexus out of the sky. Pow. Parachute. Smoking crater."
Jean Halliday and Rupal Parekh, meanwhile, report in
Ad Age that
a
mysterious advertising blitz popping up in various media this week featuring a smiling and winking electrical outlet is on behalf of General Motors. The number 230 and the date 8-11 lead them to
surmise that the campaign is for the plug-in Volt, which will likely get its juice from the 230-volt outlets used to run heavy appliances. GM has scheduled a press conference for Aug. 11, but that's
all it's revealing.
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