While I cannot speak for Mr. Lutz, I'll give you my take on the Buick statement.

The 'channel' strategy......that is, the lineup of Divisions under one dealership roof is to 'dual' Buick/Pontiac/GMC. ......(Canada had the channel strategy down pat for years.....nearly every Chevy dealer was dualled with Olds, all Pontiac Dealers were dualled with Buick.........

That means that the Pontiac/Buick/GMC dealer will have a full lineup of cars and trucks......from sedans (Buick) Coupes (Pontiac) and trucks (GMC) That's not to say that Buick won't possibly get a coupe or that Pontiac doesn't get sedans.......but there is no reason to have every division have a version of the U-Van (Uplander/Terraza/yaddayadda).......and a version of the W-body sedan.......just doesn't make sense.....and hasn't, in my opinion, for quite some time. That said......we are under contract with our dealers that IF they put up adequate capital....have proper facilities....hire the right people and market properly, they should be able to make a return on their investment.......that means we needed to give them products in several segments in order to compete............thus, when we had hundreds of single line Pontiac and hundreds of single line Buick dealerships......well....you get the idea.
We no longer have hundreds of single line dealerships......they're being combined weekly as dealerships come up for sale......

Just my take.........

 

i was kinda disappointed whe he flat out said Pontiac will never reach the state of "perfection" of the BMW 3 series.. thats does not sound very inspiring.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Buick's "sporty coupe" ends up being nothing more than a FWD coupe based on the Pontiac G6. The insiders all say that the LaCrosse will probably move to the Epsilon platform when redesigned around the end of the decade. I would not get my hopes up for a new Grand National.

 

I concur about the Buick coupe, and don't know enough to say anything about the next LeCrosse. But seems Buick somewhere along the line is slated for a RWD in the not very distant future.

 

Shouldn't Buick be getting something on Epsilon soon?

I would imagine any Buick coupe would be tied directly to the next GTO and production of a large RWD chassis in North America....which has been delayed 1-2 years. That does not mean Buick could not import a sedan..or RWD in NA could not get moved up. At GM things seem to change by the hour any more. Our first hint that something is happing will be a plant getting tooled up.

 

sporty coupe..like in G6 coupe direction..

and TRUCKS for Buick??

as in pick up truck??

 

who knows maybe therell be a fwd coupe and a rwd gnx. he did say coupes

 

If we get a GN or GNX I would be VERRYY surprised..