Buick takes an inside-out approach to luxury with the LaCrosse GL concept coming to L.A.
With the preview of the new Buick LaCrosse GL concept, the General Motors brand is rethinking luxury from the inside-out.
Buick’s strategy for winning over new customers has been to emphasize inviting design and warm colors — an approach already showing a payoff as the once-dying brand begins to reverse years of losses. And Buick officials intend to put even more of an emphasis on styling during the brand’s news conference at the upcoming L.A. Auto Show where it plans to reveal the LaCrosse GL show car.
High fashion and its stark choices doesn’t work for Buick customers, who are more interested in sharing their experiences with friends and family than making a bold statement, stressed David Lyon, Buick executive director of design, discussing plans for the Los Angeles show. Lyon also said Buick customers want to get away from the ‘beige, gray, black” interiors that have characterized interiors of cars over the recent years.
Buick underscores its new focus on design with the LaCrosse GL Concept.
Consequently he gave Buick’s color and trim designers orders to come up with combinations that will appeal to the Buick customer’s sense of luxury. The results of the effort will be spotlighted in Los Angeles when Buick unveils the LaCrosse GL, Lyon revealed.
“The LaCrosse GL concept expresses Buick’s distinctly human kind of luxury – one that is as warmly inviting as it is elegant and refined,” said David Lyon, executive director of design. “The design cues that already distinguish the production LaCrosse – such as the premium leather-upholstered seats, ice blue ambient lighting and soft touch surfaces – are amplified in the GL, and serve as inspiration for future Buick models.”
Buick’s color and trim designers worked from a palette of cabernet red, dark cocoa brown and caramel chocochino, according to Lyon, while using burnished metal of antique jewelry, ombré patina on vintage guitars and the flocked lining you’d find in keepsake boxes. For GL’s French-stitched premium leather seats, the designers looked to the understated elegance of classic club chairs and contours of windswept sand dunes, added Magdalena Kokoszynska, creative designer on LaCrosse GL. Smooth suede was used for the headliner to invite one’s touch like a favorite pair of glove, Kokoszynska added.
The LaCrosse GL’s cabernet red exterior paint is complemented by brushed and tinted chrome accents on the grill, door handles and deck lid, as well as around the windows, taillights and headlights. Machine-face, satin-finish 20-inch rims fill the wheel wells for a firmly planted appearance.
“The brushed and tinted chrome trim gives the GL a more subdued appearance than if we had used bright chrome. The overall effect is more in keeping with Buick’s quietly confident aesthetic,” Kokoszynska added.
Kokoszynska said the objective is to wrap the car’s occupant in luxury that is emphasized by flowing sculptural surfaces that are finished in a rich blend of warm-hued materials. The interiors also offer soft-touch refinement and surprise-and-delight details.
Like the GL’s exterior trim pieces, the interior metal accents on the instrument cluster and center stack controls are a darker, warmer hue, and are complemented by the swirling grain of wood trim on the steering wheel and dash that evokes the ombré patina fade found on classic Gibson Les Paul guitars.
Attention to detail also is evident underfoot, where leather-surged and accent-stitched floor mats offer further refinement. Likewise, the storage compartments are flocked like the interior of a jewel box.
“Every surface in the interior of the LaCrosse GL has been crafted with the knowledge that Buick customers enjoy the finer things in life, but don’t need to flaunt it,” Kokoszynska said.
Lyon said spending relatively small amounts on new material for the interior actually can bring a significant return in terms of both higher prices and new customers looking for a different, more subtle expression of luxury.