Buick Excelle

Buick does not build many cars like the Buick Excelle: a 4-door sedan / 5-door hatchback / 5-door station wagon with 1.5 L L2B I4, built from 2003 to 2023 in the decade of stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids.

How it came about

The Buick Excelle (Chinese: 別克凱越; pinyin: Biékè kǎiyuè) is the common name for the subcompact cars marketed by Shanghai General Motors Company Limited (Chinese: 上海通用汽車有限公司) under GM's Buick brand. It is classified as a compact in China, but by international standards it is a subcompact car. The original Buick Excelle (Chinese "Kai Yue") is based on the Daewoo Lacetti developed in South Korea by Daewoo Motors. While this car was originally sold worldwide under the Daewoo brand, in 2004, General Motors rebranded all Daewoo products in Europe as Chevrolets. Parallel to the Lacetti-based Excelle, Shanghai GM introduced a new car called the Buick Excelle GT in China, but called "Ying Lang" in Chinese. It is based on GM's global compact car platform "Delta II" which is developed at Rüsselsheim in Opel's International Technical Development Center (ITDC).

The Chevrolet Cruze is based on this same platform. Since the 2009 economic crises and the subsequent demise of the Saturn brand and reduction of GM's North American brands to four, the Opel models are aligned no longer with the Saturn brand, but the Buick brand. Consequently, the models built and marketed by Buick China are twins of the Opel variants of GM's global platforms while the Lacetti-based Excelle was re-positioned below Buick's newer offerings in the Chinese market. In China, a hatchback called the Buick Excelle XT debuted in 2009, which is essentially a rebadged Astra J. A sedan debuted in 2010 called the Buick Excelle GT (Chinese: 别克英朗GT). An estate car based on the second generation Buick Excelle GT debuted in 2018 c

The hardware

Under the skin sits 1.5 L L2B I4; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. The gearbox is a 5 speed D16 manual / 6 speed automatic / 4 speed Step-Gate automatic. The wheelbase is 2600 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.

Family and rivals

Where it sits in Buick's history is not in doubt: the Buick Sail came before it; it was built at Shanghai, China. On a showroom list of its day it stood against the Bentley Continental GT, the Mazda Mazda3, the Mazda RX-8. Its Buick stablemates include the Buick First Call and the Buick Funeral Car.