We’re Going Behind the Scenes with Buick to See How Its New Identity Was Born

The Buick Envista it made a big splash when it arrived last year. Although the turbocharged three-cylinder is sluggish, the Envista’s sleek design and refined details have proven popular, with sales continuing to climb as it delivered nearly 10,000 units in the first quarter of 2024. The Envista also promises to start a Buick design revolution. as the first pure paper car using the established and flashy design language EV wildlife concept. We recently attended General Motor’s new Design West facility, which opened last year, looking inside Buick’s studio and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the design process and how the new Buick model came to be.

It may seem old-fashioned, but the design process still begins with a sketch. Bob Boniface, Buick’s global creative director, told us his team has a weekly drawing review, which he described as “quick” and “the best meeting of the week.” This collection focuses less on production cars and more on letting the team’s imagination run wild. It allows artists to create unusual designs and push boundaries, which Boniface says “reminds us why we do this.”

This is also where the broader brand design language begins to take shape. During a sketch review in late 2018, Boniface asked his team to write the face of the car “without any shackles.” The freedom to explore worked—one designer’s sketch caught Boniface’s eye, a striking yet elegant look that he thought could change the look of the brand and translate into the entire line. The team further refined this theme, converting it from drawings to clay models.

This is usually the next step in the process, with small prototypes created by hand by a team of skilled craftsmen. We saw quite a few clay cars on our tour of the studio, each one built as half of a car encased in glass. This gives a sense of how the complete thing would look while saving the sculptors the time and trouble of creating the entire car. Above each drawing was embedded, providing inspiration for the example below.

While computers play a big role in the design process, “there is still no substitute for seeing and touching the car,” Boniface said. General Motors’ senior vice president of global design, Michael Simcoe, visited Buick’s studio one day in 2019 after the team transferred preliminary drawings of Buick’s new design language to clay. The design of what ended up being the Wildcat EV concept stopped Simcoe in his tracks, and he encouraged Boniface to explore the topic further.

The design was soon transferred to a complete clay model, at which time Boniface gave it the name Wildcat, taking inspiration from a series of concept cars of the 1950s, one of which, the 1954 Wildcat II, sat in the hall of Design West in our time. visit. Typically, designers create three to five small models before reaching life size, a process that takes only a few days. While small jobs are made by hand, large pieces are milled by large robotic machines.

There were three SUV design lessons at the studio we attended, one being carved with a lathe, tiny pores of clay piling up on the unsanitary studio floor as the machine cut intricate shapes into the bodywork. After the mill is complete, designers make adjustments by hand, using long pieces of tape to trace where they want the new line before shaving away or adding clay to the model. One prototype we saw was covered in a material called Di-Noc, a stretchy fabric that is applied to the clay to give a sense of how light will interact with the surface of the car’s body. Buick’s studio has a large ceiling with more than 75 light panels that can be adjusted to create different lighting conditions.

Many of the full-scale models that the design team creates are never intended for production. Boniface estimated that less than 50 percent of artwork makes it into small designs, with even smaller numbers progressing to full scale and only a few reaching dealer lots. Even the Wildcat EV concept wasn’t meant to see the light of day—the clay model that resulted from that initial sketch was only meant to serve as an internal design study to inspire future projects.

But the Wildcat’s sleek bodywork and fancy lights were so appealing that GM President Mark Reuss suggested they build a concept car, Boniface explained, to show the public that Buick was serious about design. The unlikely direction of the Wildcat EV from the car’s rendering shows how, at least at Buick, “design direction rarely comes down from the top,” Boniface said.

Instead, Buick takes a more grassroots approach, focusing on experimentation and collaboration in the studio. While the Wildcat will remain a concept—despite our pleas to turn it into an impressive electric flagship—this trial-and-error approach can affect real-world vehicles. Originally Envista had a more square design, said Boniface, like his brother, Chevrolet Trax. But the team messed with the clay and painted the roof like a coupe, and after the engineers gave approval, it reached production.

Although General Motors has a state-of-the-art design studio that looks eight to 10 years into the future, the design process for most production Buicks typically begins three and a half years before the cars roll off the assembly line. Creating a truth that is years away is difficult, Boniface admitted. “Designers need to have perspective,” he explained. “They need to be better informed about what the competitive landscape looks like.”

The design language pioneered by the Wildcat EV and pioneered in production by Envista is meant to be timeless, Boniface said, by avoiding stylistic details and “controlling visual weight using surface changes, not curves.” So far, this has resulted in a series of sleek, elegant, and quiet designs, from Envista to 2024 Meditation and The recently revealed 2025 Enclave. They may not be as unique as some of their competitors, but the looks are appealing to Buick buyers, with the company boasting a whopping 61 percent sales growth in 2023. With Buick’s first electric vehicle expected in 2025, we’re curious to see. what Boniface and his team have cooked.

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