Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Opel's stylish Adam city car won't land in the U.S. with a Buick emblem after all

Ronan Glon
By

Opel Adam S
Ronan Glon/Digital Trends
A couple of years ago, Buick considered selling a re-badged, Americanized version of sister company Opel’s stylish Adam city car in a bid to take on the Fiat 500 and the Mini Cooper. The General Motors-owned car maker has announced that it has dropped those plans in the wake of low gas prices and sluggish small car sales.

“I very much did feel when I came over that [bringing the Adam] could really help accelerate the Buick brand story,” explained company boss Duncan Aldred in an interview with trade journal Automotive News. “I don’t see that as much. Whether the market shifted or the fashion nature of those cars has changed, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be looking for a small, B-segment car today.”

Recommended Videos

The current-generation Opel Adam (pictured) wasn’t designed to comply with American safety and emissions regulations so Buick would have needed to federalize it, a process that’s both costly and time consuming, in order to sell it here. Buick’s interest in the model reportedly convinced Opel to design the next-gen Adam with the United States’ regulations in mind, so it will essentially be ready to land on our shores with only minor tweaks if the firm’s executives ever change their minds.

Related

The second-generation Adam isn’t scheduled to debut until 2018 at the earliest, meaning it likely wouldn’t arrive here until the 2019 model year, and a lot can happen in a couple of years’ time. In other words, minicar fans hoping for a German-flavored alternative to the Fiat 500 might not be entirely out of luck.

Until then, the popular Encore crossover will remain the smallest member of the company’s lineup. The family might be expanded toward the top, however, as Aldred revealed he hasn’t excluded launching a stylish flagship model positioned above the Lacrosse in the Buick hierarchy. He stopped short of providing specific details, but an earlier report claims the head-turning Avista concept that bowed in New York will spawn Buick’s first-ever four-door coupe before the end of the decade.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Ronan Glon
Ronan Glon
Contributor
Ronan Glon is an American automotive and tech journalist based in southern France. As a long-time contributor to Digital…
The U.S. Galaxy Note 10 will have the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 after all
samsung galaxy note 9 news silver 1

Samsung has for a long time used two different processors in its flagship phones, depending on where they are sold. In the U.S., a Qualcomm chip is usually found inside, while in Europe, South Korea, and most other places, Samsung’s own Exynos chip is used. And, it looks like that will happen once again for the Galaxy Note 10.

Serial Twitter leaker Evan Blass tweeted earlier that some U.S. variants of the Galaxy Note 10 would feature a Samsung Exynos chip, but has since retracted the claim, saying that, in fact, the U.S. Galaxy Note 10 will feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855.

Read more
Audi Q3 Sportback crossover is a mini Q8 that won’t come to the U.S.
audi q3 sportback

Previous

Next

Read more
Tesla won’t close its stores after all, but its sales model remains digital
Tesla Model 3

Tesla has backpedaled on its plans to close a vast majority of its stores worldwide in order to save money, and to lower the price of its cars accordingly. The California-based automaker published a blog post to explain it will keep more stores open than it initially planned, and it will make most of its cars a little bit more expensive to offset the cost of running a dealer network.

"Over the past two weeks we have been closely evaluating every single Tesla retail location, and we have decided to keep significantly more stores open than previously announced," the company wrote on its official website. It will reopen some of the stores it closed in high-visibility locations, but they will be staffed with fewer employees. Ten percent of the stores it closed will remain that way; they were the locations that didn't perform well and would have closed even if Tesla didn't shift its sales model to online-only. Twenty percent of the stores that were set to close around the globe are under review, meaning the company will evaluate how well they do in the coming months before deciding whether to keep them open or shutter them.

Read more