Over a year now, the launch of Buick’s new LaCrosse gave us pause to consider the average age of Buick buyers, and the future of the brand’s demography. At the time, The Detroit New claimed the average age of Buick buyers was 63, a fact that gave the paper cause to celebrate Buick’s new lease on life. And considering that the brand once attracted buyers of an average age of 72, that wasn’t a bad trend at the time. Today’s DetN has a similar story, lauding Buick’s newfound youthful appeal with such quotes as this one from IHS Global Insight’s Aaron Bragman:

They are making definite improvements in the U.S. To kill Buick would have been crazy. It’s one of the most important brands in the Chinese market…. It’s still too soon to really come to a verdict on how Buick is doing in the U.S. But nobody can say those are old person’s cars anymore. Because they aren’t.

But this latest round of Buick-boosting is still based on the old reference point of a 72-year-old average buyer demographic. Compared to a year ago, Buick’s average buyer age appears to have crept back up again, as the Detroit News cites a current average demographic of 65.

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I had the opportunity to visit with the Cadillac folks at a Pre-New York Auto Show Reception in West Village. It was a tasty cocktail gig with a trio of V-series models (CTS Sedan, Wagon and Coupe) available for closer inspection.  Though nobody actually sat in them.  But that’s not the point: marketing and re-branding the product was the topic of conversation.

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Inspired by the Volvo-Geely deal, Automotive News Europe [sub]’s Luca Ciferri contemplates the unthinkable:

Back in 1986 Ford offered to buy nearly 20 percent of Alfa with its stake rising to 100 percent if a turnaround plan for the struggling government-owned brand succeeded…. But the venerable sports car maker is still European. Its destiny is decided in Turin. If Ford had bought Alfa, the brand probably would be now owned by a Chinese automaker…. I wonder how the Alfisti would react to the prospect of decisions on future Alfa cars being taken near Beijing. I wonder what the unions would say if they had to learn Chinese?

Well Luca, infamous Italian xenophobia aside, perhaps the better question would be could Alfa really be any worse off than it currently is? If the brand manages to survive the year under its blessedly Italian leadership, it will be lumped into a GM-style “brand channel” and its new products will be based on Chrysler’s leftovers. Oh, and there’s no guarantee that it will survive its “strategic review” at all, as Fiat has said there’s a chance that Alfa won’t survive past another year. So who knows, maybe the Chinese will end up with Alfa sooner than Ciferri might imagine.

Chinese site auto.sina.com [via thetycho.com] has a belly-laugher of a wild-ass rumor: they say BYD has its eye on Daimler’s zombie luxury brand Maybach. The rumor is clearly based on the fact that BYD and Daimler recently closed a cooperation deal, in which they will jointly build vehicles in China for sale under a new brand name. But beyond that, there’s not much to go on. From what I can tell from the Google Translate version of the story, auto.sina.com seems to have an anonymous source in BYD that on March 23 divulged:

BYD is on the matter and approached Daimler, Daimler announced soon abandoned the brand, BYD Auto will soon be underway acquisition action.

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BMW has filed trademark registrations for a series of new car names. According to reports, the names registered include i1, i2, i3, i4, i5, i6, i7, i8, i9 and E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6, E7, E8, E9. The M50d, Urbanic, Gran Coupe, Compactive, and Compactive Tourer names were also filed.

Autocar reports on fresh brand-equity casualties in BMW’s battle for mainstream territory. According to our sophisticated car name evaluation system, “Compactive Tourer” is the only moniker in this bunch that comes close to making the cut. But hey, it’s better than naming sub-1-Series BMWs after fractions. Or worse.

Motor Trend reports that Cadillac’s long search for a flagship is over. After debating a number of options, including importing a stretched Chinese-market STS, GM has decided that the “Super Epsilon”-based XTS will be the future range-topper for its luxury brand. The XTS was developed on a stretched version of the platform that underpins GM sedans including the Buick LaCrosse, Chevy Malibu and the forthcoming Buick Regal, and was shown in concept form as the XTS Platinum concept at the Detroit Auto Show. That concept was shown with a theoretical plug-in drivetrain made up of Cadillac’s 3.6 liter DI V6 and the plug-in components from the canceled Vue plug-in, and according to MT, the recent cancellation of the Converj plug-in means “there’s profit and green image to be had in the plug-in XTS.” Until that technology is production-ready, choosing the XTS’s engine options will be an interesting challenge.

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One of the biggest conundrums facing the folks tasked with marketing the forthcoming first generation of mainstream electric cars is branding. On the one hand, firms want their mainstream brands associated with the green halo of having an electric car in its portfolio. On the other hand, electric cars aren’t cheap. From a pure pricing perspective, it makes more sense to brand expensive EVs as luxury products. GM struggled with this problem when it developed its Converj version of the Volt, ultimately deciding that the common-sense arguments for branding the $40k Volt as a Cadillac weren’t as important as boosting Chevy’s profile with an EV offering. Nissan, meanwhile, has decided that it has room for both a Nissan-branded Leaf EV and an Infiniti-branded luxury version.
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If we have something to be talking about positively with Hummer, believe me we’d be talking about it

GM International’s Tim Lee in the WSJ, commenting on earlier rumors that post-Tengzhong offers for HUMMER were being entertained.

We’re ready to seal the deal. If the deal fails, the problem is not on our side. We have not violated any part of the agreement. The situation is changing constantly…and the process of the negotiation is very tough. We will put as much effort as we can. I hope the deal can be done

Geely Zhejiang Chairman Li Shufu is sounding defensive in today’s Wall Street Journal, as his firm’s deal to buy Volvo from Ford drags on. And he won’t say what’s holding things up on Ford’s end either. After all, the money is there, and Ford (allegedly) isn’t sweating the IP details… so where’s the beef? Ford spokesfolks say the Blue Oval’s

position hasn’t changed since 23 December last year. As Ford and Geely said at the time—and as we’ve continued to say—we expect to sign a sale agreement in the first quarter.

That gives the Volvo-Geely deal two more weeks, not long considering the deal has been over a year in the making. So why is Li Shufu getting so antsy? Is this end-of-deal nerves, or is the Geely-Volvo deal going the way of HUMMER-Tengzhong?

Let’s face it: it’s not the best time to be launching any new automotive brand just now, let alone a brand built in Formula 1 and offering only a single, $250,000 product. Throughout the industry, OEMs are abandoning or distancing themselves from motorsport, as the old “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” logic proves to be an ever-fading anachronism. And yet here is McLaren Automotive, launching its first new road-going supercar in over ten years, with the the help of two F1 champs. Can an automotive brand survive selling high-priced symbols of racing prowess, at a time when racing (particularly Formula 1 racing) is becoming ever-more divorced from road car realities? More importantly, can it take on the lions of the supercar world with mere techno-wonkery?
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Alfa Romeo has launched an official fine art collection, which can be found at www.alfaromeoart.com. With their gracious permission, we bring you this selection of some of the luscious images now on sale there. Too bad none of them answer any of the pressing questions facing Alfa today.

We knew that production of HUMMER H3 and H3Ts was continuing, as an unnamed fleet buyer has ordered the final batch of 849 units from GM’s Shreveport plant, but that’s not the only Zombie nameplate that GM just can’t seem to kill. Automotive News [sub] reports that 1,037 Saturn Outlooks were built last month “to utilize existing materials” according to GM spokesfolks. According to production stats published at GMI, about 3,000 Saturn Vues were also built in February at GM’s Ramos Arizpe plant in Mexico. Is GM having brand separation anxiety, or are zombie car nameplates as hard to kill as their undead namesakes?

Or is it the other way around? Based on the latest readings from our official TTAC losing-the-plot-ometer, Porsche is still at least ten years away from matching this spectacular achievement in short-sighted brand narcissism.

We still own the Ralliart name, and we still intend to brand our cars with it. The biggest change for us is that we won’t have to pay royalties to use the name anymore,

Mitsubishi North America spokesman Maurice Durand explains to Automotive News [sub] why the death of Mitsu-owned racing firm Ralliart is actually kind of a good thing. After all, how many Americans really watch rallying often enough to know or care whether Mitsubishi’s erstwhile rallying partner has anything to do with the cars that bear its name? The fact that the Lancer Ralliart has a two-liter turbocharged engine and AWD is what consumers will notice; using a brand name that leaves no doubt as to the inspiration for the trim level does everything it needs to from a marketing perspective. Whether a team named Ralliart actually races similar vehicles is, in the modern marketing context, almost completely irrelevant. After all, Subaru isn’t even competing in the World Rally Championship at all anymore… the old “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” adage couldn’t be more dead.

Remember Maybach? With eight years and untold millions now spent in a futile attempt to dethrone Rolls-Royce at the tope of the automotive pecking order, it seems that the monument to Daimler’s arrogance and greed will be going the way of Pontiac and HUMMER. Auto Express reports that

The firm plans to launch mildly facelifted versions of its three-model line-up – with new grilles and LED lights likely to be the only changes – before the marque is allowed to slip away.

Bosses have now privately admitted plans to wind down the brand – resurrected in 2002 – due to disappointing sales. The Maybach decision is part of Mercedes’ wider plans to take the next-generation S-Class upmarket.

Will there be any tears for the world’s most pimped-out S-Class? Of course not. Despite actively courting celebrities, and later, actually marketing the brand, Daimler was never able to break its super-luxe brand into the stratosphere of household-name luxury. At least not for more than a few months during relatively go-go economic times. As we recently noted, the experiment has conclusively failed. Maybach has nowhere to go but the ash heap of history. If we ever miss it too much, we’ll be sure to buy a brand-new, fully-loaded S-Class and take it to the least-tasteful tuner we can find.