The Interesting Origin Of Buick's Car Logo Explained

Buick is hardly the hottest brand in the U.S. market at the moment, with models like the Encore crossover lacking the unique features and driving dynamics to compete with the best in the segment. The brand has also been unable to appeal to younger buyers in its home country, with a 2018 study by CarMax finding that Buick had the second-oldest buyers on average, behind only Cadillac. However, despite its middling performance in America, Buick is doing very well in certain global markets, with China standing out as a particular area of success in recent years.

Buick is now pivoting further towards catering to Chinese consumers and is also in the process of making the leap from internal combustion to electric drivetrains. As a result, its branding has also been subject to significant change, with a new Buick logo unveiled in 2022. The logo is one of the most instantly recognizable features of any carmaker, yet Buick's logo has been subject to a series of drastic alterations over the years. Taking a trip back through the brand's previous identities, however, shows a few common themes and design motifs, and it's these motifs that shaped the latest transformation of Buick's signature badge.

The first iteration of the Buick shield badge was introduced in 1937, after it had been first discovered by a General Motors researcher named Ralph Pew sometime in the mid-1930s. It was modeled after a historic Buick family crescent originating from Scotland, where the company's eponymous founder had been born before moving to the United States at a young age. The shield had been recorded in a book on heraldry published in 1851, and featured a red shield with a silver and blue (or azure, to be more specific) line running diagonally through it. A gold cross was also featured on the shield, which had a hole in the center, with the red of the shield showing through. Pew took the design and added his own spin, eventually creating the initial Buick company shield logo.

The shield design was tweaked a number of times over the following decades, being narrowed in 1939 to better fit the profile of Buick's cars at the time. It was widened again in 1942 and placed within a black circular background as Buick temporarily switched to making military equipment in the Second World War. By 1947, when regular production resumed, the logo reappeared without the background, and continued to be used up until the end of the '50s, when GM designers suggested a major change.

In what would turn out to be the last deviation away from the tri-shield design, GM designers introduced the Buick Hawk concept in 1975, with a hawk logo. The hawk proved so popular that the design spread to the rest of Buick's lineup the following year, and a red-tailed hawk called "Happy" was even featured in commercials over the following years to reinforce the new branding. However, this was only successful to a point — by the mid-1980s, Happy the Hawk ended up taking a proverbial backseat to the traditional tri-shield logo.

During this period, Buick was making some remarkably futuristic cars, but executives decided that emphasizing the brand's heritage was the best way of maximizing sales. By 1989, the Buick Skyhawk car was about to be retired, and GM bosses decided it would be a good time to officially retire the hawk logo too. Happy was axed along with the Skyhawk itself, and Buick returned to the tri-shield as its sole logo the following year.

With Buick sales consistently strong in China and languishing back home in America, GM's primary concern for the brand had become appealing to Chinese consumers. A new, simpler design saw the "Buick" name removed from the logo and just the tri-shield kept, distilling the logo back down to an even simpler version of the 1960 design. Simple, perhaps, to the point of being too bland and forgettable. Buick's modern cars have often struggled to toe the line between simplicity and blandness, with our review of the 2021 Enclave Avenir praising the car's ride, space, and infotainment, but lamenting the car's lack of a unique selling point.

Even Chinese consumers that were previously enamored with the brand's history and prestige appeared to be starting to lose interest, with reports emerging that sales were slipping in Buick's biggest market. Clearly, GM needed to do something about it, and the resulting brand shake-up saw the signature badge overhauled for its first major redesign since George Bush Sr. was in power.

While the new design is a significant departure from its predecessor, Buick's executives have claimed that the revamped logo wasn't initially planned at all. Automotive News reports that the idea came about when Geoffrey Richmond, a designer working on a project to create "the new face of Buick" for the EV era, left three colored slash marks on his sketch in place of the standard logo. Those marks would usually have been replaced with the logo before being presented to executives, but in this case, they weren't, and the accident got GM President Mark Reuss intrigued.

Further exploration of the new, accidental design was launched, and the new Buick logo was eventually formulated. In a press release, Buick claims the new logo represents "a modern expression with a sense of technology," presumably alluding to the brand's intended trajectory as an all-electric carmaker in the future. It didn't go into specifics on which new models would be the first to get the badge, only saying that it would be "mounted on the front fascia of upcoming Buick products."