BuickCopied

Buick's tri-shield goes back to 1959, when three shields standing for the Invicta, LeSabre and Electra lines were set in a ring, itself derived from David Dunbar Buick's family crest. The brand had tweaked it many times since. In 2022, with an all-electric lineup promised by 2030, it changed it properly, in what GM President Mark Reuss called the first significant update to the logo in more than three decades.

The origin was an accident, Automotive News reported. Designers were sketching the new face of Buick for the EV era; one sketch had a few swooping slashes where the badge would sit, and it was shown to Reuss by mistake, before anyone replaced the marks with a traditional badge. He was intrigued. The senior exterior designer whose sketch it was called it a happy accident, since everyone in the studio was drawing that way.

David Haskell, a creative designer for Buick brand identity, refined the sketch into the finished logo. His team removed the circle and spaced the shields apart but next to each other, aligned horizontally rather than on a diagonal, and kept an angled sash in each to preserve recognition. Buick said the sleeker shields with just a touch of colour maintain the heritage while reflecting the fluid movement of future vehicle design. Anne-Marie Laverge-Webb, design manager for brand identity and graphics, said the work drew on designers' input going back about six years.

The logo first appeared on the all-electric Wildcat concept and reached production on the 2024 Encore GX, in Buick's 120th anniversary year. Reuss said he loved that it would be on all Buicks going forward.

Car and Driver first spotted the mark in a trademark filing dated 16 March 2022: three shields aligned horizontally instead of diagonally, each diagonal stripe swapped for a downward swooping line, and the surrounding ring gone. The filing claimed no colour, leaving open whether the red, silver and blue would survive, at a moment when Cadillac had just gone black and white. When Buick confirmed it in June, the magazine noted it was the first significant change since 1990, part of a brand that had already deleted its exterior name badges and moved to an all SUV lineup.

It is one of the better car-badge updates of the flattening era. Losing the ring opens the mark up, and the horizontal arrangement reads as motion rather than a coat of arms. Keeping the sash was the right instinct: the shields still say Buick.