Here’s a Buick Electra L7, seen at a makeshift parking lot in Beijing on a warm spring day in 2026. The Morning Glow Rice-painted car looked pretty good under the sun, with its aerodynamic design and shiny chrome trim.
The Buick Electra L7
Electra is a NEV sub-brand of Buick. Earlier, Buick used the Electra name for a series of electric cars. The sub-brand operates more independently, with its own marketing and PR. The SAIC-GM joint venture produces the Electra L7 in its Wuhan factory.
The Buick Electra L7 is a beautiful car, probably the best-looking Buick sedan since the 1999 Buick New Century. The Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center (PATAC) designed and developed the Electra L7 specifically for the Chinese market. PATAC is an automotive R&D center, jointly controlled by SAIC and General Motors.
The car in the photos is the top-spec Avenir model. Buick uses the Avenir name for the top-trim levels of its high-end cars. It comes with these classy ‘handwritten’ Avenir badges on the front doors.
The interior of the Buick Electra L7
This is the most minimalist interior in a Buick – ever. The Electra E7 is a China-only model, so Buick purely focused on Chinese consumers. No worry about America or Europe! Car buyers in China want a cabin to be light, spacious, high-tech, and free of buttons and switches. The cabin of the Electra E7 ticks all of those boxes. The interior color is Pine Frost/Mist Blue.
The 3-spoke steering wheel looks great, with a leather-bound rim and a flat bottom. The drive selector is mounted on the steering wheel column. Ahead of the driver, a 50-inch head-up display is paired with a 10.25-inch instrument display, while the central touchscreen measures 15.6 inches.
Look at that! An enormous panoramic sunroof and endless legroom. The floor is completely flat, so it’s easy to move around. There’s a tissue box on the bench. The Electra E7 model is furthermore equipped with a 2000W, 27-speaker audio system, the most powerful stereo ever fitted in a Buick.
Specifications of the Buick Electra E7
The Buick Electra E7 is the first Buick to feature an EREV powertrain. It combines a 115 kW/230 Nm 1.5 turbo range extender + a 252 kW/400 Nm electric motor at the rear. The top speed is 200 km/h, and 0-100 takes 5.9 seconds.
The Electra L7 has a 59-liter fuel tank and a 40.2 kWh LFP battery pack, good for a 210-km electric range and 1420 km combined. It features a 400V architecture, which isn’t great, but the battery isn’t big, so 10-80% takes a reasonable 18 minutes.
ADAS
Another first: the Electra L7 is the first Buick with lidar. The lidar is part of Buick’s L2 Xiaoyao Zhixing ADAS, which was jointly developed with the Chinese ADAS company Momenta. The other sensors include 11 cameras, 12 ultrasonic radars, and 3 millimeter wave radars.
Price
These fellows are popular dark-faced parody variants of the Japanese Crayon Shin-chan manga series. In China, they are called “black-face Shin-chan”(黑脸小新).
The Buick Electra L7 Avenir costs 212.900 yuan ($31 K). The base model, with the same powertrain but fewer goodies, costs only $24.5 K. That’s a very good deal for a beautiful Buick sedan with so many firsts.