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Automotive News & Views GM News, New Models and Market Share
8507 messages, Last post on Nov 29, 2009 at 6:49 AM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: cooterbfd (Nov 11, 2009 9:07 am) I think GM has usually been pretty good at differentiating their midsized and larger cars. It's smaller cars where they got bad with quickie badge jobs. You can probably blame that on Buick, Olds, and Pontiac dealerships crying for smaller cars in the 1970's. I think GM's first quickie badge-engineering job was the 1971 Pontiac Ventura II...a thinly disguised Nova. It used the same dashboard as a Nova, but Pontiac changed around some of the easy-swap items, like seat patterns, door panels, etc. And outside, the taillights and front-end. Chevy, Pontiac, Olds, and Buick all had strong sellers in the midsized and full-sized ranks, so it probably made more sense to invest the money to make more drastic changes among them. But nobody really bought Buick Apollos or Oldsmobile Omegas...if they wanted a compact they went with a Chevy Nova or, to a lesser degree, a Pontiac Ventura. Those compacts were probably put in the Buick and Olds dealerships with the sole purpose of upselling buyers into a Century, Cutlass, etc. I think where GM ran into problems in later years though, is that they'd make four different versions of the same basic car. And they'd all be different enough to suit a wide variety of tastes, but it's not like one was a definite step up from the other. For instance, a Lexus ES, while based on the Camry, is still a definite step up. However, when GM had the Impala, Grand Prix, Intrigue, and Century/Regal, there was just too much overlap. Now GM did a good job, IMO, of making the cars all look different. Much better than Ford did with the Taurus/Sable, for instance, or Mopar with the Status/Sebring sedans. I guess you could argue the Intrepid/Concorde as well, although here I DO see a difference...but maybe I just notice it because I have an Intrepid!  But with Toyota, the Camry tops out in price about where the ES starts, so there's really not too much overlap. With GM, all four cars were in the same basic price point. They are doing a better job nowadays, though. For instance, the LaCrosse is a definite step up from the likes of the Malibu/Aura. And it's still the cheaper cars where the cloning is too obvious, like the Pontiac G3/G5. I think the Traverse/Acadia/Outlook/Enclave sort of fell back into that trap of offering four different vehicles in the same price range, though. Not necessarily badge-engineered, but still four vehicles doing essentially the job of one. Although at least here, the Enclave seems a definite step above the others. |
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"In fact, from a demographic point-of-view I'm pretty well centered in the GMC Terrain's gun sights as far as target buyers go. And guess what? I could absolutely see myself buying one instead of the competition. Does that statement surprise you? Me too. It's interesting, because there's plenty of hard data to suggest GM is making progress. Market share seems to have finally leveled off, and the destructive combination of bloated inventory and incentive spending no longer drives pricing or vehicle sales." Is GM Actually Going to Pull Off a Successful Turnaround? (Karl on Cars)
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Replying to: steve_ (Nov 11, 2009 10:27 am) What is also impressive is that the newer vehicles (Lacrosse, Equinox, Terrain, SRX, Malibu, CTS, and the Lambda CUV's) are all selling well. It is the holdovers like the DTS and Lucerne and Impala that need incentives to move.
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Replying to: cooterbfd (Nov 11, 2009 1:00 pm) The Fusion and the Focus were 11 and 17 respectively. The rest are are the 3 trucks from F (#1 of 20) and GM (#2 and #16 of 20), the Escape, Dodge Ram, Jetta and Legacy. The Asians round out the other 8 in 3rd through 11th place on the Top 20 list. The Terrain and Equinox were never top sellers although the redesigns make the old models worthless, afaic. The CR-V (#7 of 20) and RAV-4 (#9 of 20) sold a combined 179,000 units YTD Oct. No chance that GM can come close to those numbers for quite some time. That says that the U.S. manufacturers need to work extremely hard to make cars that people will buy regardless of the hot air blown at the consumers. The best cars are winning! Regards, OW
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Replying to: andre1969 (Nov 11, 2009 6:56 am) Regards: OldCEM |
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Replying to: ingvar (Nov 11, 2009 6:15 am) Regards: OldCEM |
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Replying to: andre1969 (Nov 11, 2009 6:56 am)
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Replying to: elias (Nov 11, 2009 4:55 am) To answer your other question, here's what I think: 1. For starter uniqueness will regain consumer confidence who're sick of clones, plus it will relieve GM from it's current image. Better consumer confidence leads to better sales. 2. GM can invest more money on creating worthy new products with the money it wastes on rebadging, re-skining, etc for it's clones. Sure, such money may not seem much at first, but with so many clones GM has I bet there'll be plenty of cash to spare if the clones are killed. To me, all those points lead to better GM, better products, and better sales. What do you think?
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Replying to: cooterbfd (Nov 11, 2009 9:07 am) Hmm? What makes you think it's any different? Clones by itself can be an ok thing or a bad thing. OTOH the difference is already stated by Andre, and IMO there's either: 1. A substantial step up between the clones, like what you see from Camry-ES350 (although I still consider ES as borderline cloning) 2. The badge jobs aren't sold in the same market (or to be exact, in the same country). In this case, I don't see Equinox being sold in Europe as Opel Captiva and in Korea as Daewoo Winstorm as a negative thing. But selling a guised up Equinox under the name SRX is a problem in my book. If, for example, Saturn is still alive and Gm sells another Equinox under the Vue name, that's a problem in my book as well. OTOH I agree with british_rover, I don't see XLR as a Vette clone, a platform mate, I say.
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Replying to: lemko (Nov 12, 2009 6:31 am) Having owned a 2000 Jetta and have owned a SL-2 Saturn, all I can say is they are apples and oranges as a 2000 Jetta is 10x the car any S series could even dream to be. Anyone who can be satisfied with an SL-2 must have very low standards. What a horrible car. Now maybe if all you care about is getting from point A to B then it does the job. As far as reliability, maybe a 2000 S series is more reliable overall, but quality, fit-n-finish, ride, and handling are on a whole different level with the Jetta. That said, my personal sample of friends and family that have owned both VW's and Saturns is quite high. In my sample their are about 5 vw's to 5 or so S and SC series Saturns. Not one Saturn owner purchased another Saturn after owing one, but all but one of the VW owners bought another VW, except for 1, who is me. I'd buy another VW in a heartbeat. My SIL and a good friend of mine both returned '98 & 00 SC-1 because of build quality issues. My SIL's had a trans leak Saturn couldn't fix after 3 tries and my friend's had that stupid 3rd suicide style door that leaked water into the car when ever it rained and sounded like the window was open when over 50mph and once again Saturn couldn't fix it. My MIL's '95 SL-2 started leaking trans fluid at 50k and she just lived with it since the repair was expensive. My wife's '92 SL-2 burned a quart of oil ever 250-500 miles by the time it had 65k miles on it and Saturn told me that was normal and they wouldn't do anything about, so much for the extended warranty and we never touched another Saturn. Guess we weren't alone. I'd rather drive a car I thoroughly enjoy even with reliability issues over a lousy designed car that is 100% reliable. I'd take a Jetta that was in the shop every few months over any S-series that was guaranteed to go 200k w/o a single problem. traded it at a loss LOL, Lemko, who are you kidding. GM is the king of trade in at a loss. The 2000 Jetta TDI I owned was purchased for $21k. I put 35k miles on it and sold it in 2001 for $17,500. That's pretty damn good in my book, what GM car in the last 10 years would even come close to that, maybe a few corvette models, but certainly not any Malibu, Impala, or any other lousy Saturn of that era.
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