GM new reorganization will build small conpact cars in US.

I have a great name for it - they should call it the Chevette. :madgrin:

 

And who is going to buy these when they can buy a Honda or Toyota? GM can make competitive larger vehicles. Small vehicles, not too confident.

 

Really pretty but as they proved on Myth Busters, you really can polish poop.
and what do you have if you have a hand full of polished poop?
You have a hand full of shiny sh!t!!
It's harder to make small cars well. Can GM handle it? Time will tell.

 

Well, Government Motors Corp could learn a thing or two from Opel et al, to offer smaller cars here. Will they? Who knows

The Aveo is a joke, the generic Cobalt/whatever offerings won't be missed. The current Malibu is competitive, but the earlier Malibu wasn't so great

The axe fell on quite a few dealerships in Canada and the US. Hopefully, with Chapter 11 they can s***can the deadweight, useless management fools and stranded liabilities, and become competitive again

 

i like the cobalt
nice car
for younger poeple or single households.

and i also like the aveo ( sedan not the hatchback )
its something else then al those 1/all of the same cars here designs.

 

True, efficiency across the board would be a good thing. Ultimately, I think we're moving away from cars altogether, and towards more light rail, and rezoning to lower travel times between home and work.

 

the cobalt is great?.. everyone i know with one hates them... from base model to the SS model.. they all break. none of my friends are going to buy another cobalt in their lifetime.

 

It's better to invent, than try to re-invent. To me, here's the money quote:
"With the government's backing and nearly $20 billion in U.S. loans so far, the company has made more dramatic changes in just a few days than it has in decades."

I hope it's not too little too late for GM. But that's how business works. I think The Prius is a good example of what Toyota did right vs. What GM and American Automobile companys have done wrong. Toyota suffered in the early days of The Prius with development and production costs along with the on the street insults of the "oddity" of a hybrid. But last year when fuel topped 4 dollars a gallon what cars couldn't be kept on the lots?

The past decade or longer, I don't think there was anything wrong with selling what the public wanted, which was big trucks and SUV's and Mini-Vans. But in that same time period Toyota kept a beach head with economical cars with good reputations for reliability. Corolla, Yaris, Echo, Tercel, even Camry get's comparitively good gas mileage for a mid-size ICE. Also everyone on THIS forum knows about the emergence of The Prius and Hybrid technology.

What has GM done? The occasional and almost token "Aveo" like offering, which often was just a rebadged automobile built by someone else. But the heart of GM has been huge automobiles. This worked, has worked, Open your eyes to what is the majority on American streets you still see mostly large vehicles. But GM's refusal to tangibly, realisticly simultaneously offer economical smaller cars and make real marketable advances in Hybrid, because let's face it, The Volt has been mostly just the car paraded out in Auto Shows to impress people, has cost them. Times change and if you have made all your decisions for decades based on Profit NOW, it can be a tough place to suddenly try to change. For the good of America I wish GM luck.

In the 90's I thought The Geo Metro was a good product. Economical and actually had some "Green Cred" way before it was cool. Very affordable and great gas mileage. I worked for a company that "accidently" (long story) bought a Geo Metro to replace a delivery van. That Geo Metro got abused like a delivery van, weighted down with tons more than it was designed to haul but it held up fantastically. I think near 150,000 very abusive miles it finally just gave up. But it impressed. If you saw what the Metro was asked to haul and knew the bare minimun of maintenance given, 150,000 miles was amazing.

Anyway it's not hopeless. Through partnerships and with global cooperation and goverment help you can produce a more diverse product line. But GM has to prove that at upper management they are willing to make the sacrifices to do so, and they understand the importance of doing so. Otherwise, it will just be some mediocre token offerings and rapid failure. I never thought I'd live to see the day where 75 cents could buy GM stock, and I wish I never did.

The past decade Toyota has done the inventing and now GM is faced with the tough task of trying to re-invent. Not impossible but difficult.

 

i dontnow about that
i just rented one on vacation in LA in 2005 and loved it.

2 doors small sportscar 4cyl ICE that feeled like a v6 and ofcourse automatic

 

If I am not mistaken, Geo Metro was in fact rebadged Suzuki.

In Europe it was sold as Suzuki Swift. Excellent small car at the time when it arrived on the market - around the end of 1980's. Later in second half of 1990s Suzuki lost its focus on car market by not replacing popular Swift with something up to date and never regained the car market share it used to have.

So it seems, that GM actually never had a focus on smaller cars. Smaller cars were more a focus of GM subsidiaries around the world (like Suzuki with Swift, Opel with Corsa) and so Detroit guys probably never mentally bothered with small economical cars.

Well, in my opinion, killing the EV1 program was a clear signal, that it was something mentally wrong with GM. They could develop it further as a eco geek style car for people wanting something different and willing to pay more to get something different. Later the technology developed could be mainstreamed the same way as Toyota did with Prius. But they failed.

 

The telling point is if GM assigns the first string to develop this small car. It's hard to overcome the GM corporate culture of considering small cars as not worthy of their best efforts.

 

Well, like several weeks ago when I test drove that new Dodge Challenger SRT-8. Yes, the dealership was all but begging folks to drive their vehicles. Overall, I was impressed with the build quality, scary-quick 6.1 V8, and fairly docile ride for such a machine

Now if only Dodge had put the same attention to detail, and engineering, into an average midsize that Joe Consumer would buy, they would have something.