Brain Fertilizer

From Via Drudge, the NY Times say Ford and GM stuck in Neutral.

Excerpt:

The Big Two automobile giants offer plenty of explanations, from soaring health care costs to rising gas prices and creeping interest rates. But consumers and industry specialists say G.M. and Ford have swerved off course for a more basic reason: not enough people like their cars.

"I still hate to buy a foreign car," said T. J. Penn, a 44-year-old painting and drywall contractor walking through a Toyota lot this week in Ann Arbor, Mich. "But the quality and reliability makes it hard not to."

In other news, I think GM is probably going to end up killing off Pontiac, rather than Buick, if it decides it must kill off a division.

Why?

Because as Motor Trend (I think...I read it a dentist's office waiting room) editorial pointed out, Buick is a best-seller in China, whereas Pontiac has no such following anywhere else.

Making things even harder on Pontiac is that GM seems to be positioning Cadillac as the line that will take on BMW. That's really the only niche I think Pontiac ("Driving Excitement!") could go after. Not to mention, GM's entries into the Performance Sedan niche is further complicated by owning Saab and putting the Saab platform under the Malibu*.

The Corvette is going to be the ultimate horsepower production car for GM, and since they apparently have no plans to bring back the Trans Am, well, I don't see much space for Pontiac to grab customers. The general flop of the G6 just makes things even bleaker for Pontiac.**

I also gotta tell you: I think GM is making a mistake in its battle plan. Cadillac might be an excellent RWD performance car, but they seem to be trying to take on BMW and Lexus and Audi and maybe Benz, all at the same time. That's not smart. These cars all have different demographics, with the most overlap probably being between BMW and Audi. One car line can't attract everyone, and the recent Cadillacs are even more polarizing. I think they look like an 8-year-old's vision of a 'cool' car, and I probably wouldn't be caught dead in one. Yeah, despite my pragmatism about how a car performs, I really hate the ostentation of the current Caddies.

Lexus is "refined luxury for the rest of us". I heard it said once by a salesman in Hawaii that "Benz is for rich people, but BMW is for successful people". That seems to fit, too. BMW also aspires to be the "ultimate driving machine", and the car reviewers have agreed they do it quite well, with only Audi coming close. Cadillac doesn't usually get mentioned in the same articles as BMW and Audi's sports sedans (the others usually being Jaguar, Volvo, Lexus, and Saab, and the VW Phaeton for the top-of-the-line---complicating things for GM Saab never comes close to the leading Audi and BMW cars!), nor is it usually compared favorably to Lexus that I've seen, so it seems as if Cadillac is failing in its assigned mission. It seems to be making its own niche, and that's a good thing...but "testosterone-driven ostentation" doesn't seem like a very expansive category. They seem to be going after the type of person who would buy a truck just to brag about its horsepower without ever using it to the limit, and who now wants to buy a car.

That doesn't seem very smart.

Of course, that's just my impression.

Put another way, one that seems a little smarter, or more admirable: rather than analyzing why people buy cars and trying to put out the best car in a few chosen categories, GM seems to be trying to make the best car it can and hoping that demand will follow. But they are pricing it high enough, and cladding it in controversial enough appearance packages, that bunches of people will never even consider it. Not when there are other cars out there already meeting what they already know they want: reliability, comfort, and enough performance for daily commuting in a relatively inexpensive package, found in the Civic, Corolla, Camry, Accord, Altima, Mazda 6, and even Lexus (I'm not including the Forenza and Verona because few people really know about them yet).

My problem with GM continues to be summed up with the car I purchased:
An extremely comfortable/luxurious, sophisticated/grown-up sedan for an extremely inexpensive price. And GM decided it didn't want to make the car, so gave it to Suzuki.

Why should I even want to look at a GM product?

*although another source insisted that GM actually put the Malibu platform under the Saab, which would be much more depressing/troubling.

**The last commercial I saw for the G6 was nearly laughable. About all it said was: "We have the panoramic sun roof! Toyota and Honda don't". No reason given why I should even care about the panoramic sun roof; I guess they just assume it's already a proven winner or something. [shakes head]