When will GM 'Get It'?

I would bet that American automotive engineers are as good as Japanese/German ones; but they're handcuffed by the accountants and the unions in what can be done to deliver both a more reliable and a more fun car. It always takes a near-death experience to give the people who want to build great products a chance to show their stuff; unfortunately once a company is near-death, it may be too late.

 

True, but the point is that people who love cars (probably everyone on this board) wouldn't buy a Pontiac if it had zero defects for 8 years. I mean, please, this is FerrariChat where we talk about $90,000 cars that have defectively designed headers that crack and interiors that melt...

I think GM's fixation on quality is making them myopic. Forget the Z28 IROC - the Chevy Avalanche is an abomination, an avalanche of plastic cladding that makes the old Camaros look like well-adjusted cars. And, if you plunk down $50K for a Corvette you get it serviced where they service S10 pickups and Cavaliers. THAT'S a crap customer experience, and it doesn't show up on paper.

GM's a big bloated bureaucracy, with a lot of bad history and a terrible, confused brand image problem. If the Corvette had 700hp and cost $30K there are still a lot of monied, professional people who buy a BMW instead.

This isn't just a quality issue.

 

This is so right. Why do we buy a car that we know will break and cost a truck load of money to fix? Because we love the car. GM has made huge improvements and their success have been cars that we love: CTS V, Corvette. Make a car that people want, price be damned and we will buy it.

 

Everything I read about GM is they can not succeed with the union contracts presently in place. If you believe GM's position, the retired workers are killing them. Many times articles have asked, why doesn't GM take a page from the airline industry and bankrupt the corporation, void all the old contracts and start fresh from square one? It is almost impossible to address design or quality issues when you are losing money, and thus have no money to invest in finding solutions. GM also has pride issues, they want to remain an icon, they fail to realize they are the only ones still believing that they are.

 

I'd speculate that the Vette also has the maintenance edge over the BMW. So let's see; it's faster, better looking, and has lower operating costs but the BMW is still better? I guess if some fake carbon interior trim is that big of a deal you could always buy a kit for the C6. I agree the interior leaves something to be desired, but it's pretty obvious GM spent it's budget on the "go fast" parts and this being a forum of performance enthusiasts, I bet we're ok with that.

The Vette is pretty sophisticated. That LS2 is one heck of a motor. OHC doesn't automatically equal high tech. OHC engines have been around for 80+ years too. Compare the LS2 to the outgoing M5 V8 there's no contest. The LS2 smokes it almost every area. Then compare the LS7 in the Z06 to the new M5s V10. Again, it's a TKO for the "low tech" V8.

 

John Delorian wrote a book called 'On a clear day, you can see General Motors' in the '70s about how screwed up GM was. If I were to read it again, I'm not sure I would see too much improvement!

 

It isn't cars like the Corvettes and the GTOs that keep the manufacturers in business. The price and profit may be OK, but the volume just isn't there to make any kind of dent in the overall operations. We are enthusiasts and will pay more for passionate design, but the average car buyer won't.

The bread-and-butter vehicles are the light trucks, SUV's, and mid-size sedans. Unfortunately, Ford, Chrysler and GM just can't compete with the imports because of the strangle hold the UAW has on them. Consumers really don't care that the UAW wages are two or three times higher than the wages paid at all the new "import" factories going up all over the south and midwest; they just want a good car at the lowest price.

Just in the last fifteen years Nissan put three new plants in Mississippi & Tennessee. Toyota has facilities in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and California. Hyundai put a big plant in Alabama. Mercedes built in Alabama. Honda has four locations in Ohio. Kia will likely announce a new plant near Meridian, Mississippi in the next couple of months. I know Mississippi loved getting thousands of jobs that paid $25 per hour and I'm sure the other states felt the same way.

Where is the investment in quality U.S. manufacturing facilites on the part of the Big 3? There isn't any because the UAW won't let them move jobs from the existing locations and also won't let them adjust wages & benefits to be more competitive with the traditional Asian manufaturers. I think the last major new manufacturing facility constructed in the U.S. was the Saturn plant in Tennessee. Any expansion for the "domestic" producers is heading to Canada or Mexico. When it costs more for healthcare benefits per car than it does steel, there is a major problem.

GM, Ford, and Chrysler just can't build a vehicle at a competitive price because of all the money going to wages and benefits. Once they finally file bankruptcy and get rid of the UAW monkey on their back, maybe they can set the engineers loose with more financial freedom to put the money into quality materials and design rather than into the labor intensive manufacturing process.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not adovcating slave wages for auto workers. I think they should get paid a wage that will be competitive with the prevailing wages throughout the country. But I've read enough articles citing $100,000 per year forklift operators to know that a lot of the salaries are extravagant. The unions certainly did a lot to help the quality of life of the worker back in the early 20th century when wages truely were poverty level, but they have outlived their usefullness as a method of protecting the workers' interests and have become a bloated bureaucracy that is keeping U.S. companies from being competitive in the worldwide economy.

I'm sure the engineers aren't sitting around deliberately designing crappy cars that use 50-year-old technology. Their hands are tied by having to design a car that must have less component costs than the imports because it will have more labor costs.

 

Look at the cost of employee benny's added to each average priced new car from the US. There is about $3500 buried into the price to cover workers comp, insurance, company pension plans, etc. The average cost of all of the metal in an average car is about $1800!!!!! Go figure!

 

Reminds you of the defunct US steel industry. When HS educated blue collar workers exceed the average college educated professional in salary, the business model is broken. There are many accountants, bank employees, insurance company employees and RNs holding BS degrees not making $100,000. Private colleges are presently charging ~$30,000 a year for tuition/room and board. How can you give up four years of your life, spend $150,000 on your education, be better educated and then your HS class clown makes more than you as an employee?

 

IMO (zips on nomex here...) Corvettes are ugly, shovel-nosed, middle-aged adolescent-mobiles, etc. There are bazillions of them around, though, so my opinion obviously isn't universal. This mindset about the LS2 being a great motor is exactly why GM is clueless when it comes to building a great product that people will line up to buy. No one who buys an M5 compares it to a Corvette. I don't believe anyone at GM has actually bought and driven an M5.

But: I think the more important point is what Bandit said...

Corvettes and even the sharp-looking Solstice aren't going to save GM. The BMW 3-series has always been a very desirable, balanced, classy car, and for every M5 or Z8 BMW must sell thousands of 325's. I had one (e46 coupe). I never felt like I was driving an entry-level car. It sound nice, shifted great, handled like it was on rails and looked really elegant inside. Women liked this car the way we all swoon over Ferrari's. It was a shade over $36K new, loaded with options.

GM needs a car that good. Period.

I think Bandit's point is that with unions inflating their costs and forcing a corporate mindset when it comes to car design -- i.e., GM doesn't have the cash that Porsche and BMW do to design cars we'll want without rebates -- GM is going to be hurting in the product category for a long time.

GM needs to outsource its design to a firm like Pininfarina, and spend some bucks on its interiors. Even lower end VW's look opulent inside, and the Touraeg is really impressive. I recently had a rental Monte Carlo (gold over beige) and it was just ghastly. I can't tell you how humiliated I was to drive it and sit in it. I guess it was fast, but it could have had a GTO engine and still been a piece of garbage. A Honda Civic is 100 times nicer.

GM needs to build great cars. They don't. There is no Enzo, no Ferry Porsche, no David Brown or Colin Chapman there. Just a bunch of suits.

 

Please, please explain to me where GM spent the money on "Go Fast" parts. Re-designing a motor for the umpteenth time? Developing a new rear suspension? Maybe a special SMG type of transmission that I'm unaware of?

I see a very polished turd, not a ground-breaking automobile.

 

Quality's getting better and should continue to do so. Offer employee incentives/accountabililty. Pay commensurate to skill set. Plus interior materials a bit. Focus on alternative fuels. Use Lexus/Toyota model and go Cadillac/Chevrolet. Dump the other brands. Top of the line Caddy ought to have Rolls, Bentley, Benz, BMW in it's sights, and priced likewise. Apply Lexus/Toyota model at the dealership level re: customer service, and make it part of the franchise agreement.

An armchair outsider's POV, for sure, with hopes they "get it". Big ship to steer, though.

 

I never claimed the C6 was ground breaking. My point is that any car has a finite budget. It's up to the car company to decide what portion of that budget goes to bigger brakes as opposed to brushed aluminum turn signal stalks. I jsut said that GM decided to give it a great engine, aluminum suspension, and a cool looking design.

I have yet to read a single article or review that praises more than curses any SMG type trans. They are very cool toys with some huge drawbacks.

Still struggling how a 12 sec car with braking and handling to match for less than $50k is a "turd"...

 

Still waiting for a single piece of tangible evidence that the LS2 isn't a great motor...

 

A laughable argument at best. It doesn't matter if you(or anyone else) can't identify where they spent they money! The simple fact that the car absolutely dominates anything near it(in price) is proof enough that they spent money on "Go Fast" parts.

Of course, unless you want to maintain that they spent less money and then made a faster car...which is basically the hallmark of good performance engineering. Then you would be disagreeing with your negation of the 'ground-breaking automobile' statement.

 

70k?

There are lots of cars that move real good in that price range.

GM wil never get it.

The company will go bankrupt and hopefully break up.

 

Umm. Which stock cars would those be? The Z06 is faster than anything in the Porsche lineup except the Carrera GT(or maybe GT2/GT3RS...). It's faster than anything in the Ford lineup except the GT. It's faster than anything in the Diamler-Chrysler garage short of a factory tuned Viper (ala 6.0 se's car), SL 65AMG & SLR. Ferrari only has the F430. The Z06 is faster than any Japanese produced car...

So far no car with 20K of the Z06 is faster than it...and then only a factory tuned Viper.

 

It's a great motor. However, GM is on a fast road to bankruptcy because people don't like GM cars. You can't build a global car company just by making the Corvette faster, and tuning the Corvette more is really akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Maybe if the Corvette hits 800bhp GM will be saved after all.

The original post was about a crappy Grand Prix, which is supposed to be a BMW-fighter. It's a huge trap to turn a conversation about GM into a Corvette value assessment.

 

I only responded to others who mentioned the Corvette. If only because it's one of the few things GM does *right*.

 

I've been satisfied with my Silverado. Very few problems, but the rattles annoy the hell outta me. And I would think that after all of these years they could a) center the steering wheel in-line with the drivers seat b) correct the "Chevy Lean" that for some reason they can't get right for whatever reason.

I honestly think a lot of companys in the coming years are going to go under because of the unions. They want more and more and are going to end up jobless, and pennieless b/c the company can no longer pay their pention.

 

That's exactly the point- The car is fast but it's still expensive (for GM) and has very questionable build quality.. if the 'vette was 35k I'd say they hit a home run. At 50K it looks like they're trying to get every dollar they can out of the platform and at 70k for the Z06 it's just stupid.

Many people who are interested in the Z06 are sitting on the sidelines waiting for lease returns and the used market to catch up.. GMAC will see none of this money and current owners are going to be burned with the depreciation.

Getting to the point- they spent less money and ended up with a more expensive car. How does anyone justify that?

 

They delivered car that will WALK all over anything else even in the price ball park. It will also crush cars costing twice as much and have better reliability (have you peeked at MB's quality in the past 5 yrs? Ouch).

That being said here are some other cars that will compete very well in the market:

CTS
STS
DTS
XLR
Solstice
New Grand Prix with the V8 (read the Car and Driver review)
'07 Escalade
Cobalt
HHR
Their HD trucks
H2 Hummer
Equinox
'07 Yukon

I'm FAR from a GM slappy, but I'm also sick of people bashing them for products that are no longer in the pipeline.

As far as comparing a Grand Prix to a BMW... no one really thinks that. The comparison is that it's a sporty line of cars with a practical side (4 doors, etc). BMW vs Pontiac... apples and oranges (much more expensive oranges)

 

My friend the banker knows some GM financial higher-ups. GM makes very little on the Corvette.

Believe me or not, that's all the info I'm giving out.

Personally, I find it hard to criticize the 505hp, aluminum chassis, carbon fiber fender, titanium connecting rod, dry sump motored Z06 at $65,000 (not $70k). Or a $45,500 base vette with the Z51 suspension for that matter.

 

GM is a finance company that happens to produce cars...

Pots

 

The Elise.

The M3

The S4

The Evo

The STI

Boxster S

Caymen

Bench racing isn't everything.... There are plently of cars that give up very little to the covette that are more practical cheaper, and faster in the hands of a normal driver.