That said, I don’t think that the Malibu is anything close to a home run. For one thing, it doesn’t do a very good job of capturing the Chevrolet DNA. Indeed, it has an “any car” quality not unlike the original (1964).

Toyota’s styling has deteriorated in recent years, so I suppose there is the potential for the equivalent of the 1962 Plymouth. However, I suspect that as long as the Camry continues to meet people’s functional expectations that it will do well. Recall that Plymouth was already a weakened brand entering 1962 because of quality control issues. In 1961 even Rambler outsold Chrysler’s supposed “bread and butter” brand.

Interesting comparison of the 1969 Chevy and Plymouth. I’d agree that the Chevy looks a bit better. The irony is that the Chrysler platform was brand new whereas GM refurbished its 1965 design. Chevy’s wheel well bubbles were overdone and the massive donut front bumper fortunately disappeared after only one year. Alas, Chrysler really blew it with the fuselage shape. To my eyes the key problem was the overly high belt line, which was accentuated with a blocky front end and an overly squat roofline on the two doors.

Or even worse, the 1962 Plymouth. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, supposedly the 1962 Plymouth and Dodge were downsized because someone at Chrysler engineering learned that GM had ordered tooling for a model with a 115-inch wheelbase and a ~200-inch overall length. Obviously, the all-powerful General was downsizing its full-sized offerings, and Chrysler wasn’t going to be left behind with a dowdy old car of yesterday’s larger proportions!

Unfortunately for Chrysler, this tooling was for GM’s all-new, mid-sized “A”-bodied models introduced in 1964: the Chevrolet Chevelle, Pontiac Tempest, the Oldsmobile F-85/Cutlass and Buick Special/Skylark (and these BOP versions were actually upsized from their 1963 predecessors).

Hard to imagine that GM’s power was once so influential, isn’t it?

To me, the 1969 Plymouth is awkward around the rear wheels – it looks “pinched” (the track of the rear wheels is too narrow) and the beltine is too high. At the front, the peaked fenders make the car look too high and narrow. The “tuckunder” of the lower body only exacerbates these problems. It looks as though there are about two or three “spacers” between the body and the chassis. Chrysler was going for the “fuselage” look with its 1969 full-size cars, and it just didn’t quite work. The full-size Chrysler pulled it off best.

The 1969 Chevrolet looks lower and wider, has a lower beltline, and “fills out the box” better. The body “sits” better on the chassis.

The new Malibu is very clean along the sides, and I like the “chopped tail” look. The weakest part is the front, as you noted, but the Camry is worse in this regard. The Chevy looks too “truck like” in the grille area, while the Camry just bulges out too far.

But that’s not going to overcome the Camry’s reputation (and note that I don’t think that the Camry is an UGLY car.) Basically, for styling to completely ruin the Camry and dislodge it from its current position atop the sales chart, Toyota would have to come up with the 21st century equivalent of the 1961 full-size Plymouth.

In other words, taste?

I don’t share your approval of the ‘69 Impala over the Fury, for example and I can say why… The bulges around the hindquarters are jarring and the chome ring around the front end is not pleasing. If the ‘69 Fury had been using that look since ‘66 or so then, back in 1969, one might have considered it ‘dated,’ especially if others ’69’s were a radical departure from the ’68’s.

I don’t consider the Malibu design to be cleaner and smoother, either, with the significantly lowered fender lines along the headlights and the sharp hood crease that goes along with it and the grille would best be described as a “slack-jawed grin.” Of course, that leaves me to describe the Camry as “buck-toothed,” so there’s no picking a winner, there, either.

Details. The Malibu shows a more deft touch regarding the details of the car. The car is cleaner and “smoother” than the Camry.

Is it a huge change? No. Both cars share the same basic proportions, dictated by a front-wheel-drive platform and the need to seat at least four people comfortably.

Or, to put this in classic car terms – compare a 1969 Plymouth Fury to a 1969 Chevrolet Impala. Same basic idea, same basic styling features, same design parameters, but the Impala just looks better, as though the stylists really sweated the details.

The problem is that, in today’s market, better styling alone isn’t enough to overcome the advantages that the Camry has built up in the areas of build quality, reliability and resale value. In 1969, GM owned the new-car market, so it set the styling trends and could use better styling to keep customers out of Ford, Chrysler and AMC showrooms. As we all know, it’s not 1969 anymore, especially for GM.

If a car maker coming from behind wants to turn better styling into a real competitive advantage, it has to introduce something both earth-shattering and beautiful – think 1961 Lincoln Continental – that completely changes the design language for cars in that class.

The Malibu doesn’t do that. So, you are correct – calling it “bold” is quite a stretch.

But is better looking than a Camry or an Accord.

To show the danger or relying too much on styling when coming from behind – given my mother-in-law’s experiences with her 2000 Malibu, and the 2005 Malibu that she has now, I have virtually zero interest in the newest Malibu. We’ll probably buy another Accord, or, if we do buy domestic, a Ford Fusion, based on Consumer Reports surveys and my wife’s good experience with her 2005 Ford Focus SE. (Although I do think that the Fusion is good looking – better than Accord and Camry. But if independent surveys showed that the car is in the shop regularly, I wouldn’t be interested.)

Someone explain to me why the Malibu is better looking that a Camry. It’s the same damned overall shape. The grill and taillights are different and the beltline is, I think, a tad higher and that’s about it.

For this difference, we often label the Camry as “boring” but the Malibu is often described as “bold?”

Guts: 8 Laws of Business by Robert A. Lutz

Lutz organizes the book around his “8 Immutable Laws of Business” which he poses as strawmen to demonstrate that even the best principles can be harmful if taken too far.

# Law 1 – The Customer Isn’t Always Right
# Law 2 – The Primary Purpose of Business Is Not to Make small money.
# Law 3 – When Everybody Else Is Doing It, Don’t!
# Law 4 – Too Much Quality Can Ruin You
# Law 5 – Financial Controls Are Bad
# Law 6 – Disruptive People Are an Asset
# Law 7 – Teamwork Isn’t Always Good
# Law 8 – When You Inherit a Really Big Rat’s Nest, Don’t Try to Lure Them Out with Food. Use a Flamethrower!

WTF!? Do we want this guy running a major corporation?

At the risk of sounding like I’m not giving Lutz any cred, what has he done for GM? Are there specific cars that were his?

Sure, there are.

The sales successes known as the Buick LaCrosse and Lucerne, the Saturn Aura and Astra and Vue, the Hummer H3T, and a few others.

Real list of winners, that.

You may be dedicated to using 70% of the oil you bought to make lots of noise and heat and 30% of the oil to move yourself and a few tons of steel and plastic around, but the world is moving on.

We all know the limitations of electric powered vehicles: fast but only for a short distance, more distance but at low speeds, heavy batteries, long charging times, large space stealing batteries, should be charged at night when the power grid has capacity, and dangerous or hard to get chemicals for the batteries.

But the world is moving on. 4th generation nuclear power plants use ALL of their fuel, in fact they can get power from the “spent” fuel from earlier nuclear generating plants. We need to keep our air clean, many countries do not have oil deposits and even some countries like the U.S. with oil deposits have nowhere near enough for our needs no matter how much we drill. The U.S. (and those countries without oil) absolutely cannot continue to send enormous amounts of money to countries that do have oil.

A database software designer (not a car guy or even someone who plans on making his own car) has solved many of the problems with electric powered cars. Not all the problems but many of them. September “Wired” page 118.

These new ideas will work best in small countries and in cities or anyplace with a high density population at first – the same as cell phones did. So for those of you in the U.S. Canada, and Australia dedicated to making noise and heat to move around a little you will probably be some of the last to adopt the new ideas so don’t worry. We will just have to follow way behind the rest of the world like we do with cell phones.

Better generating plants, new ideas solving problems, and above all the ABSOLUTE need to stop inefficiently burning oil for both air quality and financial reasons are all coming together. The world is moving on. I think Lutz knows this.

@Windswords: Excellent write-up, but I never implied the 300 was a rebadged E-Class. It is not, however, a unique to Chrysler platform. The good news is that for the current products, it has been an excellent platform. The bad news is that Chrysler can’t subsist off of Mercedes hand-me-downs.

It remains a problem.
They have a few well built vehicles but most are mediocre and there are more bad (some gastly)than good.
Regardless of which survey you look at their average is below the industry average.

I remember reading a bit in one of Lutz books in a chapter called “Too much quality can kill you”.
The examples showed me that Bob understood very little on the subject.

I was excited when he came to GM. He has improved design, from a poor-to-mediocre range to a mediocre-to-good range.
The competitors are offering designs as good or better with better quality. Ford and Hyundia have both out run GM on reliability during his tenure.
Volt. Look at the Solstice to see what a GM rush job on a conventional car looks like. Styling great. Overweight. Numerous design diasters (ergos, top). Bottom of the industry reliabilty in CRs survey.
Do you want NEW technology they have rushed through?

Nope. Lutz has not impressed me.

Bunter

I suspect that Lutz would not have been a better choice to lead Chrysler in the 1990s than Eaton, despite the latter’s tragic sell out to Daimler. For one thing, Lutz’s managerial style makes him a better No. 2 than a CEO. In addition, Lutz may be a gearhead but he’s pretty old school in his taste in cars (think Viper). He also has been one of the most aggressive nameplate killers in Detroit (e.g., if he had become head of Honda NA I could see him arguing for the replacement of the Civic and Accord nameplates).

I don’t buy that Lutz is an alternative fuel visionary. He’s merely shifting with the winds. That said, I don’t doubt that he has been a breath of fresh air for GM because of his anti-bureaucratic style and decent design sensibility.

Lutz arguably would have been a pretty good GM exec if he were on board 10 or 15 years earlier. In the auto industry timing is everything, and Lutz’s basic approach strikes me as dangerously dated. But because of the extraordinary group think at GM, Lutz is still viewed as ahead of the curve . . . despite evidence to the contrary, such as falling market share.

In the end, Lutz is a presenting symptom of both what is right and wrong with GM. Yes, he brings a glimmer of reform to the corporation. But on the whole his initiatives are too little, too late. Most importantly, like some of his former bosses, Lutz apparently lacks the humility to know when it is time to leave.

If Lutz’s personality inside GM is like what we see, I wouldn’t want him around. I don’t think he has dementia; I just think he lies. He sprays bullshit all over the place. And we’re supposed to believe he really does not believe than man is a significant contributor to climate change, but, in his corporate role, he just pretends he does. How the hell can anyone do that?

I give Lutz credit for polishing his image; of course equal credit goes to the ‘journalists’. As for being a car guy, who cares. The Camaro, G8, etc. do squat in helping GM do anything other than waste money. What GM needs are some adult business types who understand that it’s about making products that sell at profit. Obviously the Wagoner/Lutz duo includes no such person.

The Caliber/Compass/Patriot reside on a heavily modified Mitsubishi platform. By heavily modified I mean it doesn’t even match up to what Mitsu has anymore. This wasn’t what Chrysler wanted. They were made to use the Mitsu platform by Dumbler. They already had a small platform in developemnt to replace the Neon.

From Bob Sheaves postings on the Allpar forums:

“The GS was a Mitsu owned design that they were instructed to share with Chrysler by Daimler. Chrysler was supposed to refine it (which failed, sorta-they were able to develop it further, but most of the work was a waste as it did not all carryover into the redesign) adapt it to the Chrysler plants (not DSM – which failed) and then produce it (which failed). Mitsu continued developing the GS to meet their needs and facilities and it worked out well….for them. It was a Daimler mandated waste of time for Chrysler.

The point to all this is the redesign of the Stratus and Sebring (as well as the “new” Caliber, Compass, Patriot, etc.) was done on the fly and in a much shorter time than Daimler had originally allowed, but still, was not enough time to redo everything that needed to be “fixed” on the cars. After the direct dismemberment of the GS platform, and only those pieces used that would adapt to the latest Chrysler methods of flex manufacturing were used.

ADDENDUM: That is not to say the 2 platforms are not related, they are about as close, in human terms, as first cousins.”

The LX (300/Charger) as has been covered before numerous times is not a rebadged E-class. Less than 20 percent of the parts you DON”T SEE can be exchanged. The PT Cruiser of course is based off the Neon and is not from anyone else.

Now as for trucks, the Jeep GC/Commander, the Durango/Aspen, the Dakota, and maybe the Nitro/Liberty are all Chrylser and not shared with anyone.

1. Everything in Oldsmobile’s lineup when it was killed was U.S. Engineered and designed. The Malibu and Cobalt are to a small extent internationally engineered on a global platform, but are not foreign products in the same way the Aveo or Astra are. They’re probably the most “American” sedans you can buy, given the Fusion is made in Mexico. Sure the platform isn’t exclusively American- why should it be? Global platforms are almost always superior as the additional R&D costs are offset by volume.

Chrysler, by contrast, doesn’t have anything close to its own car or truck platform, aside from whatever garbage the Caliber rides on (and even that I’m not so sure.)

2) Apple and Harley davidson rely on an image complemented by marketing and product, not on marketing alone. GM’s problem is it lacks such an image. Honda and Volkswagen have it.

@argentla:
It is almost shocking to believe GM had such daring designs. Even the mid-90’s Tahoes looked good in their boxiness. The problem was almost consistently interior based, and prior to Lutz’s arrival, would spread to the exterior as well. Cars like the Monte Carlo and Impala were nasty lumps (and still aren’t much.) The Aztek. Even the hyper-styled Bonneville. Just things that make you want to puke.

Watch Charlie Rose’s interview of Lutz; notice how
he has some young babe next to him in the helicopter scene. He is a car guy alright. He does not claim
to be an engineer or a stylist in the interview; for that I give him credit. He claims only to be a marketing person.

Regarding the “Volt”, Lutz boasted that he likes to leapfrog other’s technology. Then he goes on to say that his idea
was to make an all electric car but the engineer
guy told him the technology was here now for a hybrid which had a small gas motor and a (smaller)
battery pack. When you consider that GM already
did the EV1, you can dismiss Maximum Bob’s leapfrog rhetoric. Mr. Lutz goes on to say that
the volt takes the environmental question out of the equation. Evidently he doesn’t understand that most electricity comes from fossil fuels and forgot that there is a gas tank on the proposed car.

But take a good look at the ‘Volt’. This thing has
such a low windshield that it looks like a chopped Mercury in a ZZTop video. This car will never make it to production. Because you could never see out of that windscreen and because GM will not make it to 2010.

I fear GM might simply find it more profitable to cheap out on its replacement and go back to crap.

Or start to “de-cost” the current model later in its production run, again as Ford did with the Taurus.

I think I’m in the minority (big surprise), but I thought a lot of GM cars of the nineties were attractive enough, in a conservative way — the final Riviera, the Buick Park Avenue, the ‘92 Seville, the Olds Aurora. Their dynamic performance was seldom more than okay, and their reliability and interior quality was frequently vile, but they looked all right. The current crop is hard to like, stylistically. The Malibu is inoffensive, but the entire Pontiac and Buick lines make my head hurt, except maybe for the Solstice (nice proportions, frown-making detailing). It’s a weird mix of overwrought concepts and “clinicked-to-death” blandness (I’m lookin’ at you, Pontiac G6). It’s hard to believe GM once built some of the best-looking cars around.

“I agree, GM cars are not the overtly terrible cars of yesteryear; they are just not great. Consider the new Malibu, whollely inoffensive and midly attractive. But just not enough of one thing to encourage the huge perception change GM needs.”

I don’t know of a single “attractive” mid-size sedan. At best you’re looking at “not too bad” , but most cars in this class are cribbed designs of more expensive models (Accord, I’m looking at you.) The Malibu looks pretty darn good and has a Passat-esque gravitas to it while still looking fairly American. It’s not going to sell well until it gets a good reputation, as it’s merely an equal with its foreign counterparts (still a stunning achievement for GM given it’s been 10 years since they released anything that could be called such) instead of better.

That’s the problem- who is going to buy a Malibu when they could buy an Altima or Accord with ‘proven’ reliability records? My last GM product (an Oldsmobile) was inoperable by the 100k mark, and that was after religious care and thousands upon thousands of dollars in repairs just to keep the car operational. It was the only car I know of that made Jetta owners feel like they made a sound investment.

My hope is that GM doesn’t get brand ADHD and do any more brand cutting and/or shifting. Each brand is right where it should be but needs to gather a good reputation before it can grow organically.