Although it’s not exactly the riddle of the Sphinx (answer: man), many of our Best and Brightest have wondered why GM can’t make a decent car interior. Even before GM Car Czar Bob Lutz assumed the throne (since abdicated), the American automaker has admitted that they need to step up their game within its vehicles. And yet, in the main, the fit and finish of GM interiors still doesn’t make the grade. Obviously, there’s a whole host of contributing factors—from supplier contracts to union work rules. A GM insider recently contacted TTAC to provide an important piece of that particular puzzle. Agent X reveals one of the main reasons GM’s interiors failed to match the competition: the executives didn’t know there was a problem. Still don’t. Here’s why . . .
As you probably know, ever since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.
Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”
Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”
I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.
Well, did the DPG at least send a list of changes to the design and production teams? “The tweaks were never reported to anyone,” he says. “That would’ve been a sure way to kill your career . . . We’d see the cars come back to us after production with the exact same problems.”
According to Agent X, GM’s testing regimen is getting worse, not better. GM has sold-off the DPG (soon to be a major resort). The replacement facility in Michoacán, Mexico, has proven problematic—weather and local topography are hampering testing procedures—and the new Yuma, Arizona, facility is not yet up and running.
And anyway, GM’s reduced its DPG testing by over seventy percent. “The buzz inside GM is now ‘from road to lab to math.’” In other words, laboratory tests are replacing road tests, until computer simulation can replace lab tests.
Agent X and I agreed that GM’s product development system was and is fundamentally flawed. Equally important, we also shared the belief that there’s tremendous talent locked-up inside the CYA hell that is GM’s corporate culture. “Look at the ZR1,” he said. “It shows GM can make great, world-beating cars.”
“But what about the Corvette’s interior,” I asked. His silence spoke volumes.
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For me the interior matters most. It’s what you see while driving it 100K miles and you have to be comfortable with the look and feel of everything. For domestics Ford had the best of the three, Chrysler had some good looking interiors made from craptastic plastic, but GM had the worst looking and poorest made interiors of all.
Take the pickup trucks. They had this ridiculous odd sized radio next to the console with a huge hole in the middle of the dash for aftermarket stereos. Considering a large number of people would be inclined to put a sound system in one of these trucks they made it stupid and more difficult to do so.
Buick did the same thing for years.
haha wow now that’s interesting though hardly surprising, that the execs remain ignorant
GM executives as a group seem to know the least about cars of any group of people on the planet. They don’t learn about how to make cars, because the way to a GM executive job is through business school, not engineering school. They don’t learn about them as consumers because little hourly-employee elves make the best possible examples of GM cars appear at their door and magically get them fixed, tweaked, and replaced as needed without telling the executives or them having to see a bill. They don’t learn about them from customers because they only see the dealers, and even them only briefly as entry-level management. They don’t learn about them from their friends because their friends are all other GM executives.
This is something I kind of suspected.
How hard is it to go to a dealership on a Saturday and test drive something? How many people does it take to tell the emperor he has no clothes?
It’s a given they should drive their own product via random samples; what’s more important is driving the competition immediately afterward (not a Chrysler). If you’ve been sheltered from cars for over a decade, I bet a Cobalt’s interior looks pretty dang good, until you drive most anything else comparable.
Why, that would require actually interacting with mere commonfolk…which would be just so wrong for big time CEOs to do. They have better things to do with their time, like run their respective companies into the ground. Take one spin in something like a base G6 and tell me you can honestly consider it world-class? Heck, Ford (for all of the talk of it being the top of the 2.45667) interiors aren’t really that much better. My three year old Fusion has massive creaks and rattles already..to include “chrome” interior door handles that are bubbling and peeling and a steering wheel that feels like a soft sponge on warm days (due to there being zero adhesion of the foam to the interior metal ring). My son’s 1997 Toyota Tercel, now dangerously close to 200k mind you, is still holding up better than the Fusion. I’m tempted to sell off the Ford when my son goes to the Air Force Academy this summer and keep the Tercel!
Isn’t it obvious that the execs wouldn’t care anyway? If they had any pride about making a quality product they’d have done some digging and found out on their own. As other commenters have stated, it isn’t that hard to pop into a dealer anonymously. This is clearly willful ignorance.
GM executives are all about keeping the patient breathing long enough to extract their money; they are clearly not interested in creating a quality product.
OK, maybe GM is really this stupid, but I can’t see a huge company like that relying on executives’ ideas for selling cars. Aren’t these people doing product surveys, polling the owners of the competition to see why they didn’t buy GM products, getting the opinions of control groups on how good the cars and their interiors are, reading magazine/internet reviews, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc….
I mean, TTAC is always saying how these are businessmen, not car guys, and businessmen don’t care about the product. If you’re making toys, you don’t play with the toys yourself and see if you like them, so it doesn’t matter if the engineers are showing you ringers. You get a bunch of kids and have them play with toys off the assembly line and see what they think. I’d be 100% flabbergasted if GM wasn’t already spending millions doing this.
So, does “Agent X” have any proof that the reason GM interiors suck is because the executives get ringers? Or is he just seeing executive ringers and crap interiors and thinking the two are necessarily related?
Because, and I know this post is long already, we can’t forget that GM still sells A LOT of cars… up until a few years ago, they still sold more cars than anyone else in this country. Crap interiors might have been a bad idea in the long run, but in the short term America obviously wasn’t too torn up about them. My guess is that executives WERE getting feedback that the interiors sucked, but they decided to ignore that feedback in favor of a cut-your-way-to-profits strategy.
I remember reading once that Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, spent half a day a week in his office. The rest of the time he was out visiting stores, talking to customers and employees and suppliers, looking in back-rooms, and generally making sure he knew everything that went on in his business including the customer experience. It’s really not a unique story, Tom Peters talked about “management by walking around” back in the 80’s. One thing for sure, you can’t manage from the penthouse.
The problem stems from the fact of GM’s historic success/size. The same pitfall is now facing Toyota (their interiors are not among the best, not by a long shot. The rest of their vehicles are class leading however.)
When you are so big, the benefits of cost-cutting are that much larger. And managers make their bonuses by controlling costs. So they nickle and dime the suppliers. It goes on for years, and soon the parts are sub-par. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if a manufacturer awarded supply contracts to the best rather than the cheapest?
That GM management has been insulated for ages can not be a news item? That’s the core of the GM culture, and the core of its problems. To solve that, the head must be cut off, and in a move for self preservation, the head has been resisting that for as long as the problem has existed.
I was really liking the CTS I test-drove, until I had to stop for a while at a train crossing. Then my attention started to wander around the interior, and I started seeing the uneven panel gaps, the creaking plastic when you adjust the clock, and so on. The CTS ended up being removed from my list to consider. There’s no way that a “Cadillac” should suffer from problems like that.
Why would you consider “union work rules” to be a contributing factor to the indecency of a GM interior? Other than the usual anti-union bias seen here? I mean I can point out a host of transplant interiors that are no better and there ain’t no evil unions “helping” contribute to those crappy interiors.
LOL, in addition we did the same to mag test cars and kept the VIN and bought the ringers at auction for personal use.
Worse yet, most are reluctant to ever set foot in a competitive vehicle. Being seen driving a Honda or a BMW would be too shameful. They don’t even know what they’re competing against.
When all you know is mediocre, mediocre looks good.
They don’t learn about how to make cars, because the way to a GM executive job is through business school, not engineering school.
Look at the bios of GM’s “senior leadership” team, and you find lots of folks with undergraduate engineering degrees. (Bob Lutz’s bachelors degree is in production.) Engineering is a common path into the company.
It’s not a matter of engineering educations vs. MBA’s, but of whether the customers’ needs are served. GM’s focus has long been on cost management, not customer satisfaction, so sales have naturally declined.
It’s a retail product, so the execs should be spending time out in the retail environment so that they can see their products from the perspective of the average person who uses them. These guys should head out of town, rent some cars — their own and those of the competition — and drive them around, observing the world around them and talking to people randomly who buy the competitors’ products.
As pointed out above, the private jet/ penthouse mentality bars them from getting the market feedback that would help them to make better decisions. They can’t relate to the customer, so it’s understandable that the customer’s needs are ignored.
What they needs is “mass forgiveness.” Basically, everybody reports what’s going on, even if they are the ones doing it, and work backward from there. Granted, there are many thousands of things going on, but if people aren’t going to lose their job over something like this, they might be more willing to come forward.
Do you all remember when Bill Ford hired Mulally? At the press conference, Mulally said how much he liked his Lexus. To me that showed that he got it. However, the Ford faithful were insulted. That’s the biggest problem. You have to drive the others cars to know how good your own are. It’s why our Car Czar friend always said GM’s cars were better than the competition. He didn’t drive the others, and apparently his own cars were ringers.
Id like to provide a true story to underline this article. For two decades we built and sold quality control equipment to GM. I talked at length with our customers, the quality control managers of various plants. Each was provided a new vehicle made by their division (eg Oldsmobile), which they took notes on and logged problems. They turned it back in after three months.
But during this time they drove only their own divisions vehicle, and never went to a dealership for either a repair or purchase experience. It was serviced in the corporate garage, and everything fixed up so even little items could be taken care of.
Thus as Toyota etc started to really pick up steam these persons were blissfully unaware of any problems, vehicle or dealer relative to the competition. The only competititve analysis i found going on was done by a small group in the GM tech center who took the other vehicles apart and laid all their peices on the floor. Again missing alot of the customer experience aspect.
This really bothered me, as it seemed the company was flying blind to a degree- and it was. People were more concerned about what their counterparts in other GM divisions were producing , than in the outside world.
There is a good article todayin Automotive news by Rob Kleinbaum about how GM culture must change.
RE: Rolling radious machine. Did that perform the same function as trim and trueing a tire?
36 Years of witnessing GM senior management do thier bit.After reading between the lines of Mr Faragos piece.After purchasing a top of the trim line Impala LTZ,with the very expensive upgraded leather interior.I have reached an inescapable conclusion.
The credentials of TTACs inside source,are beyond
reproach.Not only that the guy knows what he is talking about.
Why, that would require actually interacting with mere commonfolk…which would be just so wrong for big time CEOs to do
Nasser did this while at Ford…but he fucked up. How? He used to go to car shows and general “middle class” events in Metro Detroit dressed up in the finest custom suits and simply didnt fit in. He had this aristocracy thing….seemed like he was dressing up to go to a board meeting, not to view vintage Mustangs. The only way you could get away with something like that, at least around here, is if you are a member of te Ford family.
It still doesnt explain all of the interior shortcomings. Low and middle management are well aware of the products, why dont they mandate changes?
How does the Cobalt SS powertrain and suspension (they’re great by the way) get approved when interior upgrades do not? The Cobalt’s interior deficiencies are mentioned over and over and over, and they are the most visible to the customer. Why not upgrade the interior first, increase sales volume (and customer satisfaction), then move on to the performance goodies???
Stories from my time at Chrysler:
- whenever the execs schedule a plant visit, the plant folks spend weeks cleaning up the place and making sure that everything looks presentable.
- Chrysler has test labs onsite in Auburn Hills. I remember a particular incident where the execs (Eaton at the time I think) was going to do a walk-through. It was announced weeks ahead of schedule. Many hours were wasted in cleaning up the place. Also, any tests that could potentially fail a part were hidden, and only the completed or low-risk parts were run that day. More time wasted. I never understood why someone like Eaton didn’t just take a walk down into the labs in the middle of the week to see what the heck was really going on down there. If it was my company, that’s what I’d do. Remember how Sam Walton used to go to his stores unannounced? Like that.
- The Big 3 have a fleet of vehicles that they run to 100k miles every year as part of their emissions certification. To me, this looked to be an ideal opportunity for the execs to drive an example of their cars that had undergone testing and see what wears out, what breaks, etc. Nobody took any interest in these cars. They were scrapped.
- Overall, the vast majority of folks at the upper echelons in the Big 3 tend to focus on their career only, and to hell with the product. This mindset seems to have permeated into most public companies since nobody has ownership and there don’t seem to be immediate consequences.
Wow. This is just… not exactly all that surprising.
But I disagree; Chrysler, Dodge and Suzuki have worse interiors.
Way, way back in 1966, Fortune magazine commented
on General Motors that GM officials were products of a system than discouraged attention to matters outside of their jobs; they spent most of their time in camaraderie that kept them in much of each others company…there was no self-examination going on. Recently, Fortune wrote another article on GM-and called managed insular and isolated. General Motors needs to be blown up, the existing management subject to a Stalinist purge and new management brought in. Then, the company may have a chance of survival.
@ rocket:
There is a good article todayin Automotive news by Rob Kleinbaum about how GM culture must change.
You could have read it here first: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/guest-editorial-retooling-gms-culture/
Great reporting of an urban legend. GM interiors are fine. Is a Cadillac interior nicer than a Chevrolet? Of course it is. Is a Toyota interior any better? No. But a Lexus may be.
I would like to have actual sources (eg. names of people or articles, where these people worked or work or where the articles came from) to back this story up. This article is just hear say without any valid sources.
Also, of all the interiors I have been in regarding GM I have enjoyed them all and I own three GM products, a 77 camaro, 96 buick park avenue, and 2008 Impala, all interiors good by my standards.
And while I have been in, admittedly, less foreign cars, while the gaps have been ok, the materials have rated no better in my opinion than that of the GM.
Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line
That kind of behavour is the epithome of a dysfunctional organization. Google “Potemkim Village” to see a 18th century Russian precedent to that level of dysfunction:
http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&q=Potemkin+village&btnG=Buscar+con+Google&meta=
Tom Peters talked about “management by walking around” back in the 80’s. One thing for sure, you can’t manage from the penthouse.
In the Toyota Production System they call that principle “Genchi Genbutsu”, i.e. “go and see for yourself”.
http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&q=%22Genchi+Genbutsu%22+%22Toyota%22+%22Production+System%22&btnG=Buscar&meta=
Of course that it is completely pointless if you “go and see” a carefully staged automotive Potemkim village, as the one described in the article.
To Bridge2far:
I was on a local car show and was amazed how cheap the Toyota Camry interior looked, event in a convertible Solara, which was supposed to be a bit more upscale car that the base 4 cyl 4 door.
Low and middle management are well aware of the products, why dont they mandate changes?
Because they’d be fired if they did.
The “squeaky wheel gets the grease” axiom only applies at non-dysfunctional organizations. At a place like GM (and sadly, many others) the squeaky wheel is scrapped.
I know at least one very large apparel retailer that sends new executives (or those about to be promoted to execs) to work at an actual retail store for a few weeks during their big Christmas season. They work as a regular sales clerk.
This gets their hands dirty actually seeing how their money is made, how their product is sold. See customers face-to-face, or watch customers walk out the door without a purchase, and head to a store across the mall.
What a fantastic concept. This retailer has risen to be a leader in its segment.
It should be pointed out that most American business of any real size generally does not have a top management that really spends much time with the “plebians” under their power. I work at a place where all of our C level execs are RARELY seen in the IT or Accounting departments despite the fact that it would take all of half an hour a week to come up and talk to all of us. However, this does not happen even in our small corporate office. I reckon similar shit happens at many, many US companies.
It gets even better, the ones that don’t get Limo’d to work every day, have a private parking garage, with a their own set of mechanics and engineers to make sure the cars are spotless, run perfect, and are perfect fit and finish. The engineers, are at least manager level making over 100k/yr. And the longest they will drive a car, is 6 months.
Even if this is true (it may be, I’m just skeptical…though I can’t imagine the top execs have a ton of time to spend at a dealership), I don’t fault them too much….they shouldn’t have to go to a dealership to find a random sample if the people working below them, the engineers and engineering managers, along with design, did their jobs.
If they had, the cars they saw at the proving grounds wouldn’t be ringers, and the problems would have been attacked and fixed instead of swept under the rug and those who pushed to fix were punished. It lies with the people making those decisions, not a Bob Lutz or Rick Wagonner.
Sorry, that’s my take on it. People have to do their jobs. Bob Lutz can’t do everyone’s job for them.
I have to say, I was very inimpressed with the newest Toyota Corolla interior. I thought that they must have sub-contracted the design and plastics to Chrysler, in fact. Awful. I only looked inside the Camry, but it didn’t strike me as particularly upscale.
Toyota is not immune to stupidity, either.
If you want a really nice interior in a boring family car, go look at a Hyundai Sonata, especially in tan (with black accents). Very nice, even in the basic GLS car line.
This is what a middle-class family car should be like inside.
Interestingly, the CEO of Hyundai declared that from the top on down to the line workers, quality WAS going to improve, and the cars were going to improve. Or else. And, they did. Not just in cars built at their South Korean plants, either.
Hence their recent sales increases are genuinely for a reason other than just people ‘value shopping’.
Yes, people ARE ‘value shopping’ but when they get to see the product they’d ignored, they are genuinely impressed enough to part with money.
GM and Chrysler could take notes, but they don’t think they have anything to learn from the company that is breathing down Toyota’s neck and scaring them very badly in Japan.
Jerome10
It is the truth.
The people at the proving grounds were punished for telling the truth/reporting problems. So they didn’t.
Anyway, as the Italians say, the fish stinks from the head down.
Interesting story. I do question the sense (value) of any executive who would not expect this and take measures to ensure that they indeed find out what a regular Joe experiences. That’s not to say Lutz could have walked into most showrooms unnoticed. He simply would have had to be creative and procure a vehicle sample through a 3rd-party. Not exactly rocket science.
Another aspect of this that raises an eyebrow is that there is no way on earth you can “tweak” most of the crappy interiors in GM vehicles. Shitty plastics can be aligned until the cows come home and they are still shitty plastics. Poor ergonomics and seats can’t be “tweaked”.
Sure, take care of the rattles and file a few of the ridiculously sharp edges on console lids and such if you’re trying to hide some things, but that tube of lipstick only goes so far on the pig.
A couple of examples come to mind – both a C5 and C6 Corvette I’ve previously owned had “The Legend Lives” sticker on the door put on crooked. If you aren’t paying attention to something like this that the customer can see, then God only knows how they are putting together things you can’t. A second example would be the volume knob on the C6 that was way too small. How something like this gets past the premier vehicle team at GM highlights the sad state of affairs. Same holds for the misaligned sticker – this was Bowling Green. I mean, if you’re going to work at the one GM plant with that kind of storied history producing what is surely the pride of the GM fleet, how can you be that Goddamn sloppy putting shit together? These two things spoke volumes about both the design/development and the production line to me.
And don’t get me started on the state of most of the other GM vehicles that I’ve had as rental cars. These are in a separate shameful league of their own that any GM exec should better have experienced as an anonymous rental car customer if they had any desire to find out the truth.
Living in a bubble is Job#1 for US executives.
Akio Morita, the founder of SONY, installed B&O hifi equipment in his homes and office, to challenge his engineers in the 60s and 70s. It worked then.
@steronz
Allow me a slight correction to this statement:
Because, and I know this post is long already, we can’t forget that GM
still sellsgives away A LOT of cars… up until a few years ago, they still sold more cars than anyone else in this country.A company that has lost money for eight years straight (if not more, given their dodgy accounting), doesn’t sell cars, it is giving them away.
I used to work maintaining mainframe computers at the Ford, Broadmeadows factory. One of our staff got on the list to purchase an “employee” Falcon. Apparently, these cars get an “Employee car” sticker affixed at the beginning of the assembly line and that was the best Ford I have ever seen. It was perfectly assembled – no gaps or rattles. I hate to say it but until the workers are all replaced by robots we will continue to have ‘Monday’ cars and ‘Friday afternoon’ cars built. This affects fit and finish.
All manufacturer’s interiors are getting worse and worse. Camry is as bad as a lot of the Big 3. Honda is a little too space age for my taste. Very few cars south of $30 large have interiors worthy of praise.
I worked as a car electronics installer for a while during college, and I noticed that GM interiors really were the worst of the breed.
It’s easy to identify a bad looking interior – but identifying a poorly designed and assembled interior requires disassembly.
GMs of the 90s typically had interior panels that would break when disassembled, and would not line up with fasteners when reassembled. The end result was squeaks and rattles when the weather got cool.
GM was also notorious for using those damned plastic “tree” fasteners on interior panels. They are designed for ease of assembly, but during disassembly the fasteners would break, or become so distorted that their holding power was compromised.
The Germans, on the other hand, were a real bitch to take apart (tight fitting panels), but the interior panels were strong, fit well, and could be reassembled with precision in a logical manner. German cars rarely came back with complaints of squeaks and rattles.
The absolute worst cars were the f-bodies – those things all eventually became rattle traps.
-ted
Wunsch :
March 20th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I was really liking the CTS I test-drove, until I had to stop for a while at a train crossing. Then my attention started to wander around the interior, and I started seeing the uneven panel gaps, the creaking plastic when you adjust the clock, and so on. The CTS ended up being removed from my list to consider. There’s no way that a “Cadillac” should suffer from problems like that.
There have been some recent blogs on Edmunds about the CTS’ parking brake release handle, squeaks/rattles, exposed wires, failing trim, etc. It may be a huge improvement over some GM vehicles, but this illustrates they’re not quite “world class”. Not even close. Someone’s asleep at the wheel when it comes to details at GM.
http://blogs.edmunds.com/roadtests/Vehicles/2008CadillacCTSV6DI/
My experience at GM is that middle management is fully aware of defficiencies but, as another commentator already said, may be afraid of blowing the wistle on the issues.
It intrigues me that, while I was there, myself and the whole product development team were subjected to some training hours dedicated exclusively to getting better interiors. So again, they were fully aware of the problem. One of the training videos for instance compared a GM leather seat to a German manufacturer leather seat (I think it was Audi) and showed the specific differences that made one bad and the other good.
So why not make it better. I guess beancounting is the answer, of course supported by top management.
Why would anybody think GM management is concerned with customer satisfaction or the quality of their products?
Same old, same old… call them “ringers” or call them “highlighted”, it’s done everywhere.
This, however, should stand out:
“Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.””
While I can’t call the above quote a straight out lie, in the back of your skull a phrase should be gnawing at the base of your brain. That phrase would be “plausible deniability.” The top execs may not have mandated the tweaks to the vehicles but they certainly set up the environment to make them happen.
I have to say, I was very inimpressed with the newest Toyota Corolla interior. I thought that they must have sub-contracted the design and plastics to Chrysler, in fact. Awful. I only looked inside the Camry, but it didn’t strike me as particularly upscale.
I’m going to come off as a Toyota fanatic, and I really don’t mean to, but I think the distinction has to be made between having nice-feeling plastics and well-assembled ones. Here’s the difference:
* All the panels in a Matrix (or my Fit, for example) are rock hard, but are well-grained, backlit appropriately, detailed, fit together nicely and don’t shake much. At least the places where you rest your arm/elbow are padded.
* All the panels in a Caliber don’t aren’t. They’re not aligned properly, the holes show flashing (or, in the case of the door-lock post holes, actual drill shavings curling up from the hole).
Toyota seems to have come to the realization that as long as the fitment and behaviour isn’t cheap, people aren’t really going to notice. Truthfully, I can’t blame them, because the only reason for soft-touch dashes and such is to imitate the leather dashes from a century ago. There’s no reason for them to be soft to the touch, other than that they’ve always been so.
Here’s an example: I have a very expensive stereo, and a somewhat less expensive Apple computer and an only slightly-less-expensive espresso machine at home (yeah, yeah, I know…). None of these things use soft-touch plastics, not even the stereo that costs more than my first car: it’s matte black plastic with a few lights here and there. I touch it way more often than my Fit’s dash, and I truthfully don’t care that either are made of hard plastic because they both look and work well.
And that’s why auto scribes’ griping about hard plastics in Accords and Camrys is kind of pointless: as long as the cars are reliable and treat their owners well, and the plastics aren’t offensive, they aren’t going to care. People will notice misalignment, true, but uneven exterior panel gaps and hard plastic everywhere but the armrest is a non-issue.
GM’s problem is different: the cheapness was more a symptom, historically speaking, not a reason to hate the car. If your Camry gave you thousands of trouble-free miles but had a hard dash, you’d let it go. If your Malibu’s plastic intake just cost you an engine, or your Caravan’s transmission broke for the third time, those hard—and badly assembled—panels are just the icing on the cake of mediocrity.
It may be a huge improvement over some GM vehicles, but this illustrates they’re not quite “world class”.
It’s not World Class until it’s costing you three grand a year in window regulators, fuel pumps and headlamps!
The CEO of Loews Hotels, Jonathan Tisch, also spends time doing every single job in the hotel (as do many of his executives). It has lead to major improvements not just in the quality of the hotels, but in the quality of life for employees.
kericf :
All manufacturer’s interiors are getting worse and worse. Camry is as bad as a lot of the Big 3. Honda is a little too space age for my taste. Very few cars south of $30 large have interiors worthy of praise.
I agree with you.