I’ve pretty much canceled my advertisement-subsidized subscriptions to almost every car magazine I ever got (with the exception of Excellence).

The point of Hyundai is a compelling one to raise. There is NO REASON that GM couldn’t have designed a product renaissance the way Hyundai has over the last 20 years.

People don’t rail on Hyundai because Hyundai products are not only competitive, they’re low cost price leaders or close to that in the categories where they compete.

If GM had that type of value proposition, they would be well on their way to a much brighter future. But nope. Short term thinking, dealer greed, poor leadership, poor internal coordination and a starved product pipeline helped to get GM to where they are now. Malibu and CTS demonstrate there is hope, but since the Malibu isn’t “better” than its competitors, it needs to be priced more aggressively.

Conquest rebates won’t do it. Price is not the problem. The people that aren’t coming back have visions of getting just out of warranty and finding themselves suddenly faced with a repair bill that’s more than the car is worth. They want the value of a car they can rely on for 10 years. The current 5/100 warranty is a shell game and people know it. Hyundai can do it, you’d think GM could, too.

A 10 year TRANSFERRABLE warranty would also help out with a boost to the resale value. What do people look for on the used market? Inexpensive but reliable wheels that they probably plan to run for a while. Between two 5 year old cars, the one that’s still guaranteed to be kept useable for another 5 years has a big edge and this will be reflected in the resale price.

A 10 year warranty makes the statement that the car it’s attached to will be reliable for a very long time.

The stumbling block, of course, is that the older the car gets, the more chickens come home to roost. If GM IS building a very durable and reliable car out of high-quality parts, a longer warranty won’t cost much. If GM is building a car out of lowest-possible-bid pieces…

Whether you like it or not, each customer who will never look at a GM product again IS a challenge to GM. To survive and maybe thrive, GM needs those people back. Even if they said they’d never look at another GM product again, GM has to find a way. Conquest rebates aren’t the way to do it, either. They didn’t leave for price, they left for value.

The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem.

As for an opportunity for dissatisfied GM customers to get their licks in, well, even if true, that’s just too bad for GM, isn’t it? Word-of-mouth is important. Take care of your customers.

Charlene Blake appears to have a full-time job bad-mouthing Toyota for a sludge problem that, by some miracle, none of my friends have experienced. In fact, she’ll show up in topics where such a rant is decidedly off-topic. Sauce for the goose, as they say.

Hyundai has baggage, but nobody takes potshots at them over the Excel and Sonata they dumped on our shores.

I don’t call it a rant just because I don’t like what some of the commentors are saying. I call it a rant because that’s what it is, and it doesn’t add to the discussion. It’s not a challenge being issued to Detroit to fix the products. How can it be when they’ve already made it clear that no matter how good their product is, they won’t look at it? Every article about Detroit, good, bad, or otherwise, is nothing more than an opening for them to get their licks in and ’stick it to them’ over a car they were dissatisfied with.

I remember reading about their decision to use a live rear axle in the Mustang for drag race and cost reasons before the car came out, and the Cobra got the IRS for performance reason. I questioned this wondering exactly how many people that plan to drag race the car buy a NEW musting each year. I don’t know the exact number but I’m guessing they sold 140,000 Mustangs last year. Even if they make up 50% of sales that’s 70,000 people racing them, even with illegal racing that seams like a very high number each year.

To me it seams like they are catering to a small sector of the market at the expense of better handling for the majority of the market.

Maybe Frank can tell us how many were sold in 2007.

What they failed to factor in is the disgust factor. Who among people who like cars can look seriously at Ford when they do stuff like this?

I can, when I see enthusiasts of the previous generation Mustang Cobra swapping out the IRS rear ends for live axles. Why? Because the IRS is horrible for drag racing. What do most Mustang enthusiasts do with their car? They drag race them. That is who Ford is catering to. Does it make business sense to build a car that doesn’t cater to their core buyer?

I look at Solstice and think kind of cool daring fresh lines for the first time in so long from GM and I am really glad they tried but I know whats under the skin and I dont want to get within ten feet of that sucker. Solstice’ good effect is that I will at least even monitor from a distance their evolving products, having ignored them for 20 years.

What’s under the skin that we don’t know about?

The point is, the Malibu has baggage. GM is running a hundred yard dash with an opponent who has a 75-yard lead. They have twin goals:

Keep the current customers.
Win over some former customers.

The echoes of bad quality continue to keep the former customers at bay. IF the current quality of GM products is equal to Toyonda, that’s good but many of these former customers were driven away for cause, are likely perfectly happy with their current Toyonda and are unlikely to make the effort to reconsider GM products. Like me. I am in no hurry; I find my current Toyondas perfectly satisfactory.

The current customers (and remember that a significant chunk of the American market WILL NOT CONSIDER purchasing an Asian car AT ALL) can still be pissed off and driven away. That’s product availability.

To regain market share (and their cost structure requires this), GM MUST get both sides right. Product Availability and Echoes of Quality Problems go hand-in-hand.

As for “rants,” except for the strangely stimulating Jurisb, there seem to me to be no regualar “ranters” here “ranting” about Toyonda supremacy. Just because you don’t like something, doesn’t mean it’s a rant. If someone’s personal GM history is unpleasant, that doesn’t mean it’s a rant; it’s a challenge to GM.

Even a die-hard Toyonda fanatic would benefit from a strong GM with strong, desireable, available, durable and reliable products: it would help hold the line on Toyonda pricing.

Ford decided after financial and market analysis that the lower cost/performance product point on the matrix resulting from using live axle was desirable because enough mustang buyers don’t want to pay the extra for IRS that it would cost Ford to execute. This was what the ford guy told the magazine guy. I think they are maximising revenue at cost of soul and desirable identity. I wont look back.

What they failed to factor in is the disgust factor. Who among people who like cars can look seriously at Ford when they do stuff like this?

I look at Solstice and think kind of cool daring fresh lines for the first time in so long from GM and I am really glad they tried but I know whats under the skin and I dont want to get within ten feet of that sucker. Solstice’ good effect is that I will at least even monitor from a distance their evolving products, having ignored them for 20 years.

I can afford a nice car and want more than they think I want, and if I couldn’t afford I would not be looking at GM/Ford anyway except maybe for loss generating cobalt and focus.

The Japanese way is decide if IRS is warranted in the design brief and if so then design it to the right cost. This includes US manufactured products. Europeans, you don’t get free stuff there but they seem to have a higher expectation of what a car will do and feel like. No Japan and Europe are not perfect but come on.

My step-mom drives a black convertible new generation mustang with the v8 auto, she cant really drive, she gas/brakes and wobbles along fearfully, says she loves the car and “dont I look good in it?” Makes her feel glamorous, a carefree gal in an impractical, fun car. I drove it once, nice sound from too-large motor, it hops and skips horribly at WOF. The opposite of refined. People did wave though. Is this what Ford wants mustang to be?

UAW? Mgt made promises it could not afford. Look at New Process Gear in the news now. Another US plant tanking due to silly high costs for non-college educated labor. They get plenty of people wanting to work for the tier 2 wage, except those who are locked in to tier 1 and wont go away.

Finally TTAC is great, including forum people, but for a print car rag Autoweek is a fun little 15 minute experience. They also say what is good and bad and do it in a nice way.

Must every article reflexively turn to quality when that’s not the focus of the discussion?

The fanboy reaction to this is, universally, that the former GM owner is being unfair and should reconsider. Sorry. Where I work, if someone stops buying OUR products, we worry about how we screwed up, we don’t accuse the former customer of being unfair. It’s our job to win him back, not to berate him until he changes his mind.

There are some who believe that the Japanese plants generate better product than the US plants. While the data I see leads me to a different conclusion, that’s not an example of “bias.”

I see a lot of desire to find “bias”, but no tangible examples of how this supposedly manifests itself. It seems to me that the domestic fanboys just can’t accept the idea that their favorite brands do not lead the market in R&D, sex appeal or reliability.

Because they can’t accept it, they make excuses, instead. Unfortunately, one can build an assembly line’s worth of excuses, but nobody is compelled to buy them.

Terry:
Not much to ask at all, but when every Ford article is reduced to swipes about burning Pintos, Panthers, and spontaneously combusting F150’s, and every GM Deathwatch article seems to have an angry tirade about a brand new Lumina that had parts falling off of it only a few miles after they pulled out the dealer’s lot and how they’ll never EVER as much as look at a GM product again, how much of a calm, open, and honest discussion are you really going to have? The only times I’ve seen comments about Toyota engines with sludge is in an attempt to counter the claim of rock-solid Toyota reliability. Meanwhile, every deathwatch article degenerates into a dogpile of criticism about reliability, even though I haven’t seen RF write a DW about quality issues for long time.

The key difference is that the import fanboys are typically (overly) enthusiastic about the products themselves, while the Big 2.8 cheerleaders rap themselves in a xenophobic flag. They are often blatant racists, showing some degree of hatred for Asian people. More often than not, it’s not just about cars.

That’s an abuse of patriotism, and I draw the line at ugly, nasty appeals to man’s worst instincts. And it doesn’t help their cause that the cars that they defend aren’t often all that great, either.