Otherwise a nice piece Aidge. Call me

They might not be appreciated by the American muscle car crowd but they were fun (!!!) to drive and would have been a good contender for the Hondas and Toyotas and Nissans.

Instead we get Cavaliers and Cobalts and bland Saturns. At least the recent Cobalt is a step in the right direction.

The Saturn/Opel is GMs best chance to compete with the imports. GM ought to be trying to compete in each market as instead of giving certain markets away. IF teh Asians conquer the pickup truck markets (and their product is getting nicer every year), what will Detroit have left?

Hopefully the Opel/Saturns will retain their European styling and character and avoid being Americanized with bland GM North America revisions (think Pontiac body cladding and Buick/Caddy full width tailights) and over boosted brakes and numb steering.

Hopefully the program will be run by people who have an actual interest in these small cars and not by a guy more interested in traditional American sedans aka BORING!. Let the Saab guys run the program if nothing else…

IF Saturn/Opel would continue to sell these cars I’ll buy one. What I’d really like to buy would be an Vectra 5 door. GM sells something like it in America called the Malibu Maxx but it lacks ANY of the sporty good looks of the Opel.

What is it with GM North America – are they driving us to the big SUVS and trucks or muscle cars??? Get it right GM or I’ll KEEP driving Hondas and VWs!!!

-versus-

Could the manufacturing cost be that different?

Thank you Saturn for the great dealer experience with the no haggle prices. GM could gain alot by following your lead. Thank you for the better looking Vue, the Sky, and the Aura. You are on track to be my next car maker. Focus on smaller non-rebadged cars and SUVs best suited to a smaller engine. Be my American Honda.

FWIW I agree totally that the fleet sales are hurting the car makers’ numbers. Make fewer cars and trucks. End the product over lap and create Saturn style dealers that sell ALL GM products.

Comments such as yours and others on this thread help to confirm my suspicions that cheap rentals really do help the Big 2.5 to lose sales over the long run. If one sale of a bad car to a rental agency contributes to the loss of a potential retail customer, then even the beancounters need to start to wonder whether that fleet transaction was worth it in the first place.

My fear is that they will continue to treat it largely as a finance problem, as has much of the mainstream business press, rather than as a product problem. Does anyone really believe that the Sebring, Cobalt, et. al. offer such a compelling value proposition to the average customer that they will turn the fortunes of these companies around? Given that the Big 2.5’s sales are falling while Toyota’s are climbing, I have my doubts.

Dissapointing. GM has gone backwards in the small car biz, I got

PS Who in the world would want to be seen in a Beetle?

Curioius, how many people let their rental experience dictate what automobile they purchase?

I would also like to know how the automobile industry did as a whole; are sales up, down, or flat?

Rental Car Agent: “That’s all we have left.”

I recently had the misfortune of experiencing a rental Focus in this way. I wanted something, anything, else, but unless I wanted to cough up some more cash, that’s all that was left in that price class.

As it turned out, the Focus had the absolute worst car seats I’ve ever experienced (and I’ve had a lot of different cars). My ass was literally numb after about an hour.

In that regard, it was a good experience. I would have hated to actually buy a Focus and find out how horrible the seats were later.

Just the kind of car I’d recommend for mom. Well, in Lexus form, but you get the picture.

How do people get stuck with Cobalts? My local Enterprise boys have all sorts of things to drive, from Beetles and Hummers, to Dodge Ram Quad Cabs…for reasonable cash, too. Anything has to be more interesting to drive than a Cobalt.

I got to spend 6 months in rental Cavaliers as a job ‘perk’ a decade ago. There was also an under-Achieva thrown in for variety. Whenever I was on assignment, I got a compact from National, and Cav it was.

“Oh, no, not another one” certainly rings a bell, and I did have one that had an idiot light go off which was promptly exchanged for yet another Cav.

Yes, I had a Japanese car last week as my rental – an Infiniti M35. For some odd reason, the pricing for that car was the same as the “intermediate” that my company gets me.

It was an OK car, but nothing I would own.

To avoid this type of problem in the future, I heard that new GM rental cars will come with the super-reliable, high-tech type of gas gauge that was previously found in the infamous, old, East German Trabant.

IOW, a wooden stick…

Yikes! For a forecase annual total of 90-100,000 vehicles combined. That’s not enough for any bacon-saving. Ford better keep their finger crossed.

Ford Motor Co.’s announced today that its sales fell 19% in January to 166,835 vehicles compared with 205,671 a year ago, as the company warned they would Wednesday.

The Dearborn-based automaker said the bulk of the drop is due to a planned reduction in sales to daily rental companies. Ford reports it cut those sales by 65%.

“All of us at Ford are focused on restructuring our business to be profitable at lower volumes and offering more of the products people want, including more cars and more crossovers,” said Mark Fields, Ford President of the Americas.

“We are focusing more of our attention on retail customers and reducing sales to daily rental companies sharply. Our customers benefit from this plan because their vehicles’ residual values will improve — a trend we already are seeing with our newest products.”

Ford reports that the resale values of its newest products have already improved for the 2007 Ford Fusion, Lincoln Navigator, Ford Expedition and Ford Escape compared with the previous models of those vehicles, the company reports.

And January marked the first full month on sale for the company’s new Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX. Edge sales were 5,586 and MKX sales were 1,699.

After he took a few years off from the corporate world, he’s getting back into the business. He just bought 4 locations (3 in San Diego county and 1 in Imperial county), Budget is a franchise in so.cal owned by a single man which is fortunately a friend of his. He takes over in a month and we will be purchasing ~400 cars for the locations.

Obviously we would love all Toyota’s and Honda’s for their reliability and resale but starting off, cost is important. Luckily with an auction license we can purchase a lot of `06 rental cars in the teen miles and put them back into service. I doubt we will buy any new American cars as that is a killer to sell after a year…so it mostly looks like used American/Japanese and new Japanese to start with.

As time goes on the fleet may be diversified if there is a market for it which may include unique rentals like a Mini Cooper, 3-series, etc. and of course in very small numbers.

I’ve been studying the auctions the past few weeks thru Manheim online and it’s astounding how horrible reasale is on rental cars. A few examples:

`07 Chevy Cobalt LS 4-door’s averaging 7.5k miles are being sold for $7980.

`06 Lincoln Towncar Signature’s averaging 15.5k miles are being sold for $23k

`06 Dodge Grand Caravan 3.3’s averaging 18.2k miles are being sold for $12.9k

`07 Chevy Impala LS’s averaging 7.7k miles are being sold for $11,200

To put that in perspective:

`06 Honda Accord LX 4-door auto’s averaging 12.8k miles are being sold for $15.7k

`06 BMW 325i’s averaging 15k miles are being sold for $28.4k

I don’t think there is any problem with a company having 10-15% of a model’s sales into the fleets and Toyota seems to agree. Honda is capacity constrained right now, so that probably has much to do with it’s near zero fleet sales. The main thing is to make sure that whatever you are building is a darn good car, no matter who the first purchaser is! Anytime fleet sales get in the 25% and over category that tells you that the vehicle is simply not desired by the end customer.

Not long ago I rented a car in New Jersey and put about 1,200 miles on it. The car was a Ford Five Hundred and I was favorably surprised with it. A lot of car for the money with supportive seats, acceptable performance and good-for-its-size fuel economy. Putting good cars into rental service isn’t a loosing game.

The only rental GM I was pleasantly surprised with was a leather 4dr cobalt that I rented once. That car wasn’t that bad, and I actually would go as far as to say that I liked it better than a civic. I do have an unnatural hate for hondas though. The G6 I rented was a piece of shit. The external styling isn’t bad, but the interior was so completely awful it scarred my whole opinion on the car. The pontiac grand prix is also another joke. Terrible inside. All malibus suck. There was absoultely no road feel AT ALL. The car was so numb that it felt dangerous to drive on the freeway because I couldn’t tell if I was in the lane or not.

I’m with the camp that believes GM had many chances with the rental market to impress people. I wanted the G6 to be a good car, and I wanted the malibu to be a good car. It just is a shame when brand stereotypes are constantly reinforced by the rental fleet.

And that, friends, is one of the many reasons Toyota stomps the crap out of its competitors. They have a well orchestrated plan, covering all the bases, to get you in a Toyota and keep you there.

Actually, that brings to mind something else….

I find that once a car has been confined to rental car hell, they seem in many cases to die of benign collect. A case in point is the Cavalier. Never a very inspiring ride, the most recent iteration stuck around for a long time and one would have thought that at least the bugs would be worked out. Alas, no.

Last time I had a rental car, it was a Cavalier, I was left stranded due to a non-functioning fuel gauge. I phone Enterprise, whose resonse was ‘Oh no, not another one!’. They came and got the dud, and brought me another Cavalier. It’s ‘guess’ gauge didn’t work either.

Also, the Mazda3 used to (for a while at least) be readily available at Enterprise, I’ve seen civics alot, had rental corrolas, etc etc etc.

The Hertz quote for a San Diego trip
“Accent or similar”
“Corolla or similar”
“Taurus or similar”…

Me, I decided to take a cheaper than the corrola rental: Mustang Convertible (hey, its winter).

Fleet sales don’t necesarrily kill retail value. DISCOUNTING fleet sales does…

A rental car company turns over its fleet quickly, at ~25-50k miles and only a year or less, because of how Uncle Sam writes the tax laws. If you hold onto a car for buisness, you take the pittance of depreciation. But if you sell it after less than a year, you can write off the whole depreciated value at once as an expense.

Thus one thing which the rental car company really cares about is how much can their used-car-sales arm get in the end vs paying at the start, as that is the REAL cost of the rental car to them.

Thus you see plenty of rental camrys, not because Toyota discounts them much, but because they depreciate slowly so that it isn’t a big loss when they sell em. GM has to discount the Malibu a lot more because it depreciates like a stone from retail, and a car rental company doesn’t want to pay for the depreciation.

Thus I don’t buy that discount fleet sales cause depreciation, but that the discounts are necessary because of depreciation.

Honestly, if I hadn’t gone to check myself I would have thought you were joking. Unfreakingbelievable. How in the hell could that possibly make sense? Anyone?

Then we got a rental Matrix XR from Hertz. Same price as the Colbalt, but this was a vehicle that we could nearly see owning if we wanted such a car.

Frankly car makers ought to not even let rental fleets have stripper cheap cars – it just makes the renters hate them, and kills any possibility of sales of similar models.