Last month, I brought to you a Question of the Day about resurrection; saving something from an untimely death. Naturally, we were talking about car brands — specifically, which dead brand you’d select to bring back to life in a modern world, with a modern lineup.
In the well-established TTAC interest of balance, fairness, and equality in all things, now we ask the opposite question: Which car brand deserved its death?
I don’t want anyone to claim the beloved Eagle (my answer to the resurrection QOTD) deserved its death at the hands of Chrysler, which was committed only to Jeep for the production of new and exciting utility vehicles. Consider if you will, the following as an example of a brand meeting a timely and deserving death.
Pictured above is a Sterling 827, part of the oft-forgotten and rather awful Sterling offerings which graced roughly 135 Sterling dealerships for the brand’s 1987 launch. Austin Rover Cars of North America (ARCONA) was the distribution force behind the vehicles, but interestingly was not owned by Austin Rover Group. ARCONA was created by successful American auto dealer Norman Braman, with business conducted in the United States by Raymond Ketchledge.
A total of two models were offered during the brand’s brief history — the 825 sedan and 827 liftback seen above. Underneath the Sterling badges lies a Rover 800, which was created from a Frankenstein amalgamation of Acura Legend mechanicals and Rover build quality and electrics. At the time, Honda was in a partnership with Rover, and the two companies jointly developed many cars together. Mostly, Honda provided some of their existing basics underneath, and Rover developed the electrics and what you saw on the outside. Everything was put together in Merry England.
And indeed all was merry in the first year, as Sterling racked up over 14,000 sales in 1987, with only the 825 sedan available. But JD Power quickly placed Sterling at the bottom of its reliability survey, while the Acura Legend was near the top. Electrical issues, shoddy paint, rust, and interior trim problems abounded.
Rover took action in an attempt to correct the issues, but US consumers had made up their minds about the Sterling brand. It didn’t help that at the time the British pound was strong compared to the U.S. dollar, and the venture was losing money hand over fist. After just four years, Sterling withdrew from the United States, quickly selling off the remaining 825 and 827 models in 1991 and into 1992.
Good riddance, poorly built junk! What’s your pick for the car brand which deserved its death?
[Source: Hemmings]
GM
GM is not a brand.
I never cease to be disgusted at people who cavalierly want several hundred thousand people thrown out of a job just like that.
Some folks can’t see past their own political proclivities. For all his legion of faults, W. did, and that was a good thing for the country.
The irony is thick…
No thicker than the welfare rolls would have been if the “let GM die on principle” folks had carried the day. You can bet on that.
W. did the right thing with the bailouts and Obama was right to continue with them. Some folks can’t accept that because they can’t see past their politics.
@FreedMike
There were no “let GM die on principle” folks. The argument was the GM should go through bankruptcy restructuring in the courts or via private negotiations with creditors, rather than being unlawfully (in the eyes of many) restructured by partisan fiat, which ultimately caused tens of billions of taxpayer, creditor, and shareholder dollars to be given to the UAW.
GM deserved to die because the workers and management were greedy and arrogant. They had plenty of time to react to the clock-cleaning they were getting from the Japanese but they were blinded by hubris and money lust.
The bailout of GM was probably the only way to go. Creditors got screwed. Non-UAW Delco workers took a massive haircut. Somehow, UAW workers got billions of taxpayer dollars and paid back nothing, yet they are righteously indignant when anyone questions the graft and claim people are heartless. Give me a break.
“The argument was the GM should go through bankruptcy restructuring in the courts or via private negotiations with creditors, ”
LOLWUT
YOU CAN’T GO THROUGH NORMAL CHAPTER 11 BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDINGS UNLESS YOU CAN ARRANGE FINANCING TO CONTINUE OPERATIONS.
have you *already* forgotten what was going on in 2009? lenders were failing left and right (Bear Sterns, IndyMac, Merrill Lynch, etc.) GM HAD NO MONEY AND NOBODY WAS LENDING ANYONE ANY MONEY.
christ almighty, you people have shorter memories than gnats.
In the ’80s GM’s pension fund was full. Then congress changed the law and allowed employers to “reinvest” pension funds into their own companies. GM blew through their employees’ retirements to prop up company stock. When they finally went bankrupt, the government paid off GM’s pension liability. As a taxpayer, it sucks, but it was the right thing to do. Blame Roger Smith, Rick Wagoner, and the rest of those guys who posted two decades of stock market gains while thoroughly mismanaging GM. Blame the congressmen who decided companies should be able to rob their pension funds. The UAW has plenty of problems, but they didn’t give away the pensions to stock holders.
Your sense of history is flawed.
@thelaine
“GM deserved to die because the workers and management were greedy and arrogant.”
I have many relatives who worked at or work at GM in both union and nonunion positions and they are generous humble people. So get help for you misguided hatred of GM based on a couple of people like you.
“They had plenty of time to react to the clock-cleaning they were getting from the Japanese but they were blinded by hubris and money lust.”
Another indicator that you have no knowledge of what happened in 2007 and think there was on simple reason for the recession.
“The bailout of GM was probably the only way to go.” There may be hope for you.
“Creditors got screwed. Non-UAW Delco workers took a massive haircut.”
Here is where I bet your loved ones worked.
“Somehow, UAW workers got billions of taxpayer dollars and paid back nothing…”
I sure would like some specifics on this rant.
“Give me a break.”
Please take a break and do some reading.
Here FOG, YOU do some reading.
I know, I know, you will reject it out of hand, but it is the truth about cars, regardless.
https://www.mercatus.org/publication/administrations-auto-bailouts-and-delphi-pension-decisions-who-picked-winners-and-losers
The reality is that the UAW and organized labor in general gave votes and money to get Obama elected and the administration paid them back by giving billions in taxpayer money to the UAW. Simple. Not unique. That is how politics works. Just admit the truth.
It was not the 2007 recession that killed GM, it was just an opportunistic infection of a dying patient. You are right, not all UAW workers were arrogant and greedy. There were many, many humble people who allowed their union to establish a toxic relationship with management which added to the problems which eventually killed GM. It was not a single random event or act of God or uniquely catastrophic economic downturn which killed GM. It was decades of decline due to a union and management death dance. Many of the products of this decline have been discussed in this comment section. Decontented piles of sht were competing against superb Japanese imports, time and again. The swaggering giant was getting fat, old and drunk and the hungry and determined opponent was whipping his ass. It was clear as day as it was happening, but neither GM nor its bitter, contentious, arrogant union were willing to do what was necessary to get back in fighting trim. To anyone who loves America and American workers, watching this was enough to make you puke.
Bottom line: why should working taxpayers, many of whom make less money than GM executives and workers, have had their money taken and transferred to the UAW pension fund? Answer: there is no justification except raw political power, government corruption and paybacks.
If this is not the case, why did Delco workers get screwed and UAW workers got made whole? What is the difference? Union political power is the answer. This is the truth. Admit it.
The banks paid the money back with interest. GM paid the money back to taxpayers as well. The UAW? Not one dime. It was never part of the deal. They just took the money from other American taxpayers, thank you very much.
Happens all the time. Think Solyndra. The examples are endless. The UAW deal is hardly unique. Just admit it was a raw political payoff, thank your union, and be honest. Washington DC is a den of thieves. The UAW played to win. The UAW pension bailout was a game well played and nothing more. Congratulations, you are among the favored few.
Damn it FOG, I got nothin left to argue with you about, even the marriage comment. That is a union that has unduly enriched me as well.
Yeah, we bailed out GM so they could move the jobs to China and pay the people that remain less.
@thelaine:
Good article, let me clarify a few things.
We apparently agree that unions trade votes for cash and the Democrats generally benefit the most from this. We can also agree that the UAW and NEA are two of the most powerful unions and have swayed many elections telling their members who to vote for.
As for your bottom line, it is close except that those GM executives and workers who make more money put more money into the fund that the UAW walked away with. The raw political power will continue to be wielded until legislation is introduced to prevent it. This will never happen as people on both sides of the congressional trough gorge themselves on this slop.
And for the record, I have never benefited personally from membership in any union other than the union of marriage and I am pretty sure my spouse got screwed in that negotiation. (Couldn’t resist the pun, sorry)
Realistically, if GM did shut down its US operations for some reason, other automakers would pick up sales to fill the gap and go on a hiring spree. This is not to say that everyone at GM would find a job, but they’re not going to become destitute en masse either.
That’s the right biz-school response, bumpy, but that’d have taken time and capital, and in the late 2000s, both were in very, very short supply.
If GM had died, it’d have taken a large piece of the economy down with it…in 2008. Yikes.
You are right, the country would have survived it in the end, and might have even been stronger for it. But it would have been an awfully painful process.
Overall I am happy enough with the auto bailout. It’s not like the government just opened up the purse strings to prop up a failing business. Instead, the government served as a sort of “bank of last resort” when all the other banks were in no shape to help a business the size of GM.
Of course, the government could have been on the hook for a big bill had the investment turned sour, but fortunately it did not and the government got most of its money back.
However, I am more uneasy about the bank bailouts. It felt like we gave the banks a real lifeline but not enough was changed to prevent it from happening again in the future.
The country would have survived, but would it have been stronger?
Good question. My answer is: definitely not. And the reason is that there wasn’t enough domestic capital to buy what was left of GM and Chrysler. Ford was dying itself (and I doubt a Ford/GM merger would have made it through the courts anyway), and the capital markets were in crisis.
Any GM buyout would have to have come from overseas. Toyota, (maybe) VW or China. Take your pick. Fiat was big enough to buy Chrysler, but not GM. In the end, we wouldn’t have been stronger for that…not by a LONG shot. The bailouts were the only move.
I for one agreed with Conrad Black (Lord Black of Crossharbour) who believed that rather than bailing out GM and Chrysler with taxpayer loans/money, that the governments of Canada and Ontario (yes, we Canadians put up a lot of bail-out money) should have bought controlling interest in Chrysler.
After all, Chrysler has a very large manufacturing presence in Brampton and Windsor, plus at the time they had parts plants in Mississauga and Ajax.
A Canadian owned/domestically controlled vehicle manufacturer would not be such a bad thing. Particularly since the other manufacturers ‘hold the taxpayer/government’ hostage so often regarding tax rebates/credits and loans and grants.
I think we would have had better odds of coming out stronger than you think. I agree that a buyout of GM would have come from overseas. I just say that this country is bigger than GM, bigger than any one industry. As I said, allowing the collapse to happen would have been nothing but painful chaos, but I tend to be the overly optimistic American and I think we would have come out of it with something new and better. Maybe not dominating the auto industry, but something else perhaps. It’s hard to say without a crystal ball, but we have survived calamities before and I see no reason to believe we wouldn’t have survived another.
I don’t think the bailouts were the only move. I am not even sure that they were the best move. But I will agree that they were a good move. At the very least we avoided a full blown depression.
DR86. Agreed. Banks too. No good options at the time. Everybody paid the money back except the unions. That was a payoff.
You know, I had forgotten about the union aspect of it. You are right, in a normal bankruptcy the workers would have taken more of a haircut. That was classic vote buying, but that’s nothing unusual in a representative Republic.
OK, the bailouts were not the only *conceivable* move, just like it’s *conceivable* that FDR could have reacted to Pearl Harbor by opening up peace talks with Japan.
Bush and Obama had one move vis a vis the bailouts. The *conceivable* alternatives were all awful, and included an economic depression.
@thelaine:
Unions paid in blood. As part of the bailouts, GM and Chrysler downsized massively. The UAW lost hundreds of thousands of members in the process.
“Of course, the people could have been on the hook for a big bill had the investment turned sour, but fortunately it did not and the people got most of their money back.”
Don’t forget that we, the productive citizens, paid for this.
I would agree about the banks. Just as after the Great Depression banking and insurance practices were more regulated, the same thing happened after the Great Recession. Think about the Frank-Dodd act & etc.
Although it took about 60 or 70 years to dismantle the regulations from the 1930’s, our government is working rapidly to dismantle the regulations from less than 10 years ago.
The banksters sh!t the bed, but everyone else got to pay for it, one way or another. I have a feeling we’ll be reliving this again before I shuffle my mortal coil…
The government made a nice profit from the bank bailout.
“Realistically, if GM did shut down its US operations for some reason, other automakers would pick up sales to fill the gap and go on a hiring spree.”
that line of thinking is so overly simplistic that it’s not even wrong. GM going bust would take a lot of the suppliers with them (who were themselves already struggling.) Other automakers can’t “pick up the slack” when they can’t get parts to build their own cars.
Further, other automakers aren’t going to absorb all of the fallout, they wouldn’t need the redundancies.
This idiotic “assume a perfect world” mindset has got to go.
Kind of doubt the downfall of GM would create a permanent, lower level of vehicle sales. Yes, it would be ugly, but eventually new, better firms would come back. Smart investors would buy bankrupt businesses for pennies on the dollar and install competent management. We would end up with better, cheaper cars.
America used to believe in creative destruction – too bad it doesn’t anymore.
“Smart investors would buy bankrupt businesses for pennies on the dollar and install competent management. We would end up with better, cheaper cars.”
yeah, like the bang-up job Cerberus did with Chrysler.
it’s sad how so many of you genuinely don’t seem to remember what was going on from 2007-2010. It wasn’t that long ago, people.
Deanst, America still believes in creative destruction…. just not for those politically connected.
For the connected, it’s capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down. And there are people here defending it.
The only production car they ever branded as a “GM” car was the EV1 electric coupe of the late-90s and early-aughts. But it was still sold through the Saturn dealer network and doesn’t constitute an entire brand.
There was that brief era in the mid ’00s when they stuck a boring gray “GM” badge on every brand’s vehicles.
Gm MaRk Of ExCeLlEnCe.
I think those GM badges stuck around all the way through 2009, and for 2010 they went away.
By the 1980s, the “Mark of Excellence” was simply the name of the square “GM-underlined” logo, and does not specifically refer to the chiclet that appeared sometime in 2006 on the rocker panels, front doors or front fenders of all GM cars, and coincided with a renowned marketing effort to tie all the brands together and let customers know that their cars were part of the GM family (for whatever honor *that* was worth).
The MoE chiclet was promptly removed from the cars after 2009, when GM went bankrupt and the name became poison.
Strangely, it did appear on the all-new 2010 Cadillac SRX, on the piece of chrome that spanned the front fender’s trailing edge, but I suspect that was because that chrome piece was designed to accommodate the MoE chiclet, and GM hadn’t had enough time to retool before the decision was made, or had already ordered the part and began producing the car.
I just read on Wikipedia they stopped putting them on in 2007, and then in 2009 decided to focus on the brands instead of “GM”.
Back in the late ’60s they put a metallic blue GM logo sticker (screened on foil, I believe) on the back of the driver’s door of their cars.
They did, duke, and I believe that badge actually said “Mark of Excellence” underneath the GM logo.
Yes it is. And, yes, it did die. Try suing the old GM.
And the pessimist in me isn’t sure the new GM is any better than old GM. I voiced approval for the bailout, and I stand by it. But I feel like we may be revisiting this issue again sometime down the road.
They stopped in late 2009, not 2007. The reason they stopped is because that’s when they went bankrupt, and the GM name and logo did not evoke positive images.
you go @thelaine! Don’t let anyone ever educate you or change your point of view. Stay ignorant my friend.
I never cease to be amazed how people will form opinions based on little to no information, but stubbornly refuse to change that opinion even when presented with mountains of evidence to disprove their opinion.
That’s one thing I really hate about this society. we’re so bull-headed and all convinced that we’re so damn smart (e.g. the Baruths) that whatever conclusion we jump to (absent any supporting evidence) is the iron-clad truth.
GM is actually a brand. For a long time GM insisted that the cars that their brands make also carry the “GM Mark of Excellence,” which essentially added GM branding to the car brands. That needed to die. That did die. And good riddance too.
+1
Saturn.
Worked there, in service.
Rotors would “footprint” overnight, and customers would complain about the rusty imprints of the brake pads, on the rotors.
Fluid filled engine mounts would fail, early and often.
Alternators, located at the firewall-side of engine, down low (near exhaust, IIRC)would roast, and die young.
Struts–feel like buying new ones at 60K? The customers didn’t, either.
Piston Oil Rings? Some cars had ringjobs at 60,000 miles–since when is going back to 1930’s-era rebuild intervals a good thing?
There’s a reason GM started buying Honda engines, and made Saturn quit building their own designs…then killed the brand.
Like cruise control with your manual shift cars? Me too–but don’t step on the clutch, with cruise engaged, unless you want to see the (unloaded) rev-limiter kick in at 4,400RPM, IIRC. (Was that just one SC that I tested? I dunno, and I don’t car.)
And FWD. For everything except their SUV (I was gone long b/f the SUV came out.) FWD = BORING and (generally) inferior to RWD, unless your main driving objective is getting around in snow parking lots, and you don’t want to buy 4 STUDDED SNOW TIRES, which I gladly did, for our Toyota AWD Highlander, and it is now a TANK, in snow, and actually TURN and STOP on ICE, something NOTHING w/o STUDDED SNOWS can manage, AWD or not.
But “Didja get enough BBQ?” (Remember that Saturn tagline?)
Buh-Bye, Saturn.
Saturn
Yes. End the end, it was Pontiac without the body cladding.
Not really, friend. Saturn was a whole other thing, then it became generic GM and later rebadged Opel.
Heh. I actually logged in to say Pontiac. “Like Saturn, but with trashier plastic!”
MEKUR
the captive Ford Germany brought into the Lincoln Mercury showrooms from 85 to 89
The XR4Ti was the first and the infrastructure was not in place to support it One of Maximum Bob’s (Lutz) Failures.
It was a master class on how not to add an imported model to a domestic line of cars
Yup. Too many within GM wanted to see Saturn fail. When that’s the starting point, not many places to go.
I would agree. It diverted so many important resources at an especially critical time for GM, but no one wanted to say no to the boss…
Saturn was a good brand but GM left it out to die which it did. Read the history on what GM did to kill the Saturn brand due to in-house politics.
IF GM actually spent funds on it, it would’ve nicely competed with Honda and Toyota.
Knew many people back then with Saturns and those cars would last a long time.
Still see some on the road today, many in decent running condition.
I am having an easier time thinking of brands that deserve to die now (Mitsubishi, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Chrysler, MINI, Smart). All the non-Ferrari southern European brands (Renault, Peugeot, ALFA etc) deserved the boot though.
I can tell you which brand shouldnt be around – Volvo.
Also the above post shows some American provincialism… Renault is a part of the Nissan Renault group and they sell up big in places that the US doesnt matter.
Peugeot I grant you has issues but the French govt. loves propping up PSA.
PSA’s been making money for some time now…
It isn’t about that, Mike, its just brands he doesn’t like. They deserve to die because he doesn’t like them.
Volvo is starting to make some nice cars. The new S90 is really good.
I thought so too, until I noticed all the lemon-buyback cars starting to show up on dealer lots. Seeing a 50% drop in value in one year is worth investigating.
Volvo used to make some nice cars. The 850/V70 estate and first C70 convertible were the last.
Why MINI? I wish other car companies would allow customers to configure cars the way MINI does. If it is because of past reliability issues, remember Japanese cars, while lauded now, were pretty bad in the past. Lots of Japanese cars were sold here in the 1970s, but how many do you still see? There’s a reason they’re rare now.
hpycamper: Don’t let the truth out! Most of the posters on here were probably born after 1990 and have no idea how it was back in the day.
A very xenophobic viewpoint. A number of these brands have serious international markets.
I could counter argue, all products produced for the North American market which is becoming less important overall. And cars produced strictly for the North American market do not generally sell well (or at all) anywhere else on the globe. What would happen in the auto manufacturers were to cease the production of North American spec vehicles and offer only ‘world cars’?
Their development and manufacturing costs would be reduced. They would more easily meet ‘mpg requirements’ for their fleets. And in return their profits could increase.
Of course we would all be screaming about an international conspiracy that took away most of our large SUV’s, large sedans, oversized pick-ups, etc.
“And in return their profits could increase.”
That’s a very unlikely “could”. GM and Ford don’t sell Escalades and Super Dutys out of patriotic obligation, they do it because they make tons of money from them.
I think if companies could increase profitability by only making “world cars” they would be doing it already.
Didn’t you know? The Astra was such a strong seller that it dwarfed the Silverado/Sierra/Tahoe/Yukon/Escalade profits! It was just selling too gosh-darn well here, which is why they had to discontinue it and force us to buy light trucks instead. Right-wing extremists at it again!
Yes, GM North America could be bleeding money like Opel has been for some time instead of making all that money on Silverados and GMC Denalis and Cadillac Escalades. If only they were smart enough to discontinue their money makers and only build cars they can’t give away.
Because Euro cars adapted to sell here have such a great track record, like the Contour/Mystique, the entire Merkur brand, Saturn Astra, etc.
/sarcasm
Really, only a few cars that originated or were mostly designed in Europe have done decent here, such as the current Ford car lineup except the Taurus (the D3 platform may be European in origin, but the car on it was designed here more so than the Focus or Fiesta), Buick Encore, and that’s about it.
I predict VW’s best selling model here shortly will be the one they designed with North America in mind, the Atlas.
Despite being generally better in many ways than cars designed here (think Astra vs. Ion), Euro-sourced cars are not selling as well, nor are they as profitable as homegrown products like full size trucks/SUVs and crossovers like GM Lambdas and the Ford Explorer.
Euro car’s success in North America has been, at best, a mixed bag. The success of domestic full-size trucks are anything but.
Ford sells enough F-Series in the few markets its available in to make it the world’s best selling vehicle, despite the fact that 3/4 of the world can’t buy one. But, yeah, they should discontinue it and only sell Fiesta, Focus, C-Max, Fusion/Mondeo, EcoSport, Kuga/Escape and Edge here. That’ll fix everything.
North America is still one of the most profitable regions in the world – doesn’t make much sense to standardize on unprofitable euro cars.
Actually as of 2015 North America represented less than 1/4 of the world’s sales. And that percentage is dropping.
Sure we in North America love our supersized SUV’s and Pick-ups.
But if they were dropped and replaced by
‘world vehicles’ like the Qashqai, Ranger, etc the manufacturer’s would still profit.
Removing restrictive government regulations like the ‘chicken tax’ and N.A. specific safety requirements would actually help open our market to ‘world’ vehicles.
Plymouth
I was stuck between Plymouth and Mercury, but Plymouth really was useless by the end of the 90s as Dodge turned further downmarket.
Plymouth had far worse cars at the end than Mercury did.
Prowler and Dodge rebadges were worse than Mercury which was just a Ford brand near-rebadge?
Oh they were all just rebadging jobs, but the Ford baseline vehicles were better than the Dodge/Chrysler baseline ones.
Mercury was a premium brand. Not sure why we’re comparing it to the poverty-spec Plymouth line.
operagost: I liked to think of Plymouth as popularly priced. You’re right, the Mercurys of my youth were entry level lux. But not at the end.
Mercury and Plymouth
Mercury as a brand needed to go away and come back as a trim level.
Mercury often (not always) had better sound deadening, smoother flywheels, and some better trim. Because of the way it was packaged, it was often a better deal than a similarly equipped, but not as nice, Ford. People who bypassed Mercury were bypassing a good deal.
If not coming back as a trim level, they could have (should have) moved Mercury up to Lincoln’s level and moved Lincoln up to a true luxury brand.
Actually, I think FCA needs a mainstream brand in the US, since they don’t seem to want Dodge to be that anymore.
Sergio is hell spent on making the Chrysler brand the mainstream brand.
Hummer. The brand became the poster child for conspicuous excess without proper merits beyond the image buyers thought they were protraying.
Actually, I think GM made a huge mistake getting rid of Hummer. They’d sell like hotcakes these days, particularly if they had a Wrangler-type vehicle.
FreedMike is exactly right about Hummer. Would have been hugely successfully now.
Yeah, dropping Hummer was the PC compromise to keep all the screaming greenies happy. For all the anger (because of all the anger?) Hummer had a brand recognition up there with Jeep, Ferrari, etc. at the time of its demise.
Something about “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”?
Hummer sales took it in the shorts because of the recession and high gas prices. Both of those factors absolutely decimated sales of big SUVs and pickups. That did the brand in.
The big bad gummint knew GM and Chrysler were building hundreds of thousands of gas hog trucks and SUVS – and in fact needed to keep doing so to make money – when they got bailed out.
Really? So what vehicle took over the F-Series and Silverado/Sierra as our best selling vehicles at that time? Oh wait. They remained the best selling vehicles, gas prices and recession be damned.
No offence intended, Mike. Just saying that all vehicle sales took a hit, and I get irritated when people imply that full size trucks stopped selling, OR that they caused the domestic automaker’s problems during that time. No, it was their unprofitable cars that got them into trouble leading up to the crisis. It was the trucks that paid the bills, and were a major factor in their recovery.
Ford’s decision to invest heavily in F-Series (despite Alan Mullaly saying that small cars would be “where the world is going”) has paid off big time. They sure didn’t need to count on sales of the Fiesta and Focus to float the company in North America. That would have been a fatal mistake I believe.
In fact, sales of the F-Series probably subsidizes the losses on those two in North America. So, those who love little Ford cars can thank the big bad awful F-Series for paying the bills so they can be here.
Screaming Greenies? I rather thought it was because the H2 was a hugely expensive niche vehicle and the H3 was hugely thirsty, underpowered, archaic, poorly packaged, and generally stale and undesirable by the end of its run.
Hummer sales dropped from 71K in 2006 to 9K in 2009. I didn’t know greenies had such influence on the voluntary purchasing decisions of the demographic drawn to brawny BOF SUVs. They sure haven’t slowed down full size pickup sales.
Hummer had a potentially valuable brand ruined by poor vehicles.
Yes, clearly the “greenies” had mastered the Jedi Mind Trick. You saw them all the time on TV, waving their hands around, saying “kill Hummer.” And then it died.
Didn’t know they were that strong with The Force.
Agree. Do any of you actually remember how small and cramped their interiors are?
“…particularly if they had a Crossover-type vehicle.”
Fixed.
Yes – picture the Terrain with a Hummer badge. Done.
Doesn’t mean I’d like it, lol, but it would be successful.
I agree. Getting rid of Hummer seemed like a huge mistake at the time – they had a lot of positive mindshare and would have weathered the downturn better than most brands, despite the mau-mau-ing they took from certain quarters.
The downturn (and high gas prices) absolutely destroyed sales of big, expensive SUVs in the late 2000s. Hummer was going to be a long term project if it lived, and GM had no time or capital for a long term project. When you’re desperate, you do desperate things.
I see the short term business case for killing Hummer, but I bet they wish they could have that one back. It was a mistake, but it was one they had no choice but to make, if you will.
What’s stopping them from bringing Hummer back if it seems worthwhile?
The H4 (from the HX concept) could have given the Wrangler a run for its money.
While Hummer was killed somewhat for political reasons, I’m not sure they would have survived. GM basing the H2 and H3 on existing platforms came with too many compromises. They just were not very good. There really was no new product in the pipeline either. Certainly not the Wrangler competitor that everyone thinks they need.
I think killing Hummer was a mistake.
It was, but I don’t think they had any choice at the time.
I think at least half the replies to the Resurrection QOTD said “Hummer.” It’s much beloved despite its faults.
Non H-1 Hummers were never true utility vehicles, they were fashion statements. A Tahoe, Suburban, or Silverado offered far more utility at a far lower cost. A meager Tahoe had far more interior space than a mighty H2.
Of course the H-1 was no prize either, it was horrible as an actual on-road vehicle.
Hummer died because it went out of fashion.
You’re confusing Hummer vehicles with the people who bought the vehicles.
Eh, the sheen of the Hummer name had worn almost completely bare by the time it was closed. It was always a novelty brand, and a tacky one at that: more like the Plymouth Prowler, PT Cruiser, or SSR than Tahoe or Grand Cherokee. I would bet most of the buyers still purchasing BOF SUVs stayed within the GM family anyway.
C’mon, folks…
YUGO
(Drops mic)
I concur.
The winner!
SAAB. Life is too short to have to see ugly cars.
The original 96, 900, and 9000 were good looking IMO. After 1993 they were hit and miss.
Nope. Never good looking.
All of those things were glorious looking.
Kaiser. For all the talking about being “the last serious challenge to the Big Three”, the cars were mediocre as all get out and that Continental six cylinder was already output challenged back in 1940, much less 1950.
Yeah, Kaiser seemed like an obsolete answer to the question of “What do I do with all this industrial capacity now that the war is over?”
Henry Kaiser just got in too fast and with not enough prep or capital.
The cars were actually competitive on body and creature comfort; and the flathead Continental engines were comparable to flathead Pontiac and Nash Rambler offerings. It’s just that he was overextended and didn’t understand controlling supply and assembly.
Kaiser made it big in government contracting; that was his mindset. Cost-plus. Proof of that is, as he was failing with K-F, he bought Willys-Overland and pulled out their passenger offerings, too. Selling Jeeps to government agencies and businesses, he was in his comfort zone and the downsized Willys Motors, later Kaiser Jeep, thrived.
Kaiser, from what I read, nearly took over American Motors. Henry and his son never gave up the dream; and Kaiser Industries owned considerable, and growing, AMC stock. They had had merger talks; and it was AMC engines Kaiser-Jeep was mostly using.
But Henry Kaiser had the bad fortune to expire in 1967. To pay inheritance taxes, Kaiser Industries had to be liquidated. Kaiser Industries voted their shares of AMC stock to propose an AMC purchase of Kaiser Jeep, which AMC could scarcely afford, and it was done. The AMC stock was then slowly sold to satisfy tax claims.
Loads of wrong answers in here already. That’s a shame.
And your right answer is…?
(drumroll)
The one(s) he doesn’t like, of course.
Mercury. When was the last non rebadge they put out?
That abomination they sullied the Cougar name with from 1999-2002.
I was thinking about the Cougar this morning, and how awful it was. And how it didn’t fit in with the rest of Mercury’s offerings at all.
Cougar wasn’t an awful car…not even remotely. With the V-6, it was a more-than-decent performer.
But, as you said, it didn’t fit in with the rest of Mercury’s line. It wouldn’t have fit in with Ford’s line either.
Were they reliable? Or built well?
Well, I was talking about the car’s styling and performance, which were definitely up to snuff in the class. I hadn’t heard they were badly made. If so, then you have a good point.
Problem is, the class was pretty much dead by the late ’90s and Mercury was the wrong brand to lead a sports-coupe revival with.
They turned out to be cheap throwaway cars in retrospect, but they were appealing back in the late ’90s. Not as garish as the final Celica, not as gaudy as the 3g Eclipse, not as junky as the 1g Tiburon. Aside from being manufactured from compressed turd, they were birthed into the dying days of the sport coupe.
Like I said, it was primarily designed for the Euro market, but it was originally going to come here as the redesigned Probe. When Ford realized it already had plenty of other coupes under the Ford nameplate, it decided to slap a Mercury badge on it here in the ‘States, and call it a Cougar worldwide.
But if you look at it from the context of being the next Probe, not to mention the other sporty quasi-midsized coupes that were around at the time, it makes more sense.
A tragedy that the Cougar nameplate, which in the US originally graced the flanks of a stylish Euro-flavored GT coupe, suffered ten years later the indignity of being applied to the simulated woodgrain sides of a boaty station wagon.
Actually, the Cougar was designed first for the European market, and was sold there as the Ford Cougar. You can sort of glean that from the styling, which—like you said—was distinctly apart from anything else Mercury was selling. I’d say it was a Euro car on which they decided to slap an American nameplate. So…it was a rebadge, even if its Ford counterpart wasn’t sold on the same continent.
I think the last non-rebadge Mercury was the previous, square-backed MN12-based Cougar.
Those Cougars were Thunderbirds with a different roof line.
To that point, the Sable and Topaz also had different roofs and rear windows from their Ford-branded counterparts. My mom liked the visibility much more on the 1997 Sable she bought with a larger, more square-shaped rear window vs. the Taurus’ oval rear window. The Topaz looked far more Broughamish than the Tempo with the Mercury’s more formal roof/rear window/side 1/4 windows.
And this didn’t sully it?
http://www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/comment-image/90038.jpg
Well…c’mon, woody midsize wagons were a thing back in the ’70s.
IMHO the Cougar ceased to have a reason to exist in 1974. At least from ’68-’73 it was a distinctively styled coupe, a step up from the Mustang. After that it became a body-on-frame pig and spent the rest of its life as a pointless exercise in badge engineering.
Oldsmobile.
You stepped into the wrong bar, friend.
Oldsmobile should have killed Saturn for copying its design language.
Someone was saying here the other day that Saturn’s resemblance to Oldsmobile styling was a direct result of Oldsmobile stylists working on the Saturn project.
I think Saturn should’ve been a sub-brand of Oldsmobile.
Now youse can’t leave.
youtube.com/watch?v=dDrYOEhGNbY
I think he’s lost. Or he’s Tim Cain in disguise.
Pontiac. There is nothing good that Pontiac had done that couldn’t be done as a Chevy (example: Chevy SS vs G8). Most of the Pontiac models were the same as Chevy, except they added crappy plastic moldings that usually fell off after a couple of years and made them look trashier than their Chevy counterpart.
Buick has a hard enough time surviving between the top level trims of the Chevys and the entry level trims of the Cadillacs.
Pontiac: “We build excrement”.
Pontiac ceased to be relevant once the F-bodies died.
Actually, I’d say Pontiac ceased to be relevant when Saturn was introduced.
I’d go one further and say Pontiac and Saturn were both garbage and were rightly closed. Few GM products are so good that they should be rebadged to spread them further across the market. The Tahoe/Yukon/Escalade works, and for some reason we need GMC and Chevy trucks, but other than that, no. All of the other really good GM products are single marque (Corvette, various Caddies, etc).
I never saw the point of Pontiac either.
Look, Pontiac, Olds and Saturn are dead because the Sloan model only worked in the 1950s, when each brand had exactly *one* model and each brand had something distinctive from the other. The Sloan model went: Your first new car was a Chevy, then as you progressed through your career you’d upgrade to a Pontiac. First promotion you’d get a Buick, then an Oldsmobile, and when you retired you’d buy the Cadillac you deserved.
Now that every brand pretty much has to be a full lineup, the Sloan model doesn’t work.
The Sloan model is still in full force in certain companies, but you have to have the product or cachet to back it up. Tell me there isn’t an “entry level/middle management/executive” flow to 3/5/7, C/E/S, and A4/A6/A8. Sure it isn’t distinct brands like at GM, but it’s basically the same thing.
I believe that JB wrote an article about how GM’s Division Managers killed the Sloan model. Divisional management had to drive their own division’s vehicles. So therefore they kept upgrading the content available in their division.
Once you could get a Chevrolet Caprice Classic with the same power/luxury options as a Sedan de Ville then the reasoning behind the Sloan model largely disappeared.
AGREED. Pontiac desperately needed to be put out of its misery by the 2000s. From about the mid-80s onward they were just churning out crap. Ugly outside, uglier inside.
I distinctly remember renting a Grand-Am in the early 00s and thinking “What a piece of crap” and exchanging it for a Ford Ranger which seemed luxurious in comparison. For the life of me, I cannot believe people actually paid money for those things.
Saturn and Saab were sob stories at the end. But they didn’t deserve to die. GM killed them with poor management-both had compelling products at one time or another and each occupied a potentially profitable niche.
GM deserves to die and their brands deserve to be freed from the corporate hierarchy. Which probably would have happened if they hadn’t gotten the bailout. IE, investors would have bought the business for pennies on the dollar-broken out the business units that had potential, and let them do their thing. Some would have died for sure-but some would have thrived.
People like to blame GM for killing Saab. Saab was on its deathbed long before GM. The cars weren’t great, and the random gems they’d put out every 15 years (like the 900 Turbo) were not enough to sustain them through the times when they made garbage.
GM extended their life. Niche doesn’t work when your most expensive offerings are all under $50,000. Even less so when you *ask* said $50,000 for a reworked Vauxhall/Subaru/Trailblazer.
Look, I’m defending GM. Where’s Norm?
“GM extended their life.”
If I was a Saab fan, I would have rather they died independently in the early 90s over fading out while hooked up to the bankruptcy era GM feeding tube.
This.
Corey, the same could be said for Ford and Jaguar, or Ford and Mazda. Did they “ruin” those brands? Or kept them on life support for a few decades?
I’d argue Jaguar had a better shot at success than Saab did before their buyouts.
1980s Jaguar vs Saab in a Sophie’s Choice comparison would make interesting reading.
I don’t think you remember what absolute garbage Jaguar was cranking out and how much they improved under Ford’s control. The only real “mis-step” they had in the Ford years was the X-Type.
No disagreement, but given the BL period Series II/III XJ and upcoming XJ40 vs Saab’s dated 900 I would enjoy a whitepaper on the two and argument which was better to save and why.
“The only real “mis-step” they had in the Ford years was the X-Type.”
I might argue DEW98 (S-type, LS, T-bird) as well.
Now I don’t like the S-Type, and I don’t think it was a good car (nor was the LS). BUT, it was prestigious enough to be within the brand’s mission, and sold many many units. V8 equipped (sometimes) and RWD.
The X-Type was not in the brand’s image, and was a money grab for the common man consumer. It was not any of those other good qualities the S-Type had.
I worked with an absolute witch back in the early 2000s who drove an X-type. She was just so turnt up that she had a Jaaaaaaaaag.
You better tell her to TURN DOWN.
@Freed
I’m sure when the X-type stranded her on the side of the road or at the dealer, her broom came in handy for a ride home.
Funny you should say that, 28…she went to work for Countrywide around 2005, and didn’t stay there long. The joke around the office was that they promised her a dedicated space for her broomstick and reneged.
She ended up at IndyMac eventually.
And then she ended up with the same outfit everyone else in my business went to around 2008: State of Colorado Department of Unemployment Insurance.
I still have a soft spot for the X-Type. I like the proportions, and it pulls off the traditional Jaguar look more convincingly than the S-type. Good looking car. Never driven one, but the on paper specs look a bit underpowered.
Were they really that bad?
Wha?! You think that pinched front and rear end and bubble shape is traditional Jaguar proportions?
https://importcartalk.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/2004-jaguar-x-type.jpg
Very yucky.
I like the exterior and interior of the X-type more than the current XE.
I also appreciate the standard V6.
Not quite, I said I like the proportions and the styling is a better emulation of the old XJs than the S-type was. Jaguars since then have been cleanly styled but anodyne. The X at least carried an identity.
So I’m standing by it, Corey, dammit!
Take a look at this low mile beauty, in a real color and with the big block 3-liter no less: https://tinyurl.com/ybjvzev3
That’s an automobile of distinction. How could you say no?
That’s a top flight outfit, Freed.
Interesting question.
I think Ford saved Jag from a BL-sourced death. They let them have *enough* independence, and though they foisted the awful Mondeo on them for the awful X-type, the S-type was a sales success. They also let them have the development of the aluminum XJ platform (and then never used it for a RWD Lincoln like they should’ve). And let’s not forget the XK8. Ford was a net positive for Jaguar.
Ford-Mazda I think was positive as well. Their interesting cars in the early ’90s were niche, and their regular cars were below the standard set by Honda and Toyota (still are, really). But using Ford bits gave them the volume they needed to survive, as unlike Saab they were selling affordable items for the regular consumer. Now they’re independent again, which is generally the best outcome of a buyout and reorganization.
Exactly. I think Ford took Jaguar seriously, and (for the most part) didn’t approach it as a cynical badge-engineering exercise. GM tried that with Saab. The results speak for themselves.
Plus, I think Jaguar had a lot more brand and image equity going in than Saab did.
Platform sharing is not badge engineering, for God’s sake.
OK, let’s say Saab “platform shared” instead. There’s a way to do that correctly, and GM didn’t do it with Saab.
Unless, of course, you’d like to argue that selling glorified Malibus, Trailblazers and Subarus was a viable business plan for a “premium” brand.
Saab was a dead brand walking even before GM came into the picture. The automaker made a mistake by going upmarket during the 1980s – they left behind their core market of buyers who wanted a slightly eccentric and characterful car at a moderate price and went after the BMW and Audi buyers. The 900 platform dated back to 1967 and was increasingly showing its age with each passing year. The 9000 was a flop in the all-crucial US market. The company was essentially bankrupt by 1990 and had no money to develop new cars. GM genuinely tried at first to keep the Saab brand distinct with the new 900/9-3 and the 9-5 but the buyers didn’t show up. Sharing some parts with Opel was not a big deal. After all, the 9000 had quite a bit of Fiat/Lancia DNA. However, GM had severe problems of its own as the 1990s went on and Saab was left to slowly wither away .
I agree. People think GM killed Saab, but Saab was on life support when GM bought it. All GM did was prolong its existence. Sadly, the final 9-5 and the 9-4X (of which fewer than 500 were produced) were actually class-competitive cars that could have turned things around.
GM management certainly didn’t help, in that in the 90s and 00s Saab was headed by a series of short-timers who used the division as a revolving door to other GM positions, leaving no sustained leadership for it. And IIRC, the new gen 9-5 could have come out several years earlier than it did, except that GM (Lutz) halted its development for a time. So it was too late to do anything for the company, which in any case had become independent of GM at the time of its demise.
I have to disagree. GM did kill SAAB, and not out of benign neglect. Reasonable minds can disagree if things could have turned around after the purchase; SAAB engineers had worked wonders with the platform shared with Fiat and GM, but there was not getting around the bean counters insistence on using crap from the parts bin, or the badge engineering. But, GM did use the SAAB corporate entity to prop up Cadillac at the expense of SAAB. The 9-3 was a sales success and when it started to age, GM tacked on a 140 million charge to SAAB to develop the Cadillac BLS – which was a giant sales disaster in Europe. Can you imagine? SAAB has a good reputation in Europe, and they’re forced to eat that charge to develop a car at the expense of their own success for a brand that no one buys? GM knew what they were doing, and they could have cared less.
As a Saab lover and owner, I’m going to go with their purpose ended, much like we are seeing (on a different level) with Mitsubishi. While I’m not a GM fan at all, and I’d love to hold them fully accountable because mis-steps were certainly made, the reality is Saab’s attempt to go from premium to luxury in the ’80s is what sealed their ultimate doom. I loved the 9000, but it wasn’t luxury.
Sure my 2004 is a glorified Epsilon. But what a good and strong platform to build from. A friend has a 2007 convertible as his daily driver, and he is in mourning as he looks for it’s replacement. At the auto show he was very impressed by the looks of the Fiat although he would prefer a 4 seater. It may be the Mini he goes with if the rumored Golf never arrives…
Great discourse on Saab’s demise: https://issuu.com/uoebusiness/docs/who_killed_saab_automobile_final_report_december_2?viewMode=doublePage
Damned shame, but Pontiac had it coming and so did Plymouth.
FWIW, Norman Braman, the person behind the importation of the Sterling line of cars, seems to be a Florida mega-dealer and sports team owner, who grew up in Pennsylvania. This article makes him out to be from the UK. Which is correct?
I fixed it. I read that bit of the Hemmings article about four times yesterday, and their poor and irrelevant attempt at snark threw me.
Okay, since there are already ridiculous posts, I will say….
Tesla.
Aargh!! (SCE rends clothes, clenching upraised fists). :)
Cadillac.
Scion.
Sad for me to say it, but after my excellent xB1, they had nothing else.
I’ll agree with you there. All Scion vehicles are worth more money, and will net better sales figures when parked at a Toyota lot with a sombrero on the front.
Agreed. They didn’t need to brand a youth division at the expense of the parent company.
I was thinking the same thing, but from a different vantage point. Scion was a complete miss in terms of the intended market. IIRC the point was to be an edgy youthful style brand that ended up being the complete opposite which rendered the brand useless.
First death nail; young hip people can’t afford a new car and have not been able to for more than a decade now, getting close to two decades.
Second death Nail: Old people really like the XB. I have never driven one, or been in one but I can only presume that it has easy entry/egress gets good mpg and is low maintenance and is not made by GM. Everything a boomer on a budget loves!
To me Scion was a complete whiff on the part of Toyota.
Right on all points. I was 41 when I bought my xB1, and it was great in all those ways you mentioned.
The ‘youth’ marketing never made sense to me.
I agree that Saturn deserved to die. In the end, GM would have done better to just invest that money into its existing brands. And Saturn failed to deliver on profit expectations anyway, causing shareholders and other PTB to cut the brand’s budget, and forcing it to badge-engineer other brands’ cars. It was doomed.
On the Ford side, both Mercury and Merkur deserved to die, for obvious reasons.
After the amount of time and expense trying to resurrect my Astra while living in the middle of nowhere, I’m in extreme agreement with you.
The Astra was weird. Even though it was on the same Delta platform as the Cobalt, G5, Ion and HHR, it was before GM had standardized its electronics architecture, so—being a straight-up Opel import—it had a bunch of interfaces and modules that were apart from any of GM’s other American-market offerings, let alone the drivetrain stuff.
GM did rectify that former issue with the Global A electronics architecture, which arrived in the U.S. for the 2010 introductions of the Equinox, Terrain, SRX, LaCrosse, Camaro and 9-5. Because of that, these days, current Opel imports—like the Buick Regal, Encore and Cascada—have the same basic modules as their U.S.-designed counterparts.
The Astra was another example of GM importing what automotive enthusiasts asked them to, resulting in no sales. GM needs to stop listening to us.
I believe Mark Stevenson also had an Astra at some point.
Loved the look of the car, but it was troublesome.
He did, and he had many issues with it.
If we’re going to argue with anecdotes, here’s mine – my 8 year old Astra has only required brakes and 2 rear bumpers (accidents!). The body shop did make some noise about having the factory make a new bumper cover and looking for some support parts at a junk yard, but both times it was fixed in under a week.
I put a ton of miles on mine within a short amount of time. The local GM dealer, was useless and wanted to gouge the hell out of me. I attempted to fix it on my own, and maybe could have – but time and professional commitments prevented me from doing so. I’m glad your experience is good – I enjoyed driving it, and had gotten a great deal on it (took delivery 1 week before the dealer shuttered and this was pre-GM decision to terminate). The Astra forum on the Saturn owners website was pretty good with troubleshooting and finding parts. The local dealer wanted $600 for a new ignition coil. Ha. Ebay UK had everything I needed for a fraction. Seriously, though. I do hope it holds up. It was great in the snow, and built like a tank.
Gonna have to add to the GM beating and nominate Daewoo, even tho GM bought it after Daewoo failed in US.
For all intents and purposes, Daewoo led the development of many of GM’s successful small cars, including the ones we know here as the Cruze, Sonic, Spark and Encore. I think that was invaluable, since that was the one area in which GM consistently underperformed. Daewoo is now GM Korea, and the “Daewoo” cars are sold as Chevrolets.
Yes, Daewoo added some small car competence into the Chevrolet after decades where the model name of the previous Lordstown Chevrolet small car was too toxic to use on the new redesigned model. The Cruze breaks the Vega, Monza, Cavalier, and Cobalt pattern.
GM should have merged Saturn and Oldsmobile into one. Satmobile would have been a killer brand. Decent product and no haggle pricing.
But to answer the question, Plymouth, Mercury and Hummer all deserved to die. But looking back, Hummer should have weathered the down turn. GM post bankruptcy would have made some cool Hummers. Having a Wrangler competitor would have been good for GM. Ford is just now seeing this with a new Bronco.
Nobody wants a plastic Intrigue or Aurora. That’s awful!
I do, assuming it had a competent (or divine) powertrain.
How about a plastic Alero, though?
Meh. I had a Grand Am, I’d survive.
The Intrigue was an excellent car for it’s time. It raised the bar for the competition. I’d ask for them as rentals and enjoyed every minute.
Pontiac and Oldsmobile. Irrelevant at their deaths, and largely redundant under the GM umbrella.
Scion deserved to go.
Mercury. I enjoyed my 95 V8 Cougar but Mercury never needed to exist after about 1980, if ever.
Toyota botched Scion like GM screwed up Saturn. Great initial offerings(mostly) but then no follow-up or mild refreshes when new vehicles were called for.
I think Oldsmobile should have lived instead of Buick.
“I think Oldsmobile should have lived instead of Buick.”
Yes! It would have except the Buick branded vehicles overseas were doing too well to kill off the brand.
Yeah, I know the reason Buick lived, Emperors’s car something-something 1930’s. or along those lines, the Buick brand sells better in China than here. I drove quite a few B-O-P during my time at the Big E in the late 90’s early 2000’s.
There was a clean classiness to the Olds family (mostly) compared to the same offering from the other GM divisions. They weren’t any better or worse than their badge-engineered siblings, but I thought they looked better inside and out. My wife’s car when we started dating was an Olds Alero and I felt it was better than a Grand Am in some ways.
The Intrigue and Alero were two reasons Olds should have survived over Buick.
Yugo. Bricklin. Both run by the same guy.
Sterling had a great commercial to introduce their brand. with the late, great Patrick MacNee, John Steed of the Avengers.
Bricklin also brought Subaru to the American market, so I’ll credit him with batting .333.
But it was with the Subaru 360, a tiny late-’50s-designed car that was ill-suited for the US market and sold terribly here. Subaru didn’t begin to take off until it had new management that brought over its larger cars.
You mean the late, great Patrick Macnee, of course. Lowercase N.
True that he did spell his name that way, which is contrary to the general rul of capitalizing the first letter after a Mac or a Mc.
Have a copy of his autobiography “Blind in One Ear”. He led a remarkable life including his rather bizarre upbringing, WWII service in the MTB’s, spending a number of years working in Canada, etc.
DeLorean.
And it hurts to say it, because I love the timeless shape.
Hummer. Totally impractical as far as I am concerned. Huge vehicle with no more room inside than a crew cab pickup or Tahoe.
Room isn’t really the purpose, the H2 for example was shorter than a Tahoe so that it didn’t have overhangs, you have to make sacrifices to make it a competent off-roader. H1 has a transmission mounted between the driver and passenger, and the H3 was a typical midsize downsize.
None of them. They deserved to have their issues fixed. More choices is better. I do not understand the desire here to homogenize the car business.
I can agree with that.
Saturn was a great concept killed by old style managers within GM. From the very beginning the higher ups in the other name plates did everything they could to kill it. They did so because one of the main tenants behind Saturn was equality. That meant that Senior managers didn’t get their own parking garage or close parking spot. It also meant meritocracy replacing feudalistic management practices. I was there, just out of college, and watched several old guard GM managers leave Saturn when they couldn’t create their own little empire. When they left they would stop at nothing to sabotage Saturn. They succeeded. The funny thing is that one of the biggest culprits was Pontiac management.
I’d love to hear more about that.
Yeah, that sounds like a great book. I’d read it.
Makes sense, the Pontiac folks probably saw Saturn as a large gun pointed squarely at their heads…and they were right.
“Pistols at dawn” didn’t work out for either one of them.
Renault – They died by their own incompetence.
The Kenosha plant was doing worse than their British counterparts and that’s saying a lot.
Alive and well in Europe.
Pontiac – even though my first car was a (very rusty and abused) 1968 Firebird, I never liked the brand for their garishness. The plastic cladding on the Grand Am were especially horrible. And when I did drive GM back in the 90s/00s, it was Buick or Oldsmobile.
Yugo is to easy and they only made one model so I will say Plymouth, in the last 40 years what have they made that Chrysler could not have slapped another badge on and be good, what was a Plymouth? They had a pretty full lineup vs the Yugo/ starlings of the day, never understood the reason they were a brand. And Corey shame on you for using that Saab picture, I hope you next few rentals are mid size Yaris,
Simca/Chrysler/Talbot. Aside from the delightfully quirky Rancho and the strange three-seater mid-engined Murena sportscar, both of which were good ideas not too well executed, Talbot had nothing but bland, long-in-the tooth, shoddily built cars, of which you over there only know the Horizon. (The others were the Samba, the 1510/Alpine/Solara, and the Tagora, for those of you brave enough to google them.)
And they chickened out and passed on the Espace, which Matra then took to Renault for a huge success. All in all, a completely superfluous brand when it went down, and the leftover all-new Horizon successor that got rebranded as the Peugeot 309 wasn’t great in any respect either — very much unlike the contemporary, smaller, very similar-looking, but genuinely-Peugeot 205.
I wrote about the Rancho and Matra [and Espace] a little while ago. No comments from you on there!
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2017/06/rare-rides-talbot-simca-matra-rancho/
I know, I read that article. No comments because I had nothing worthwhile to add by the time I had read it, the other commenters had everything covered.
Gotcha.
American Motors Corporation.
It’s amazing they lasted so long. They had several cool cars over the years (countable on one hand), but never had the traction to do things well, like engineer their own components or integrate others’ parts cleanly.
The fact that they lasted through most of the 1980s is amazing. But, they had no development money, and it showed. When they started slapping those ugly bulged bumpers on Matadors and selling rebadged Hornet wagons for ages, you knew it was over. Jeep was changed a lot under the Chrysler management, but let’s be honest- selling Jeep as a standalone brand under AMC couldn’t have lasted forever. They would have withered on the vine much like AMC cars did.
The AMC Eagle and SX4 were 30 years ahead of their time. They are one of the few defunct manufacturers who probably should have survived.
I think time has proven AMC did the right thing by not spending any money on its cars in the early ’80s and instead pouring whatever they had into the ’84 XJ Jeep Cherokee. The Cherokee trounced its competition from GM (S-10 Blazer) and Ford (Bronco II) by virtue of better off-road performance, better on-road performance, brawnier looks, and maybe most importantly, available rear doors (something Ford and GM didn’t get around to until six years later). The four-door Cherokee and fancier Wagoneer were the go-to vehicles for families that lived in the snow belt and/or didn’t want to drive a station wagon or minivan, as well as a great well-rounded vehicle for the traditional four-wheeler crowd. AMC’s other new vehicle in the ’80s (that wasn’t completely Renault-based), the first Wrangler, was also money well spent.
Humber. My last Super Snipe was rubbish.
Every brand who’s entire lineup was purely badge engineered. Who’s stupid idea was that, anyway?
I don’t mind using common or modified platforms and engines, but why did we need every GM division selling the same car off the same assembly line, differing only in options, badging, grille, and perhaps some cladding and options?
Good examples of this were/are Plymouth (minus the Prowler), Mercury, Pontiac, GMC, Mercury, and Eagle
Acura and Lexus?
Lexus, no, but Acura, maybe. Despite their cars being decent and selling reasonably well, does anyone think of Acuras as anything more than glorified Hondas? Which of course they are, being sold as Hondas in most of the world, whereas Lexuses are sold under the Lexus brand just about everywhere now, have their own design studios, and distinct vehicles (save for the big SUVs)
I love Saabs. I had an ’89 SPG and that was one of the most fun cars I ever owned. Also owned a2004 Aero convertible, which was really fun too. It’s a shame that GM had to kill it.
Go back up in the comments and read how GM didn’t kill it. Saab was already dead.
GM *euthanized* SAAB. it could never survive, because the market segment of “weirdos who care that their car’s ignition switch is in the center console” amounts to about 0.0001%.
I liked Saabs too, but the location of the ignition switch had nothing to do with it. I drove a 9000 Turbo hatchback (which actually had the ignition switch in the normal location). It had an engine that combined V8-like power and V6-like smoothness with four-cylinder fuel economy (and on regular gas to boot). It had a huge trunk that became huger when the rear seats were folded down. It had better winter traction than its rear-drive competitors (plus other winter-friendly features like headlamp wipers and defoggers even for the rear side windows). It had loads of passenger space (the EPA considered it to be a “large car” for that reason), yet was small on the outside. It had great outward visibility. It has advanced safety features for its time. It had great ergonomics. Saabs had features like lumbar-support adjustments and heated seats long before they became common.
GM missed all that. They thought what made a car a Saab was the shape of the grille and side-marker lamp, the shape of the dashboard, and of course the ignition switch in the console. So when they turned a Chevy Trailblazer into a Saab, guess what they changed? Me, a real Saab enthusiast, couldn’t care less about any of that stuff; the 9-7X didn’t have any of the attributes that gave Saab its following.
Why does the Recent Comments section no longer show which posting the comments are related to?
Does anyone else find this infuriating?
Please change and restore to the original setting.
Duesenberg.
Realistically, a lot more car brands deserve to die – but they will just be absorbed by the mighty Nissan/Renault/Mitsubishi/Dacia/infinit/lada/Samsung/Datsun Group.
Saab, some of their features were admirable (center mounted keys, styling), but at the same time they were never cheap.
Back in ’94 You could either have a V8 Luxury sedan for $20k, a Lexus ES300 for $30k (before dealer gouging), or a Saab 900 (which was basically an Opel economy car) for $33k. Heck, even the Saab 9000 was cheaper at $28k!
GM didnt kill them, if anything GM taught them how to make semi-reliable cars.
By the end Saabs had gotten fat and lost their hatchback design.
QOTD: What Dead Car Brand Absolutely Deserved to Die?
Stupid question.
ANS: None.
No car brand ever “deserved” to die. That is judgmental liberal socialist thinking.
A car band will either succeed or fail in the market place based on consumer acceptance and purchases.
At the time they were created, they represented a valid market attempt to make a competitive product.
If they fade away, they should be allowed to do so because sales diminish and it no longer makes economic sense for the manufacturer to make them**.
End. Economics 101.
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** Whether we think a brand is ugly or not is irrelevant. Who would have believed that the ungainly VW Beetle in the 1960’s would have been viable? Sometimes brands die despite “deserving” not to do so: Studebaker is an example. Corvair is another. Packard is a third.
Ironically Jeep Wrangler (and predecessors), now selling well, almost died three times and would hardly have “deserved” to do so in any one of them.
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Dwight Schrute, is that you?
Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.
It seems to me that supposing bad car companies don’t deserve to die is the epitome of socialist thinking.
Nobody has mentioned the brand synonymous for failure: Edsel
Geo and Asüna. For trying to trick buyers into thinking these rebadged critters were anything different than any other Chev or Olds offering.
At least Saturn offered a few unique to North America models and sales approach.
Saturn. It had become a shadow of what it was created to be.
Mercury. Just a rebranded Ford. Same goes for Pontiac & Olds. Just more expensive Chevys.
I only regret Plymouth being gone.
Suzuki – cars, that is.
Saturn never became what it was created to be. The SL was doomed by being a unicorn platform with a unicorn engine and little parts-bin sharing and it was a pretty mediocre car given all the hype and money.
Did GM ever turned a profit on Saturn?
Let’s turn this topic on its head. Name Soviet bloc nameplates that did/do NOT deserve to be euthanized. I can see Lada getting a pass on the strength of the Riva, and VW has cleaned up Skoda’s act pretty well. OTOH, Wartburg, FSO, Volga, *Trabant*…KILL IT WITH FIRE…NO WAIT, THE FUMES WILL WIPE OUT HUMANITY…
FYI Volga was a model name, made by GAZ (Gorkovskiy Avtomobilniy Zavod). The Volgas are sturdy things, I’d personally pick one over a Fiat based Lada if I lived in the Russian boonies. Kingpin axles and 4 wheel drum brakes right through the middle of the 90s!
Buick
It’s a tragedy that our government required Pontiac to be closed.
GM spent 100’s of millions to align it’s dealerships to Buick-Pontiac-GMC and then lost one leg of the tripod.
It’s not too late. Bring back Pontiac.
Nooo. I just bought a new Lacrosse. Of course I could have had a Bonneville.
“It’s not too late. Bring back Pontiac.”
No.
If GM is to have three brands, Chevy-Buick-Cadillac is the correct answer. Chevy and Pontiac are just too close in product.
The original Saturn cars were excellent reliable cars, far better than pretty much everything GM was making at the time, although they were a bit noisy.
Once Roger Smith was ejected, the next guy (can’t remember his name) had to prove he had a bigger swinging thing than Roger did, so all development on the Saturn stopped.
A few years later they quit altogether on Saturn and just started rebadging Opels and calling them Saturns, but those weren’t the real Saturn cars.
Honestly, the number of times GM has put out a potentially great car with huge problems, took years to get it mostly right, then killed it because the huge problems gave it a bad reputation, is many (Corvair, Fiero, Buick Special with the aluminum V8, Vega, etc., etc.) By contrast, Saturn is the interesting case of GM getting it mostly right from the beginning, and then killing it due to executive egos and nothing else.
That is such an interesting point and observation about Saturn vs GM
How many times, especially in the 80’s and 90s’, would we see slap-dashed and sloppily made GM products debut? The buyers would essentially be the guinea pigs and GM would slowly improve the product based on their complaints. By the time the car hits the end of its model run, it’d be a pretty solid product. But by that time, it’s too late and the model name is tarnished forever. A scenario we’d see over and over.
Saturn was the opposite. Their intention was to be competitive right out of the gate and they worked tirelessly examining the competition’s cars and using focus groups. For the most part, they succeeded and although not world class, the first SL/SC’s in 1991 were reliable and did steal a number of customers from Honda and Toyota, most of whom were very pleased with their purchase. But the car withered, the updates were few and far, and it was cheapened and decontented. Such a shame
I wish the Saturn history were discussed more. Not the end-of-the-line Saturn history where they took some really out of date products that had not had any development for years, replaced them with rebadged Opels, and then killed the whole thing. But, rather, the beginning of it, and why the Saturn was essentially killed soon after the first generation was released. Once you stop development money on a product line, it’s only a matter of time.
Maybe because it’s only old farts like me who remember the one time it looked like GM was actually getting it right.
And, the key thing, like always with small cars, was reliability. So the one time it looked like GM was on the path to competing with the Japanese small cars, executive egos stopped it.
Such a shame.
The Cruze is a decent small car, but enamoured owners aren’t flocking to Lordstown the way they’d make their way to owner gatherings in Spring Hill, in the 90’s.
Maybe the Cruze does owe some of its credentials to Saturn. The Cruze is a very competitive small car, something that GM never really had until its 2010 debut, with the exception of the first Saturn SL
But the cult-like following? Non existant
The Cruze owes its credentials to the people of Daewoo in Korea.
Don’t get the hate on Saturns.
The original models were pretty good as relatives and friends back then owned some. There are still Saturn vehicles on the road today on the roads.
Sure it was plastic on the outside but it lasted and didn’t rust though the paint used was horrible as it peeled off early.
It was GM’s management that doomed Saturn which many people don’t or didn’t know about. It’s a great study case on in-house politics and how it doomed an auto brand.
If GM actually funded and updated the Saturn brand, it may have competed well with Honda and Toyota.
greetings from 2030; the answer is all the dead Chinese brands: BYD, greatwall, foton, fudi, gaig, quoso, and others.
Saturn
The founding concept had been dead for nearly a decade, by the time the company finally bit the dust. Saturn had spoken truth to power, particularly the executives at GM, and it was rendered impotent as soon as GM could muster the political clout.
Better to see it die than to see it soldier on as a serf in the GM fiefdom.
I think it’s sad when a car brand dies, not only because of the history that dies with it, but also because thousands of people are at that very moment unemployed.
But if I must select a brand I shall go with YUGO. The Yugo was simply a car with zero redeeming qualities. Zero. Enough said. Honestly, the gasoline in the fuel tank of the Yugo was worth more than the car!
Amphicar.
Having to grease 13 spots after each and every plunge? Come on!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphicar
How did I get to the end of the comments and not see Suzuki? Crude, under powered, poor mileage, unreliable. The brand needed to die.
Sunbeam and Rootes group.
http://www.allpar.com/cars/adopted/rootes.html
After the Sunbeam Tiger and Alpine ended production it was downhill from there. There was the 68-70 Alpine which was a fastback coupe akin to a shrunken Barracuda.
We also ended up with the Plymouth Cricket captured import which was a rebadged Hillman Avenger. Rootes group was sold off to Peugeot during Chryslers late 70’s pre-bail out cost cutting. They could have been competitive vehicles if Chrysler invested in them.
GM deserved to die, but GM is not a brand (GMC IS, but GMC was redundant vis a vis Chevrolet trucks)
The brands GM owned could have continued on, unabated, with new (legitimate) ownership.
What brand deserved to die? Studebaker.
From the time they announced their closing the South Bend plant, they had NO reason to live…except as a dodge to avoid dealer lawsuits. The platform dated to 1953. The surviving Hamilton, ON, plant was little more than a CKD assembly; and on its own, was ridiculous for its small size and slow speed.
Once they ran out of South Bend engines, they were installing Chevrolet engines and transmissions. They had no serious plans to replace that platform; they were just running out the clock, trying to drive dealers to surrender their franchises voluntarily.
Next most likely: MG. The final models, the MGB and Midget, lost their redeeming social value in the MGB’s second year or so. It continued on with desperation; and then with inertia; and then with government ownership, until finally, it was undeniable even to English pols and bureaucrats, that the car was obsolete both in design and quality levels.
Mercury. Ford with styling changes competing directly with Lincoln for the same geezer demographic at the same dealerships.
Too bad Ford didn’t just upgrade it’s Ford vehicles which it did with the Mercury brand which was sold as a premium vehicle above Ford vehicles.
Too much wasted resources spent on the Mercury brand when it could’ve just spent the resources on the Ford brand.
I remember seeing one of those rovers in 87 in LA pulling into a parking lot. I confused those for the land rovers. lets see, theres so many car badges I detest. the lexus brand is just “bad vibes” written all over it. I hate the infinite crossover not because of how it looks or its design, but because at a particularly acute moment in time, I received an advertisement piece of junk mail that offended me “it is, you are” said the printed matter, eat sh_t and die, I don’t like the Acura NSX because of the name, not because its a bad car. And many other car badges that, for esoteric reasons, interrupt my peaceful inner concentration as Im driving along during the day, reading liscence plates, looking at car badges, notching the color and vectoring characteristics.
Bro…shrooms or language issue?
Buick. Oh no wait…
SUBARU DESERVES TO DIE, TO BECOME A DEAD-CAR BRAND.
Studebaker. Even though they had the brilliant designer Raymond Loewy and some brilliant engineers their build quality was horrible (even by 1950’s and 60’s standards). Too bad the Avanti was so far ahead of its time.
I agree they needed to go; but the reason was, they were committing murder-suicide – killing off their flagship product and hoping to drown the dealers in the process.
The Avanti was NOT brilliant except in its styling. It was a Fiberfab kit-car Lark, with some engine hop-ups.
It was the singular brainchild of Sherwood Egbert, their short-time head with an equally singular name. Egbert, remember, was hired as Studebaker was madly diversifying – he came from McCullough and he was essentially hired to wind down auto production. Never said; but with Studebaker pouring their Lark profits into purchasing Onan and Gravely and STP…it was obvious where the board wanted to go.
Egbert was a managing whiz who knew nothing of automobiles. But, once at Studebaker, he became a born-again pistonhead.
Why the board okayed the Avanti, we’ll never know. We do know that what enthusiasm they had for it, didn’t last through UAW contract talks, which were the tipping point on the decision to close South Bend. Nor did their enthusiasm for Egbert last long, as he was sacked while on medical leave for cancer.
Studebaker was the best illustration of what happens when bookkeepers and bean counters with no interest in the product, take control of a corporation.
Daewoo. Cheap cars that were still overpriced.