How many times have we heard an old-timer saying something along the lines of “Back in my day cars were cars made of tough stuff, not these flimsy little tin cans we have today!” As their eyes get misty, they wax on about how solidly built cars of yore were, and how they’d much rather be in a big vintage American boat than anything modern. Those sure were the days.
Yeah, right.
To celebrate 50 years of smashing things, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety put money to mouth, crashing a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air – about as big and heavy as they come, mind you – into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. The results speak for themselves.
Wow. I mean…wow. The windshield on the Malibu doesn’t even crack. The Bel Air, however, folds faster than Superman on laundry day. So you can have your nostalgia. I’ll take the one that’ll save my life.
Well, so much for that. Only days after announcing that the Pontiac G8 would return to the U.S. market as a Chevrolet Caprice, General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz has announced that the rear-drive sport sedan is well and truly dead for the U.S. market after all. Sounds like the right hand gave the left one a smackdown, if you ask me.
Posting on GM’s Fast Lane blog, Lutz said that with his new “marketing hat” on, he couldn’t make the case for a high-level sedan for Chevrolet, considering that the company is in a cost-cutting and fuel-efficiency-enhancing mode.
In the meantime, if you’re a fan of the Pontiac G8 GXP, you’d better get one quickly. According to Jalopnik, Pontiac marketing chief Cheryl Catton has said that only 2000 of the sport sedans will be built, along with 2000 examples of the Pontiac Solstice Coupe GXP. If you like hot Pontiacs (and maybe want to gamble on a future classic), you’d better get one pronto.
Among the corporate reshuffling that is taking place at the new GM is the retention of Bob Lutz, the product czar that is largely responsible for the lack of suckiness in the company’s most recent offerings.
Staying on as vice chairman responsible for all creative elements of products and customer relationships, Lutz has made his first proclamation: According to Automobile Magazine, the much-loved (but little-bought) Pontiac G8 will live on as the Chevrolet Caprice. Since this is a car that’s already sold as a Chevy in the Middle East (see photo), this is a pretty obvious move, but one that was recently denied by CEO Fritz Henderson, who said that he wasn’t a fan of rebadging. Hey, left hand, check out what the right’s doing!
Anyhow, no timetable was given, but the only real question is whether we’ll get the actual Caprice that’s sold in the Middle East with its longer wheelbase, or will the Middle East’s Chevy Lumina simply be rebadged as a Caprice for the States? I’m just glad we’ll have this platform around a while longer. Now, if GM can upgrade the interior a bit, that’d just be icing on the cake.
The American automotive market is one of the world’s biggest meritocracies. If a car is good, it sells well, and if it’s not, well, it gets a shorter Wikipedia entry. Now some may argue that vehicles like the Toyota Camry are too bland and don’t deserve their success. Then again, there’s a lot to be said for consistency…ask McDonalds.
Every now and then though, a car comes along that, despite a long list of merits, never quite achieves the ubiquity that you might expect. Sometimes it’s style, other times marketing, and yet other times it’s simply because the car was “ahead of its time,” that is, not exactly fitting in with contemporary consumer tastes.
Do these cars deserve their fate as also-rans? Not to me…they’re all good, and if people would be willing to overlook one simple thing (OK, maybe more than one in some cases), they’d find themselves behind the wheel of some very satisfying machinery. On the other hand, look for some great values on the used market in the near future. read more from "10 Cars That Coulda Been Contenders"
The automotive press is currently in the thralls of a Camarogasm as the car comes closer to its on-sale date. Blogs are waxing on about 2010 Chevy Camaros piling up outside the factory, burnout videos, even the EPA estimated mileage (pretty good for the V-6 at 29 mpg highway).
So who am I to resist? I went over to Chevy’s just-launched build-your-own 2010 Camaro site and checked all the boxes for a 2010 2SS with the R/S package. Grand total for my theoretical black-on-black muscle-car? $36,130, including the $750 destination charge. That includes the 426-hp version of the V-8 engine, since I would obviously get a manual transmission, as well as all the Bluetooth and USB goodies that a car demands these days.
It’s also about $10,000 less than my previous musclecar infatuation, the 2009 Dodge Challenger SRT8. The Camaro is lighter, has just as much power, and comes with the manual transmission standard, instead of the Challenger’s automatic (the stick is a $650 option on the Dodge). Now, I don’t have a particular brand loyalty, and I’m not beholden to any particular musclecar sect. However, fully admitting that I haven’t driven the car yet, I have say that $36,000 and change for a 426-hp musclecar is a screaming friggin’ deal. So, President Obama, can you please keep bailing out GM until I can afford one? Thanks.
(5/14/09) Note: This article was originally published in February of 2006, well before any tests of the Tahoe Hybrid or Honda Insight — the Fit-based hybrid mentioned in the story — could be conducted. There are some inaccuracies — the Insight came in substantially higher than $12,000, for example. However, the math still holds up.
Honda recently announced in Japan that it will offer a low-priced hybrid version of the itty-bitty Fit, the subcompact it recently unveiled at the Detroit auto show for U.S. sale this Spring. It will be the lowest priced hybrid available in Japan (around $12,000), and from the sound of it, will be the most fuel-efficient car pretty much anywhere.
I’m a fan of hybrids, unlike a lot of my colleagues. I’m not some tree-hugging, SUV-burning wacko about it, but I think the technology is cool, and that hybrids are as much a statement about who a person is as is, say, a Corvette. Never mind that the EPA numbers are usually a fantasy. For all practical purposes, so is a Corvette’s 170-plus mph top speed. Both are achievable in the right circumstances, but it’s unlikely that owners will ever do so. read more from "Maybe What’s Good For GM Really Is Good For the Country"
