If we’re going to head into the weekend, we’re going to need a cool car and a capable navigator. I think we’ve got both covered.
Last Call indicates the end of Hooniverse’s broadcast day. It’s meant to be an open forum for anyone and anything. Thread jacking is not only accepted, it’s encouraged.
Image: SixtiesTwoDay
Last Call: Dino? Din-Yes! Edition
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Dino=less. Better pack sun screen.
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The first rule of Italian driving has a corollary: What’s in front of me is very important!
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So the models of the sixties give me the urge to buy them a sandwich, too.
How do I force the Hooniverse page into mobile mode?-
No idea, but as a lark I deleted the text after .com/ and inserted an “m,” which led me to this article. http://hooniverse.info/2015/05/27/m2-incorporated-and-the-miata-cobraster/
The same seems to be true for any letter, or common combination of letters I’ve yet tried. Very interesting. -
Took the kid to the Dallas Auto show last week… Hello Ladies!
The gal standing by the Hellcat Charger wasn’t a little gal. She had curves. Pretty lady got my attention among the little gals there. A coworker said he went that weekend too and his girlfriend pointed out one rep that stood out. Can’t recall the car she was at…
The Hellcat Lady?
YES!
My son said she was the perfect person for that car.
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Here’s a question, why doesn’t Chevrolet no longer make sporty small cars? Most of it’s competitors offer us something, the GTI, the ST twins, 500 Abarth. Heck, even Hyundai will sell you a turbo Veloster. So why doesn’t Chevy get in the game? The sportest small car they build is the Sonic RS 1.4L with the turbo stage kit, which only has 148hp and 163 torques in a 2700+ pound car. The Cruze and Spark don’t offer any sporty trims at all.
The stupid thing about this is, GM already has all the ingredients they need to make these. You can already get a 250hp Buick Verano Turbo, so why not build Chevy Cruze SS? Why isn’t there a Sonic that can compete with a Fiesta ST? Heck, even a Spark with the turbo 1.4 from the Sonic RS would be a hoot.-
I think Buick is missing an even bigger opportunity. They are already closely tied to the perennial Adam/Corsa/Astra hot hatch contenders, and GM has more heritage there than we give them credit for. While I tend to classify to the Cosworth Vega, Mantas and euro-Firenzas as mini-muscle cars, on the FWD sport-compact/AWD manic-rallyist spectrum we shouldn’t forget the Cavalier Z24 or Skyhawk T-Type any more than the Vauxhall Chevette HS (admittedly RWD, these things aren’t written in stone) or Calibra 4×4 Turbo.
Super-hatch Ingredients:
Swoopy coupe version of the Cascada.
Maybe a 5-door derived from the Astra too, for good measure.
400hp Turbo V6 and AWD system from the Insignia.
And then merge the rally-hatchy and big-block lineages in one vehicle, in a way that will seem appropriate to fans of both genres:
Call it the GNX.
TL:DR – Yuge tracts of land. -
GM is hanging it’s hat on the Volt/Bolt.
Ant performance they have has been directed to the Corvette/Camaro/SS. -
Why not a modern Fiero? It would give them something to go up against the Miata / Fiat 124 Spider with, and, done right (i.e., without weighing 3800lbs.), that 1.4 turbo could make for a fun car.
(N.B.: drove the ND Miata a few weeks ago, liked it, waiting for a chance to get some stick time in the 124 Spider when it hits. Definitely preferring the styling of the Fiat.)-
Or this.
If it’s called the Opel Speedster, why do all the publicity shots show the roof of Holden’s design centre in Melbourne, Australia.
Because that’s where it was designed.
Could this become a Holden/ Opel/ Buick/ Vauxhall?
http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/opel-gt-concept-inline1-photo-665632-s-original.jpg
http://mikeshouts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Opel-GT-Concept-Featured-image-672×372.jpg
Definitely the Melbourne highrise skyline in the background here.-
If I were in GM’s American shoes, I’d do a reshuffle of the existing divisions as follows:
– Cadillac: luxury marque differentiated from the rest of them. They’ve actually gone quite a ways towards making this happen, but there are fit & finish items that need attention before Cadillac can be taken seriously again. Also, the Escalade needs to die and be replaced by a true Range Rover competitor.
– Buick: One slot down from Cadillac, one slot up from Chevrolet. They get upper-echelon Opels to differentiate themselves from Chevy & (spoiler alert) Opel. Platform sharing with Cadillac, Chevy, and Opel is acceptable, but uniqueness is key. No straight-up badge engineering allowed, except for (possibly) a CUV and upper-midsize SUV.
– Chevrolet: bread & butter. Solid middle-of-the-road cars, but nothing in the far upper & lower segments – compact, intermediate, mid-size, and upper-midsize only as well as minivans, CUVs, and SUVs into the upper-midsize range. If they take a couple of captive-import Daewoos, no big deal. The Corvette stays here as a halo car.
– Opel: this is where the subcompacts, sporting compacts, and sporting intermediate-to-midsized cars go as well as outright sports cars that aren’t the Corvette. All models are captive imports from Opel itself. This basically fills the niche emptied when Pontiac and Saturn were axed.
– GMC: trucks, midrange minivans, and utility vehicles. Some cross-pollination with Chevy acceptable.
There’s likely some tweaking to this that could be done, but it should serve to a) remove some of the existing model range confusion from the respective lineups and b) provide a ladder for customer loyalty over the years. BMW was really good at understanding this latter concept, and there’s no reason why GM can’t do the same.-
And bring in Cadillac as a worldwide luxury brand. Perhaps with Buick as a worldwide brand too. Chevrolet never worked overseas as they quickly became ‘how cheap can we make this’ rebadged Daewoos and were quickly perceived as such. And not as good as Fords.
Brand lustre is a fragile thing, easily tarnished and hard to repolish.
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I mean, they had the Sky/Solstice, which was a little porky, but had potential (great at SCCA, apparently), but they killed it off before refining it much. … Just like the Fiero!
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One thing that I never understood about the Sky / Solstice twins: the Saturn was the more aggressive-looking of the two. I don’t know about anyone else, but to my mind that seems to be the reverse of how it should have been, and is one of the more glaring examples of GM’s complete lack of insight into their own operations over the past decade or so.
On an unrelated note, an acquaintance whom I very occasionally bump into worked for GM from the late ’80s into the early 2000s. According to him, one of the greatest faux pas an engineer or designer can commit is to suggest reusing certain, shall we say, sensitive model names. Corvair is right out, as is (and understandably so in my opinion) Vega. Anything related to Geo or Saturn is also a no-go zone, but the one that’s apparently a giant powder keg?
Fiero.
He never understood why that name was practically a one-way ticket to the unemployment office for anyone not in executive management who might toy with using it on a concept (let alone a production model), but apparently there’s a history of designers and engineers who have suggested it finding themselves taken aside by their immediate management and the quiet recommendation of finding another name for their project being made.
Purely anecdotal, take it for what it’s worth, etc., but it’s what I’ve been told.-
I think it’s one of those things, where in a vacuum, I can see how the Sky could look more aggressive than the Solstice, but at the same time, they also looked like they belonged to their respective families (although it was maybe better executed with Saturn). I guess, because the Jag XKSS is fresh in mind, the Solstice didn’t necessarily need to be aggressive looking to be a proper sports car.
It’s also interesting that the Fiero is so verboten – short of the ’84 fires, it’s just a typical GM failure (which is to say missteps and neglect, rather than an epic screwup) -
To be fair, the aggressiveness I see in the Sky that I perceive as lacking in the Solstice could be simply that – perception on my behalf. Looking at what else was on the market at the time that they could reasonably be compared to, I will give them credit for standing out and not just being blatant copies of [insert 2-seat roadster here].
That said, I can see where you’re going with the XKSS looks on the Solstice; the Sky reminds me of the Crossfire, particularly in the flanks.
Either way, I would love for someone to write the definitive chronology and history of GM’s multiple decades of shooting itself in the foot when trying to deviate from the median. A what-went-wrong-and-why account on a model-by-model basis of their notable postwar screwups could not only make for an interesting read, but could also serve as an object lesson in how not to run a car company for the competition. -
One day, I will read On A Clear Day, You Can See General Motors.
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Strangely enough, that one’s also sitting in my pile.
If you haven’t already, I’ll also recommend Evan Boberg’s ‘Common Sense Not Required’. It reads in places like a collection of forum rants, but has some good insights into what was going on in Chrysler and AMC.
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the premise of my theory on this is that Ford would have built the STs for the European markets anyway. in History, Ford sold ST Fiestas and Focuses in Europe when we had no Fiesta and a different Focus.
Ford’s European division has always been excellent at making sporty compacts. the FiST (i have one! it’s fantastic!) and FoST are the current bearers of that standard. for Ford to bring those cars over here was trivial – they already did the engineering and regulatory work to sell in the USA the exact same base model Fiestas/Focuses sold in Europe. the engineering work to bring the ST versions over was probably relatively simple, leaving only the regulatory work.
GM has Opel/Vauxhall and their sporty small cars, but they don’t have the sort of focused cross-border integration that Ford has been working on since the start of the Mulally era. the Fords we get here are largely the same as the Fords you can buy in Germany, besides engine choices. GM doesn’t have that. as far as I can tell, there is no European equivalent of the Cruze or the Sonic, or at least nothing that sells in big numbers. Europe has always been the driving market behind the hot hatch – nobody in Asia or South Korea, the markets where GM is sharing the platforms under its small American cars, wants hot hatches.
so maybe the effort of designing and engineering a Sonic SS or a Cruze SS just isn’t worth it for GM. it wouldn’t be worth it for Ford either, except that they were going to develop those cars anyway and it’s not especially inconvenient to sell them here too. that’s my theory.
i’ve always been a Ford man – for no particular reason – and living in this golden era of small and economical cars, it seems like the Blue Oval has just got its shit together by selling the same cars everywhere. but i dunno, it seems like GM has figured out how to make a small American car that isn’t an afterthought on four wheels. i’d be interested to see how a fast version turns out.
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I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with the observations re: GM and Ford’s respective sourcing of the hatchbacks that they sell in the US.
What surprises me about this is that GM has spent the nearly the entire last half-century trying to figure out how to sell Opels in the US in one form or another and completely botching it almost every time. As a semi-recent example, I’ll offer up the Saturn Astra.
The Astra actually almost tempted me to buy one, but only almost. I liked how it drove, was OK with the styling, and generally thought it was a very competent car (which is not to damn it with faint praise) that needed just one thing: a performance variant with about an additional 60bhp on tap. While it drove well, I could only really say that I preferred how it drove compared to its competition (excluding the Golf, though not by much of a margin), but without a hot – or even warm – version in the lineup, it was a little too pedestrian for me to live with on a daily basis.
To GM’s credit, they didn’t Americanise it in the wrong ways; it really was a good car as far as I was concerned. They just didn’t offer the model that I was looking for, so ultimately I ended up buying something else.
This is where I can’t fathom GM’s thinking when it comes to Opel: it’s as though Detroit perpetually fails to understand what it is that Russelsheim is doing, and how that could be of benefit to Detroit if only they’d bother to spend half an afternoon actually getting to know what it is that people might want.-
just noticed that my original comment says “Asia and South Korea.” d’oh –
i meant South America.
it’s hard to fathom GM’s thinking on just about anything. i don’t know that much about its corporate structure (or Ford’s, for that matter), but it seems like even more of a mess. departments and brands that historically operated with a degree of independence have not been tightly integrated into the corporate mother ship.
i totally believe that, as you say, Detroit GM just has no idea what European GM is doing, and learns nothing from them. it’s because they’re treated like a separate entity. when a solid basic car like the Astra can’t sell, it’s because of incompetence. if they had taken a chance and sold a refined, well-sorted hatchback as a Chevrolet, it could have been the turning point for GM’s small cars. they knew their volume brands were in the tank because of reliance on selling boatloads of cheap garbage to fleets, and that was their chance to start making it right. instead they shuffled the Astra off to the “weird shit” brand and were surprised when nobody bought it.
Ford has demonstrated that Americans will buy “European” cars, and they do a good job of splitting the engineering work up between the two continents. i wonder how long it will take for GM to see the light.
as an aside, the This American Life episode on the story of the NUMMI plant is really great. a peek into some of the internal politics at GM, and how often they shoot themselves in the foot because of it.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi-
Even a cursory look at GM’s ownership of Saab reveals that they clearly didn’t know how to make/market European cars for America but they also didn’t know how to do European cars for Europe!
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The unfortunate bit is that the Sonic’s actually a pretty great little car (about as good as the Focus, which it has the same interior volume as), but they don’t seem to be interested in what would make it really memorable, and the upcoming refresh is just so underwheming, it suggests they’ve given up on it. Likewise, the Cruze is a perfectly fine car, in line with what most people want (solid, quiet, comfortable, unobtrusive), but GM seems to have no ambitions beyond that.
I just took a long, close look at the (ahem!) pixels, and am confident they’ve been shopped.
I’m also a bit surprised, that no one’s mentioned that this is a rather witty restatement of the Land O Lakes logo.
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Oh, wide angle lenses on the ground do funny things to bodies, but so do anorexia and drugs.
Hop on the back and Hang on Tight
Lets go riding it is Saturday Night…….
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Vogntoget fra Bring fikk sleng flere ganger før det havnet utfor veien. Sjåføren kom uskadd fra hendelsen.
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“The truck driver lost control several times before getting off the road. He was unharmed.”
Pretty good anchor, that trailer.
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