What went wrong?

>GOVERNMENT
>MONEY

What went wrong with Government Motors you say? They've always made ugly ass cars, look at their current lineup. It's literally all shit.

What's the story on this?

>implying ford never took any
>implying ford never recived the worlds biggest bailout

kek

Oh, hi, actual automotive history enthusiast here with something other than muh gubmint. This is going to be long, so bear with me.

It all boils down to platform sharing. Since the 20s, GM has treated Alfred Sloan's idea of "a car for every purse and purpose" like gospel. Each make had, for a very long time, a specific price point and buyer. You started off with a Chevy, then moved up to a Pontiac, then an Oldsmobile, then a Buick, and then it was time for the Caddy, baby! Of course, people rarely followed this to a T, but they still had a product for every buyer. Each make had distinct styling, engines, gadgets, and so on, and the number of options available, all of which didn't compete directly with each other and stuck to their own price point, was what made them so successful.

Sloanism, however, only works that well with one body style. If every car you produce is full-size, then you instantly have an incredibly easy-to-notice measure of prestige. It's easy to tell why the small Chevrolet is less luxurious than the land yacht Cadillac. But once you add mid-size and compact cars to the mix like they did in the 60s, it gets harder to continuously provide a real reason to buy one make's car over another. You can do it, but it's incredibly difficult to pull off.

Let me put it this way. In 1955, the top-of-the-line Chevy Bel Air cost $1857, and the least-expensive Pontiac Chieftain cost $1972. In 1965, the Chevy Impala, a full-size sedan, cost $2779 and the Pontiac Tempest, a lower-end, mid-size car, cost $2313. So why would you buy the Chevy when the Pontiac not only cost less, but was more prestigious? The situation was playing itself out all across their brand lineup. A Buick Skylark cost less than an Oldsmobile 88 but was supposed to be the higher-end brand. A Buick Special cost less than a Chevy Bel Air. With the addition of compacts and mid-sized cars to the lineup, the rigid hierarchy that made GM so successful started to blur.

In the 60s, though, they managed to keep their brand images alive not only because people didn’t compare full-size cars with mid-sizes and compacts like they do today, but also because they had distinct styling. Their platforms were just that: platforms. The underpinnings of the car and the basic dimensions were shared, but you could play with the sheetmetal. Each make still had distinct styling, and all of any one make’s models had a sort of familial resemblance. The Oldsmobile Cutlass looked a lot like the 98, even though one was much, much bigger than the other. So, in the 60s, they managed to make up for their blurry price points by keeping styling distinct.

But, like most things, the 70s fucked it up. Even more models and the addition of subcompacts meant price points got even blurrier, and a push from GM executives to save money when the gas crisis was at its peak meant styling became a little less distinct. Sure, an Oldsmobile Cutlass looked like a 98, but it also looked a little like the Buick Electra that it shared the A-Body with. The move for greater inter-division commonality reached its peak when, in 1977, the Oldsmobile division started putting Chevy engines in their definitely-not-Chevy cars. But the Chevy engine was almost identical to the Oldsmobile engine anyways. After that, it was only a matter of time before engines were shared between divisions instead of staying segregated.

The situation got worse in the 80s; specifically, with the J-Body cars. This was the first GM platform the spanned all 5 makes and did so pretty horribly. They could have pulled off offering the same car to five different divisions with distinct price points, but they didn’t. So the Chevy Cavalier and the Cadillac Cimarron both looked largely the same and shared most mechanical features. It wasn’t platform sharing anymore, it was badge engineering. The Cadillac Cimarron went down in history, but the Chevy Cavalier, Pontiac Sunbird, Oldsmobile Firenza, and Buick Skyhawk that shared the J-Body were the ones that dealt the most damage, because they all looked the same too. Selling the same car for five different prices dealt a serious blow to the idea that each make was different.

The 90s saw the creation or acquisition of more makes, like Saturn, Hummer, and Geo (fuck you 1989 is basically the 90s). This is also when things really started to get out of control. There weren’t any new problems per se, just a continuation of the old ones. Cars were styled and priced even more similarly, and the sudden onslaught of new brands to divide up the market didn’t work either. Not only had the boundaries between their five core makes been blurred to hell and back, but now there were new competitors that didn’t even try to fit within the lineup and cannibalized sales from other divisions. At this point, GM executives started to realize that they fucked up and tried to “reinvent” their five core divisions, trying their hardest on Pontiac and Oldsmobile. It didn’t really work.

The first to go was Oldsmobile. It was being squeezed between GM’s other divisions the hardest, and by the late 90s buyers were leaving in droves. So they shut it down. GM coasted downhill during the rest of the 2000s, not really making any real effort to save the rest of their divisions. Although styling started to provide a little bit of differentiation, by now they were just too far gone. They went bankrupt, and when they were picking up the pieces they decided to axe Pontiac, the most vulnerable of the four remaining “core” makes because, at this point, it was little more than a Chevrolet with a split grille.

Since then, though, things have gotten better. Sure, they’re not as distinct as they used to be, but the Chevy Malibu, Buick Regal, and Cadillac XTS, for example, look different from each other, even though they’re all riding on the Epsilon platform. And if you don’t think so, or if you’d just like to gripe, go back and look at the Chevy, Buick, and Cadillac on the J-Body and tell me those look more different than the Epsilon cars. The trend is being reversed, and it looks like they’re going to keep it up, too.

So, as a TL;DR, the main thing that fucked up GM was each division having too much in common with the others, be it styling, pricing, or anything else. It’s not because they took government money or because the GT-R is faster than the Corvette. It’s because they tried to apply Alfred Sloan’s car for every purse and purpose to too many purses and purposes. They could have done it right, but it would have taken one hell of a visionary, and the bigwigs and executives wouldn’t have gotten the answers that they wanted.

I know that was incredibly long but something this complicated (even though it really isn’t) needs a lot of backstory to fully understand everything that went wrong. Plus I needed an excuse to put off all the shit I should be doing right now.

TL;DR: gm is fucking garbage

Optisparks, FUCK YOU OPTISPARKS, EAT SHIT!!!!

>measuring lap times in grams

Hi, local naysayer with no automotive official history here.

>The move for greater inter-division commonality reached its peak when, in 1977, the Oldsmobile division started putting Chevy engines in their definitely-not-Chevy cars. But the Chevy engine was almost identical to the Oldsmobile engine anyways. After that, it was only a matter of time before engines were shared between divisions instead of staying segregated.
It was GM that made them stick Chevy engines in, not Oldsmobile themselves. There was even a lawsuit about it, which GM lost.

The Chevy small block is also most definitely not 'almost identical' to the Olds Rocket, hence the reason for the controversy- people were buying cars expecting to get a true-blue Rocket under the hood and ending up with the Chevy engine instead.

> they decided to axe Pontiac, the most vulnerable of the four remaining “core” makes because, at this point, it was little more than a Chevrolet with a split grille.

Ironically Pontiac was the only one offering cars that you couldn't get as a rebadge from another GM make, such as the G8 and the Solstice.

All that and you also skipped over one of the other largest reasons for GM's fuckups- the rule that absolutely nothing could be faster or better than the Corvette, the only exceptions being when a car option or package was essentially snuck under the bean counters' noses (like the Regal T-type or the Fiero in general). Over the decades there are many, many examples of things designed or developed by the other marques (usually Oldsmobile, Buick and Pontiac) who couldn't put the tech in their own cars because it had to be given to the Corvette (or it was scrapped, shitcanned, and covered-up with a different reason because it was killing 'vettes on GM's own test track, i.e. the second generation Fiero).

fuck off alphonse, your meme is shit and your lap times outdated and from a badly set up car

The SS doesn't look bad. Based Aussies.

Too bad the only neat part of GM has been made redundant.

What did he mean by this?

>It was GM that made them stick Chevy engines in
That's what I meant. And "almost identical" was a bit of a stretch there, I know. I don't know enough about the two to give a good comparison.

>Ironically Pontiac was the only one offering cars that you couldn't get as a rebadge from another GM make, such as the G8 and the Solstice.
Damn, you're right about that too, user. Kinda goes to show how fucked GM really was at that point: nothing they did, no matter how unique, could save Pontiac. There's so much they could (and should) have done that would've stopped their massive downsizing.

>the rule that absolutely nothing could be faster or better than the Corvette
Didn't know that, actually. Thanks, GM. It's interesting, though, because for a long time the widespread, unspoken rule was that as you travelled up GM's brand hierarchy your car would be faster, and they axed the higher-up makes' projects because they'd be faster than the Corvette.

Stay mad

Stay deluded, fag

Stay btfo, fangirl

user gets fooled by a terrible photoshop

They snuffed my favorite brand.

>It's interesting, though, because for a long time the widespread, unspoken rule was that as you travelled up GM's brand hierarchy your car would be faster, and they axed the higher-up makes' projects because they'd be faster than the Corvette.
Some examples off the top of my head you might find interesting:

>The Firebird's existence, period. Pontiac always wanted to make a proper sports car and was never able to. GM gave them a Camaro chassis and said here, this is what you get, and you can't make it faster than the Camaro, either. So they couldn't make it faster, but they could still make it handle better, hence all the tucked-away option codes you could get for Firebirds and Trans Ams that would give them race-spec suspension parts.
>The Pontiac Banshee- a name used for multiple concept sports cars over the years, all of them shitcanned. Most famously the first one, which was called a "Mustang fighter" by John DeLorean (then head of Pontiac) but was explicitly canned because GM higher-ups knew it was faster than the 'vette.
>Pontiac (noticing a trend here?) Fiero, second generation: the Fiero itself was slipped right under the nose of GM. Pontiac proposed it as a small, light, mid-engined economy car, powered by the Iron Douk 4-banger; by the end of the Fiero, it was a true sports car with fully redesigned suspension (popularly rumored to have been 'borrowed' from Lotus) and a V^ in the back. The second generation was going to be refined even further handling-wise and with both engine choices replaced by twin-cam variants; a new 200hp+ V6 and the Iron Duke being replaced by the Oldsmobile Quad-4. However, Pontiac took essentially all the money they made each year on the Fiero and put it right back into R&D for the next model year, hence why each year is better than the last; to GM higher-ups, this looked like the car was a giant money pit. In combination with the second gen prototype performing so well on GM's track, that was the end of the Fiero.

More interesting tidbits:

>Saturn Ion Redline: Little-known trim package for the Saturn Ion that put it in, in the words of Car and Driver, "Porschey territory." Discontinued after three years, the engine and drivetrain were later re-used in the Cobalt SS Supercharged.
>W-43/OW-43: Prototype engines created by Oldsmobile in the late 60's by taking a Rocket 455 big block and building a monster making use of chain-driven dual overhead cams. Made 700hp+ at the crank; had to use multiple carburetors (among other things like a fifth, dummy camshaft in the center of the engine) because only the Corvette could use fuel injection.
>Cadillac Cien and Sixteen: V12 powered sports car and V16 (yes!) powered land-barge that never made it to production. Probably not scrapped for the Vette's sake but interesting anyway.

That was an interesting read, thanks user

They stopped making their best car

Thats two memes. GM BTFO

>Stay btfo
too bad I won't
>fangirl
ffs I'm not even a chebby guy
>2016
>not having the name of one of America's and World's greatest men in the front of your car
smdh tbqh famalam

Stay assblasted nigger

>american """"""taste""""""

>fake lap times
As expected

>fake
fastestlaps.com/tracks/willow-springs
Stay BTFO japcuck

>paid lap times

Prove it, faggot

>grams

Dude, I hope your kidding. If not, your the dumbest mother fucker that I have seen on Veeky Forums

>spoon feed me mommy
Stay btfo

>m-muh s-spoonfeed
You don't have to prove your lies to me, you have to prove them to the whole community. Stay btfo and projecting.

I do want a V8 but i'd prefer a manual, even if it's slower.

ATS-V8 when

>spoon feed me
Stay btfo

Bump

>asking for proof is asking to spoonfeed
>this is what weebcucks unironically believe
I already spoonfed you with the proof that you're wrong, but I know you don't care about the truth, you only care about spouting memes that make American cars look bad because you can't afford one.

>spoon feed me mommy
Stay btfo

How desperate can you be? You are wrong. Accept it.

>You are wrong. Accept it.

>spoon feed me

>this amount of denial
lmfao fucking flat earthers

>denial
Nope, sadly it's true.

Gm can't compete

...

Stay btfo

...

Gm also innovates by leading in recalls

Didn't realize toyota recalled so many cars

At least they recall the cars instead of letting people die and paying after.

What?

Do gm fangirls actually believe this?

>>>r/Veeky Forums

Bumpo

JESUS CHRIST, DO YOU SERIOUSLY THINK YOUR FORCED MEME IS FUNNY? PLEASE DO END YOURSELF IF YOU THINK SO. YES I'M SERIOUSLY FUCKING TRIGGERED.

Everything