An Auto Industry Marketing Question...

I've seen the Saturn commercial.

The orange Pontiac reminds me of an attempt at a small BMW but yea, Honda, any of them, it's similar lines. I remember back in the ninties the Thunderbird looked like a grown up Accord. The lines were almost identical to my eye and I owned an Accord at the time.

I wanted a T bird for it's daddy.

You're an idiot. An undeniable, complete and utter idiot. You have no facts, just a personal bias, so you invent "truths" when you haven't the slightest idea about the costs or the practices of the real world.

I don't presume to know anything about the Marine Corps or barebacking with studs named "Enrico", yet I manage to keep my peace about your specialties.

and unions and liberals and democrats.

Well, to be fair, I do have an MBA with an emphasis on marketing. So I can speak with some authority about marketing. But hey, I would never dream of contradicting you about how to best tighten the third lugnut on the front left tire of a Chevy Malibu.

So we're agreed you're a fool, good.

Well, humor me then. If GM is so great at designing cars, then how do you explain to lackluster response to the GTO when it was reintroduced in 2004?

Shit you said yourself in, like, post #3 of this thread that Pontiac had to come up with new names for their models because their loyal customers are disappointed with their current offerings.

Has Ford had to come up with a new name for its sports car because people are disappointed with the Mustang? Has Mitsubishi had to retire the Eclipse because their customers don't like the new car? What about the Toyota Camry or the Honda Accord?

If Pontiac does such a bang-up job of designing cars that their customers like, then how do you reconcile the failure of the GTO? How do you explain that their current line is the G8, G6, G5, instead of the Bonneville, GTO, and Grand Prix?

Because from where I stand--especially looking at that fairly underwhelming coupe you put up there, GM has no idea how to build cars. The fact that they're teetering on the brink of bankruptcy seems to support that.

That's not what I said, and if you weren't borderline retarded you'd understand that.

Pontiac had to shift its market segment from women to youths (there was a problem ten years back with the dominance of the female gender making up buyers). They did it by reinventing their lineup. In fact, I haven't heard nearly this much bitching from anyone but yourself. Maybe you've got an axe to grind, maybe you're having a hard time dealing with you age, I don't know. What I do know, is that among the intended segment, kids who would otherwise drive a Mitsubishi Lancer or a twenty year old Volvo, they're falling in love with that G8.

There we go again. You're assuming you're indicative of the entire market and making facts up again (bankrupt? Hardly). The coupe has been well received in Australia and online, I imagine it'll do well next January.

Wait. So the options are:
a) A $13,000 Lancer
b) A 20-year old Volvo (Blue Book of about $2,000) or
c) A $28,000 G8?

Do a lot of "kids" have 28 grand to drop on a car?

There's another marketing basic: You can make a product that is targeted at a customer demographic. But if you price it outside of that demographic's reach, you're wasting your time.

(Oh, and I did notice how you neatly sidestepped the abysmal failure of the GTO.)

Gee, I'm glad we have a totally unbiased source like Chris to tell us how wrong Volpone is.

Yes, he is obviously an idiot, b/c anyone who would challenge the leadership of the Big 3 has to have something wrong with them.

I mean just look at their record!

Shit. I was a bit skeptical of Chris' claim that "kids" are going apeshit over this G8, so I was checking out some reviews.

Turns out the G8 is another Holden, ported over to the United States. The GTO was a Holden, ported over to the United States, and this wonder coupe of Chris', if it is coming from Australia, is also a Holden.

This leads me to believe that Detroit no longer has the capacity to design cars, so they are limited to taking whatever they can scrounge from Australia, putting a Pontiac badge on it, and hoping to God that Americans have the same taste in cars that Australians do.

You're welcome.

My, what a wonderful troll. If only I cared, or hadn't heard it a hundred times already.

Sorry.

BTW, The Holden division is on fire. You'd know that if you knew what you were talking about.

That's kinda like saying the Mercedes division of Daimler-Chrysler is on fire proves that the Big 3 aren't fucking retards.

Which the focus of this thread.

Are you really trying to compare a brand of a former owner of Chrysler to a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors?

For the purpose of this thread.

The thing I'm curious about is, Chris, did I understand you correctly upthread, where you appeared to say that the target demographic for the G8 are the same people who would otherwise drive a 20 year old Volvo?

"Bonneville" doesn't evoke any positive images in my mind.

Maybe it's because my mom used to drive one when I was a kid... I remember it had a weird "fuzzy"-ish exterior section around the rear window.

Ah. I stand corrected. I didn't know it was doing so well. That "GTO" they brought out a couple years ago--that was a Holden design, wasn't it? How's that doing for Pontiac? I went to the Pontiac website, but I couldn't find anything about the 2008 GTOs.

OK. To dial back the trolling a bit, and to not make any more jumps to conclusions than are absolutely necessary:

For whatever reason, GM has decided to radically scale back it's Pontiac design department. Instead, for new cars it is relying heavily on its Australian Holden badge, as it did when it brought out the Holden Monaro in 2004 as the now-defunct GTO.

They've decided that a part of the reason for the failure of the GTO is that people didn't accept the Monaro as a GTO, so they've opted to blow away their traditional model names in favor of the new G-X naming convention. For some reason they have, however, decided to keep the Pontiac make instead of folding Pontiac and opening Holden in the USA.

Now in those three paragraphs there's a lot of room for discussion. Why have they essentially stopped designing Pontiacs? Will a make that appeals to Australians appeal to Americans? If they don't want to build Pontiacs, why don't they shutter the make and open Holden in the US?

In a semi-related topic, I saw a couple G6 coupes parked in the lot at work today. It's actually a fairly impressive-looking car. Of course on the way home I also saw a late-model Grand Prix coupe and it was also a very impressive-looking car. I was fairly pissed when they stopped offering a Grand Prix coupe.