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Why don't you tell us how you really feel. Geeeez !!!! :surprise:
I'm going to say this I'd be willing to bet a good portion of BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, drivers are in debt up to their eyeballs because they are trying to out do their neighbor.
Perception and having money is two different things obvious. I'd be willing to bet your average Cadillac, driver has alot more money than your average Bimbenzus drivers.
Rocky
P.S. Blame the UAW card is out again I see. My father saved GM/Delphi $3-4 Million in suggestions in his 27 years.
Wow, must be a big regional difference.
What I like about my Cadillac is that there are a number of dealerships in this area. The nearest Lexus, BMW or Acura dealer is a day's drive away.
It's so bad fintail, one family I know lives in a double- wide but bought a new Benz, and dress in the latest fashions to be perceived as something they are not.
Rocky
Rocky
LOS ANGELES — Weary late-night travelers arriving at the airport after hours should appreciate Cadillac's new DTS-L, a long-wheelbase version of the front-wheel-drive DTS sedan that arrives in early 2007.
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleId=117747
Rocky
LOS ANGELES — Cadillac continues to focus on elegant, hand-crafted cabins with its new Platinum Series collection, which includes limited editions of the STS, XLR and DTS.
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleId=117765
Rocky
Around here, you can drive through areas where every house is 1M+ and healthy six figure incomes are common...and you'll see virtually no Caddys save for a scattered 'Slade. In the same areas you can't throw a baseball without hitting a S class or 7er. Caddy doesn't say "money" more than anything else.
You can lease a new C class just as cheaply as a CTS. I suspect GM financing is no more difficult than MB or BMW, either.
Maybe dealer location has something to do with it. Within an hour I have 4 MB dealers, and I believe 3 BMW dealers.
Down here in Tex-[non-permissible content removed] people are still pretty patriotic by nature and prefer domestic cars over foreign. The dealer obstacle I'm sure has a lil' to do with it also. I'm very surprised so many rich folks would want to live in cold and cloudy Washington. Burrrrski ! :P
Rocky
Most Caddy owners tend to live more in their means and usually get their cars when they can afford them easily.
2011 Hyundai Sonata, 2014 BMW 428i convertible, 2015 Honda CTX700D
Beach an hour away, mountains an hour away, desert 2 hours away, grinding traffic, laughably inflated house prices, slightly higher wages, passive aggressive local psyche - WA has it all.
I don't see the Escalade market as especially frugal anyway. DTS however, very much so, especially as so many are bought as near-new.
What ?
Rocky
Consumer Reports measures longer, and the trail of black dots next to GM vehicles is telling. So does GM's litany of recalls (how many times has the TrailBlazer been recalled???)
Car and Driver did a long term test of a Cadilllac SRX. It left them stranded multiple times, and they mentioned that in the 30-40,000 mile range had numerous and excessive squeeks and rattles.
Hardly confidence inspiring ...
BMW, Acura and Infiniti rule the ELPS market. The CTS puts up decent sales numbers. Cadillac is weakest in the true luxury markets dominated by BMW, Mercedes and Lexus (think 5,7 series classes). I agree with everyone that Cadillac would need to hit a tremendous home run to rebuild its brand in the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Northeast. Cadillac's still mean something in the Southeast, too.
Rocky, I live in Austin which is very much in Texas. This is an Infiniti town. There are more G35's on the road than Chevy Impala/Malibu's here. There are some 3 series here but not like in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.
What may work in Caddy's favor is if they build a compelling product is for people to buy Caddy's to differentiate themselves from all the BMW's, Infinitis and Lexus' around. It's starting to work for Audi.
Standard of the world? Hmm... Even Lexus doesn't have that big of a worldwide market outside of the US. BMW and Mercedes are #1/#2 worldwide. Lexus and Cadillac are #1/#2 in the US.
GM would need to devote a ton of money that they don't have into building the Cadillac brand worlwide ahead of Audi/BMW/Mercedes. They have the dealer network and the manufacturing capacity. They just need to continue to work on product and make sure that it is class leading (luxury, performance, value, gadgets, etc.) not just merely "good enough".
Rocky
I don't see Caddy developing any large scale worldwide presence, not until I am very old at the earliest. Ask Lexus...Europe is a very tough market to crack.
In Idaho ?
Rocky
Wow, you consider 40 old ? :P
I disagree with you on that one. They have a few compact cars designed just for that market in the pipeline. I believe GM, is going to build a new plant in Warsaw Poland, if my memory is working right.
Rocky
Europe is a tough market to crack. GM has many factories - where they have made Vauxhalls and Opels for decades. That won't help them sell Caddies to people fiercely loyal to MB and BMW. Caddy has never been more than a small blip on the radar in Europe, and usually not even that.
Rocky
Rocky
P.S. You will be younger than 50' lets put it that way.
150 maybe.
That's only 80 years away for you. :P
Rocky
Really? Philadelphia is far from the Midwest and Cadillac still has a lot of brand equity. So does Buick. We just hired a young guy at my workplace and he tells me about a lot of the other younger guys driving Buicks and that they seem hot right now. I think young people are getting sick of Mommy's Camcord and the poseur "F&F" crowd.
Funny thing is, the dummy managed to wreck his Bimmer on the Roosevelt Blvd. Anybody familiar with the Roosevelt Blvd. knows what a dangerous, poorly-designed road it is and all the convoluted cross-overs and psychopathic drivers. This dummy tried going 60 mph through a cross-over, hit the concrete curb, and flipped the 5-Series on its side pretty much totalling it. I come home from work to get a phone call that he is in the hospital getting checked out, but they will release him that night. His wife, (my girlfriend's sister) was in worse shape and had to be kept overnight and missed her own father's funeral. I wonder how he felt getting a ride home in my old Park Ave?
Same question can be asked about the posers in the import luxury around there...how old are these cars? It takes no special money to buy a 10 year old S class or 7er, and these cars fool many into beliving they are newer than their registration may state. That's how it is here anyway.
I suspect Caddys fall into the same hands. Pimped out Devilles are not uncommon in certain areas around here.
The brand cachet statement from earlier is right on the nose. In some areas, these brands just don't have a lot behind them.
The Consumer Reports survey is limited to what their subscibers own, and is not a scientific survey of each make. The basic problem is how to turn the data into something meaningful. I am not sure that Consumer Reports has. This does not mean that there is no useful data there, but comparing one make to another is questionable.
Automobile also had a long term test of the SRX and were very happy with it, except that they would get the V8 instead of the V6.
You just answered one part of the problem with CR's survey: no random sample. It's a convenience survey.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
I'm not saying that CR is perfect, but if a guy owns a Chevy Lumina for a few years and is responding to a survey, I don't see why his answers would be any different if he's responding to a CR survey vs a JD Powers survey, or how the results would be skewed in any specific way.
Are you getting a cross section, a random sample, of the Lumina owners in the total group of buyers/owners? That's the problem with CR. How many Lumina owners responded? Do you have 1000 so that there is a sample deviation of 3-4% for each year of Lumina.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Does JD Power provide any stats for cars beyond 3 years? I'm more concerned with reliability beyond 3 years (more like the 5-8 year point) when the warranty is gone. I wonder why JD Power doesn't look at long term reliability beyond 3 years?
Do you have any examples of where JD Power indicates a car is highly reliable while CR indicates it's not?
Rocky
P.S. I thought BMW's were the ultimate driving machine ?
Nope that was the Pontiac GTO.
2011 Hyundai Sonata, 2014 BMW 428i convertible, 2015 Honda CTX700D
Cadillac breaking away into a super luxury marque will allow the best American know how to reinvent the entire corporation. Super engineering advances have a way of trickling down. This improves the whole company. Cadillac vs. high end MB Models, High End BMW Models, is what needs to happen. Make cars that are undeniably good and have style, people will buy them.
Just my two cents.
Rocky
Exactly right - Cadillac marketing is great - like trying to sell the Catera in Spanish, using Cajones in the ad....dumb. Trying to sell the Escalade with an ad showing it plowing the snow - in Miami..... :confuse:
I'm not betting the farm on Cadillac marketing taking Europe by storm....
Well, I suppose you could make that case regarding the Cimarron (the early inspiration for the Chevy Suburban a/k/a Escalade).
But Cadillacs' prices have never been all that low, at least not for the big ones.
The problem for the last 30-something years has been the fact that they've really been little more than Chevy's that have been "SuperSized."
Which leads to another problem for Cadillac. It suffers from a kind of "reverse halo" effect.
While "halo cars" can have a beneficial impact (or so the theory goes), the reverse is also true. Everyone knows that Cadillac is GM, and GM has managed to take the pretty stellar reputation it had in the 1950's through the 1960's, and trash it.
Today the GM name carries negative perceptions: rental car level products, shoddy workmanship, poor reliability, outdated technology (four speed transmissions and OHV engines), and embarrassingly bad interiors.
This impacts consumers' (and more importantly, opinion leaders and trend setters') image of the brand.
Hence the absence of cachet (which it did have through the 1960's, but not since).
You and I know this, but as you can tell by the usual GM apologists here Cadillac likely thinks otherwise. The CTS-V is the rough and crude hot rod you speak of not the XLR-V and STS-V, they seem to have a much higher degree of refinement. Don't kid yourself Cadillac wants to be seen as equals with BMW and Mercedes at all cost.
M
You sound like a GM apologist of the highest order. We actually have people here telling us that GM made great cars during the 80s? That is the most insane nonsense I've read yet. Those are precisely the years GM lost their [non-permissible content removed] to the foreign makes. Every GM car my family had during those years were utter and complete junk those are you facts. Fast foward to today. GM makes some decent, even "nice" cars that still manage to be (outside the Corvette Z06) merely competitive. GM misses the details 100 out of 100 times and they never, ever seem to get it right until it is too late. Don't need to have a "study" to tell me what I can see and feel for myself. That is the problem with studies, they only address certain things. Just because a GM car is more reliable nowaday doesn't mean they've fixed their traditional lousy build quality, another finer point lost here.
M