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As for BMW, no I doubt they bring out anything smaller than the 1 series - they have Mini for the lower end.
Because the G8 is a large car starting at $28K. The new Caddy Alpha will be a compact car starting at $28K. That is like asking why BMW sells a compact 3 series for $35K when you can buy a Civic for under $20k. They are different cars after different segments. The $15k knocks out almost all buyers from the 3 series but yet there is still a goodly volume there. It has pretty much better everything and the 3 buyers feel it is worth it. The Alpha caddy will have pretty much better everything than the G8 and there will be plenty of buyers here and overseas who will buy it for the attributes it has.
Well yea,that is true for all brands up there above $30k. No need for any of them. Sub $30k cars will do what everyone really needs. Whether you like it or not there is a huge market for prestige brands world wide and GM needs to have one there. Around here 3 series took over the young persons market who want to show they made it and want a sporty car to show their youthfulness.
GM doesn't have to kill a brand to effectively get rid of it. As far as I know, there's nothing in the dealer contracts requiring any specific level or type of product. GM could easily make one Pontiac with minimal effort, i.e. the G5, and not bother with any advertising.
And sure Pontiac could go to one model but then they would have a bunch of GMC/Buick dealers with only a couple sedans and they would be in trouble financially. And please do not say kill GMC because there are just too many buyers out there who will not buy a Chevy truck. GM would probably lose 5 points of retail market share it they killed off GMC/Pontiac/Buick and at a huge cost. And those GMC's and Buicks are selling at great profit margins.
I keep wondering why everyone wants to kill off brands. OK I know why, but GM is increasing retail share, the products keep getting better and they are rationalizing the dealers. They still have huge cost issues the imports do not have like the hourly workforce wages, health care cost and a huge costly base of retirees but they are chipping away at these cost.
I just see them having the right combos happening now and sure there are some issues but overall looking good.
By the way, thanks 62vetteefp for the discussion. Although I am not getting much done today. With Oldsmobile gone, I definitely think they have the right mix of brands and shouldn't kill any off. My two biggest beefs right now are they have way too many dealers and they have been mis-managing the brands for so long( are 4 Lambdas really necessary?).
I recently started to look into a replacement for one of my current vehicles and was/am interested in the HHR. Within fifteen miles of my house in upstate NY, there are 11 Chevy dealers. How do you maximize profits on each sale when you're competing against that many places almost exactly like you? Forget about the other foreign and domestic competition let alone all of the other Chevy dealers I have relatively easy acces to in the state.
GM doesn't necesarily need to kill off more brands, but it does need to either pare down the nameplate list, or drastically pare down the model lineup for the non-Chevrolet brands. Right now it has too many hands grabbing for too much to pay proper attention to the needs of each one, which is why GM has been focusing on one or two at a time (Cadillac, Saturn, now Cadillac and Chevy some) and leaving the others close to empty-handed.
The BLS is a premium car smaller than the CTS, and they don't sell any.
Nah, the Lucerne is much bigger than the CTS - it's a full size car, based on the big DTS.
The BTS doesn't sell well in Europe because it's FWD. It's not even available in America.....
Also, as gas hits $4, $5 a gal people aren't going to buy the biggest thing they can afford, like they might have done in the past.
That is exactly the point I am trying to make about Caddilac. Define the brand and stick with it. That BLS should have never existed. If someone asks me to describe Caddilac the words luxury, RWD, powerful would be the first to come out. Caddilac as much as they want it to be, just doesn't fit in most of the EU's mentality I guess you could call it. I still think, especially now with their X drive, Saab needs to make a dedicated run at BMW in the EU.
Throughout my driving experience in the CTS I felt, though nice, it just didn't have that "it", that panache to make me give up a 5 or other luxury vehicle in that range for it. To me it's a great competitor to an IS, G35 or the 3 sedan. Don't get me wrong, it did a lot of things good but and was a decent ride, just not to the point of "I gotta have this vehicle in my stable". Don't get upset, just my opinion.
I don't think they should go after a small Caddy unless they are serious about it and if there is truly a market for it. Just doing it because they "need" or "think they need" a 3- or 1-series contender is wrong. They have to do their homework over it or it could be Cimarron-City all over again. But as others have stated, would this Caddy take sales from sister divisions or in fact bolster Caddy and GM as a whole? Yes, BMW did the 318ti and MB did the C-Class hatch, but both were posers and not taken seriously in the market. And remember, the 1-series is on another mission; to rekindle the "magic" of the 2002tii (especially the 300hp 135i 1-series) and the first couple 3-series generations. Would this new Caddy have the same purpose, to invoke emotion / passion of a past small Caddy? What is the purpose of the baby Caddy? Fill a gap / niche? To place another Caddy under CTS, CTS has to grow up, not so much in size but in substance.
For me, Caddy (and GM overall) has to beat the competition on many levels in order to get me to buy from them again (and I'm a current long time owner). They simply can't make due, but surpass what's out there consistently. I want to go back to "arriving" in a Cadillac, not just "getting there"!
Depends on your def of a platform. A Platform shares the engine cradle, underbody, front of dash (cowl) minimum. With underbody sharing you cannot revise the real size of the car much. Sure you could share engines and suspensions between different sizes but the body is what a platform is measured by.
3 year/36000 mile basic warranty matches Toyota, Honda, Ford, and Chrysler.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
The DTS replacement would be a long, long, long.
exactly. The cradle or engine compartments are shared as are the cowl. This sets up the whole car with locations of all the main components that become fixed in space.
You can make up ways to change the length. The Grand Prix was 2 inches longer than the old Impala on the W platform for more rear leg room. GM did not have to pay for an extra rear underbody tool to get the larger car. The main body had a slip plane with the rear end somewhere around the rear seat. GM did not have to tool up a 2nd rear underbody component. With the Zetas GM has decided to tool up multiple underbodies to allow more flexible lengths. Actually I am not sure how they are doing this.
BUT they are all the same width. No way that you can make a midsize car out of the zeta. It is just too wide. The same would be true of a FWD. You could not share architectures between a Camry and a Corrola. The definition of an architecture is at minimum a shared cowl. If you change the width of the cowl you start to mess with column location and much more. The width of a car is one piece of metal.
Guess it all rest on how you define a platform. I guess if you wanted you could take Honda and say they only have one car platform with huge flexibility. Still have to pay for all those tools so really no savings.
I guess they could - but it would probably be too big, IMO ....probably bigger, heavier than the current DTS. Probably doesn't fit into the CAFE 35 plans...
Of course if CA and the other states get the government to allow them to raise the CAFE to 40, or whatever, SUV's and CUV's will go the way of the dodo and perhaps we will see a revival of large cars. There is a huge market for large vehicles and somebody will have to sell something to meet that market.
Remember the reason SUV's became popular is because large cars were compromised because of CAFE while trucks were not, so the big 3 put their money into the SUV's.
There was a huge market for large vehicles, back when credit was easy and the costs to own and operate them were lower.
Yep, back in say, 1995, when gas was $1.25 a gallon, in inflation adjusted terms that's even cheaper than it was in 1975, so why not drive a Suburban or Explorer if you wanted a 'full size' car....the SUV sort of replaced the big sedans and station wagons people used to buy...
As for the Lambda 'sedan' - I guess if it wasn't for the CAFE 35, it probably would make a nice platform for a big sedan to replace the DTS and Lucerne...maybe a "tall sedan" like the Ford 500....but I don't see it happening
My point earlier was that GM should design a platform to allow for larger and smaller vehicles instead of design special purpose platforms that only allow for one size. Obviously if doing this is much more costly than having 8 different platforms then the current status que is probably best, but GM is not profitable as things stand now.
Big question is what will happen to the CTS next time around. Doubt they will keep the Sigma platform for one car.
If you look below you can see that the underbody width is the same for all 3 of the Sigmas being built today. Width is identical and track is only marginally different due to wheel/tire differences. Interior dimensions are due to differences in the stying and layout of the door panels. The cowl is the same as is the underbody. Now the old CTS was smaller and I believe when the STS came out they tooled up a new underbody for it ( and future iterations) but I am not sure. But the difference is only 2" which is not much of a change. Not enough to build a wide range of market segments.
CTS STS SRX old cts
wb 113.4 116.4 116.4 113.4
Track 62 62.3 62.2 60.3
width 72.5 72.6 72.6 70.6
shoulder 56.6 58.6 58.7 56.6
hip 55.1 54.6 56.3 53.4
How many different car platforms can they get away with minimum?
sub compact FWD (gamma II) Korea
compact FWD(Delta) Korea
mid size FWD (EPS II) Germany
large FWD (none in future as far as I know, but the Eps II would probably be stretched) Germany
compact RWD (Alpha) Austrailia
MId to large RWD (Zeta) Austrailia
So that is the minimum number that can be used. 5 car platforms as defined by the industry. However I could see the gamma and Delta having a very wide number of shared components. Of course there is also the y cars.
Zeta II, presumably, maybe with aluminum control arms or something.
Whoaaa! wow, not sure I know it all but since I was involved in the design and development of vehicles for 23 years from testing, design, development and then a bit of marketing I do have some knowledge of the processes.
Maybe we should look at any other manufacturer and see if they have reduced platforms vs. segments. What other OEM has the same platform across multiple size segments? Is the Civic on the same platform as Accord? How about the sub compact.
If someone could develop a way of sharing underbodies and cowls then the number of architectures could be reduced.
IIRC, Isn't the Odessy, Rigdeline, and Pilot all on the Accord platform???
Toyota uses the Camry platform for the Lexus ES and the Avalon. I don't know how toyota does the rest of their line up.
I do understand that there are some limits to what can be done with one platform design. However, I think that three distinct vehicles could be made out of one platform. Whether this would be cheaper than three different platforms each designed best for one vehicle. My thinking here is that the widths of the bodies could vary by an inch either side of the middle and the lengths could be varied more. That way chevy could get the smallest, pontiac the middle and buick the largest.
I think in the early 50's, the A, B and C bodies were the same basic design, with some size differences.
Scott
What????? Now, nobody will confuse the K car as a world class automobile, but that platform and the amount of vehicles built off of it allowed Chrysler to come back from the brink of bankruptsy and made Iaccocca the Icon of the '80's that he was.
The are all basically in the same size segment. mid sized. Avalon and Camry have exactly the same track, 62 inches. The Avalon is 1" wider at the widest point which is due to syling.
Scott
My thinking was that the global RWD platform could handle biggish mid-size, as well as full size cars. A smaller epsilon platform might replace the epsilon and delta platforms so that small and mid-size (but not biggish) FWD's are on one platform.
The sports car platforms probably won't go away, although how the sky and solstice do will determine their future.
The XLR is probably going to end with no replacement.
With General Motors putting future rear-wheel drive models on hold, the Pontiac G8 could be the only sedan of its kind from the General for years to come. That said, the G8 is good enough that we probably wouldn't mind if it was the only rear-drive sedan GM offered.
This is the kind of news that drives you nuts.
Regards,
OW
Hmmm, somehow I wonder about that. I guess they could kill the anything larger than the CTS and use the Sigma platform for future Caddys.
But, the world is changing and to get the 35 mpg manufacturers will have to some real serious downsizeing as will the consumer. Remember the 80's? Everything got cut and downsized. So it may be right that vehicles the size of the G8 and larger will be gone. So there will be no need for the Zeta platform in 5 years. So I guess I could see it going away and keeping Sigma for a low volume Caddy RWD. The only reason it was really going away was to allow higher volumes on one RWD, lower cost platform-zeta.
My understanding of the sigma platform is that its size range is very limited with the old CTS at the small end and the STS at the larger end. Perhaps the RWD DTS will come from Holden.
The Volt electric drive will require all new platforms anyway to optimize the vehicle design.
Cadillac FWD BLS in Europe gets 48 mpg and has 178 HP. Maybe this is part of solution. People in US will just have to get used to smaller cars to cut down on oil imports and escalating food costs. Ethanol is not the solution.
Maybe GM large RWD cars are doomed because of CAFE. GM knows how to make FWD cars well and may have to adopt this type of platform for all cars except for specialty such as Corvette, Solstice, Sky.
As much as I would like to believe this I cannot. Can you post a link showing a gas powered BLS getting this kind of MPG?
Technically it's 47.9 mpg - but it's a UK site using mpg and I didn't look to see if the g/km fits with our gallons or Imperial gallons.
Cadillac BLS Wagon
OK, article was wrong, it is not 48 but is 40. This still beats proposed 35 CAFE.
If BLS brought to US, people will accept if marketed correctly. Many who can afford a Cadillac and/or entry lev lux may not care about MPG, but the BLS will get them involved in fuel savings whether they like it or not. BLS is decent looking, maybe better than larger DTS or Lucerne. And, the BLS will be a safer handling car than RWD, especially for those in snow/ice belt. GM can market BLS in US as being a legitimate luxury Cadillac (properly appointed for US) and showing that owners are environmentally responsible. This is win-win situation. Cadillac can take credit for leading the way.
OK, article was wrong, it is not 48 but is 40. This still beats proposed 35 CAFE
What does the gas version get over there? Just read an article in C&D and it explained why diesel may not be the answer for our gas problems here.
Summary: Diesel adds $1-2K in additional cost to the car.
diesel output will be very hard to increase due to the type refineries we have here and would take 10 years to add capacity IF someone started to set up a plant. Has to do with how much of gas/diesel they get out of each barrel.
Fro the above reasons diesel is more expensive than gas and if demand goes up will quickly out pace the price of gas.
The BLS as is will not be coming here. Look for all new vehicle.
They have four gas engines: two 2.0 turbos, some E85 version of that, and then a 2.8L V6 turbo. I didn't find any mileage ratings for the gas engines, but they're the same as the Saab 9-3 so I'd assume the mpg is also identical.