LTB51

Depends if you are going for profit or volume I guess. For volume, ideally GM could have a brand for every individual person. Not so good for profit. GM's volume is based on an unprofitable model. Haven't they seen that Simpsons where Homer designs his ideal car and bankrupts his brother? When Buick has a minivan, you know something is horribly wrong. I think 20% is just on the way to < 15%. GM should be planning based on that.

Big time demand from child sex offenders for yound boys and girls. Lots of money to be made. Perhaps GM could get into that game as well? When sex offenders stopped asking for 5 year old boys, GM could stop offering them. Why blame GM for offering what people want? Ok, so that was a bit extreme but you get the point. Sometimes there is a higher cause than making money. Perhaps terrorism funded by oil or diamonds isn't it. GM's small car/hybrid offerings are very poor. Many of them are made by other companies. GM put their resources into getting SUVs to market instead of hybrids or a good small car. Now they are "capping" gas prices. You may not like the message, but it certainly seems to Fit (pun intended!).

Good point. But a slight correction. I believe all the GMT-900s saw sales declines. At least the Avalanche, Yukon, Tahoe and Suburban all declined.

No, I don't think they do. At least I don't remember the last time I saw one....

+ ~3000 Escape/Mariner + ~2900 Civic + ~500 Accord + ~100 Insight ~20,000 Hybrids/Month

I believe it is due for a redesign next year. Not bad for an old model against a lot of new cars.

I think you are being too optimistic. They've got to address quality, resale, reliance on fleet, negative impressions, legacy costs, incentives, poor interiors, hybrids, delphi, pension, etc. Even if they manage to do all that (and how many years will that take?) they will have just caught up to where Toyota/Honda were years ago. If they lower fleet sales drastically they will have lower sales than probably Ford and Toyota. I'm not sure the weak management that got them to this point has the balls to follow through.

Good point. GM totally missed on hybrids. They don't seem to be any good at making their own small cars either. And they have been selling their stake in the companies that can.

The old impala was as ugly as sin. The new one looks much better.

Honda could pass DCX in the next year or two as well.

Aren't the Avalanche, Yukon, Tahoe and Suburban all examples of redesigned trucks rushed to market? Not a good sign that they are all down already.

FOG, why aren't you happy with this media bias? GM did worse than predicted here and Chrysler much worse. Here we have an example of the media actually making GM look better than it is! Yay!

I believe Honda and Toyota are both up > 10%.

How do you know? What is the source of that information? (I'm not doubting you, I just think that kind of information should be more publicly available.)

You know how you know when you had a bad month? When the 3rd best PR you could come up with is a vehicle "keep(ing) pace".

I can't wait to hear FOG's rant on the bias of the media!

I wonder if it was the same glue that is causing the Alero dashes/interiors to separate?

Sports4 looked very good. This is bland like the Aura.

I thought they defaulted to Saturn. Lutz is only half right. But it is a good distraction technique. The real reason GM isn't competitive in that market (despite their continued attempts at it) is that they aren't competitive on quality and resale value. Of course if a consumer has to choose between two bland choices they will take the one with better resale and quality. The flip side is that you can make a wild looking car like the 300 that will sell well, but you also have to deliver the quality and the resale value. Ask anyone who owns a 300 how many electrical problems they've had (it is a Mercedes after all!). Don't make people choose between quality and resale or cutting edge design. Stop whining and making excuses and give them the whole package!

This gets too much play. They made that many more yen relative to USD, but the yen is worth that much less in terms of USD. It works out to no gain at all. Plus, we should be looking at this as a positive. Think of how many more yen GM's 1Q profit is thanks to the exchange rate. :AH-HA_wink:

Lets be honest... most of this is just bitching because we don't like results. Many of the complaints on that site are irrelevant. Many of them apply to JD Powers as well. But where is the site complaining about JD Powers? We now know that JD Powers is terribly inaccurate.... currently by as much as 40% by their own admission. And even the changes they have made to rectify it don't address their two biggest problems: 1) These changes will mean that JD will be up to 40% more accurate than they were previously. I don't yet have all the details of the new methodology. But if, as the PR suggests, they just added questions on more "areas" of potentital quality issues, there is no guarantee that the survey isn't still missing "areas" (as it was before). Theoretially the next iteration could improve the accuracy yet again.... perhaps the current survey is greater than 100% off. 2) JD still considers an impression that the suspension is too tight as an equivalent quality issue to the engine having a catastrophic failure. That is a joke. But perhaps the biggest joke is that, in spite of the known inadequacies of JD, there is still a web site complaining about absolutely meaningless items such as the CR response rate.

Gives a bit of an indication about how accurate the survey has been in the past, and perhaps explains some of the more bizzare ratings they have given. But this still doesn't address the real flaw of the methodology... a feeling that the suspension is too tight has the same weight as an engine blowing up. Do both have an equal effect on quality? Not at all. This should also give JD an excuse to raise the price of the results significantly.

Well I can't figure out how GM is able to sell their current minivans, but I see them everywhere. Perhaps Joe and Jane Minivan really do want to pretend that they bought an SUV? Personally, Dodge's whole new boxy look for their SUVs (and I guess their vans) seems incredible ugly to me.

Probably clearing them out for the new model.

Kind of amazing to see the TSX coming on strong like that two years after introduction.