Northstar

You can get a less loaded model for cheaper, but as balthy said the Enclave isn't going after Chevy's buyers. The Acadia is also available with nice options for $35k and below.

Hot air balloons are pretty cool. I got to go in one a few years back for about 10-15 minutes.

The sides are rather funky, but I like the front and rear. Hopefully the sides are more like the CLS if they're going for the short decklid look.

I went on a Carnival trip that was a lot of fun. Royal Caribbean is better though, I hear. More upscale and they let you buy drinks in international waters even if you're under 21 as they should (Carnival doesn't). Your ship also sounds bigger, though the one I went on (Valor) had plenty to do.

A Sebring Limited is more than a Mustang GT. I doubt he can afford that if he can't afford the Mustang. C&D did like the interior, but the Mustang and G6 interiors probably make it seem better than it is (as they are both terrible). If it was me, I guess I'd go with the Mustang. G6 interior sucks and it has no trunk, Sebring is way too boring, and Mustang has a bad interior and you see one at every stoplight. If he is considering used, I'd go with something from a more premium brand. Saab 9-3 perhaps.

The Alero is a good choice for the money. The interior is much better than the Grand Am (though still cheap) and it is not as cramped as the Grand Am. My sister actually wanted the GA when she got the Alero, but when she sat in both of them she changed her mind because she felt really cramped in the GA but not the Alero.

I think the Malibu should do well. Sell about 250k/year or so, though it really is rather boring. Better than Accord and Camry? Yes. Better than Altima? I'm not sure, but I'd say the Altima appears to have a bit more flair. That's not always good in this segment.

So it's a BMW R-Class? Meh...

If I had plenty of expendable money and wanted a big, rather pointless (for me), macho truck to drive around when I felt like scaring some Tundra's, this would be it.

Hmm, that's interesting. I guess they're probably high-rpm screamers than low-rpm rumblers in S4 and RS4 form.

Too bad there's no A4 with an engine that sounds that good. S4 and RS4, perhaps, but not an A4.

Lucerne, Enclave, upcoming LaCrosse.

F-150 gets fleeted more. Silverado has been outselling it in retail sales. F-Series also has some insane incentives. Fleet most likely. I have no explanation for this; perhaps the low incentives when compared to Ford and Chrysler was the reason.

Ski-Doos are snowmobiles, I'm not sure how well they'd do in the water I actually forgot that I rode on a rental Yamaha in Florida, and it definitely was a big step down from the Sea-Doos. Possibly because it was a rental, but it didn't have near the power or maneuverability of the Sea-Doos. Yamaha's also look goofy with the little "fountain" shooting up in the back, IMO.

I don't own one, but I've ridden on a couple of my neighbor's. They have Sea-Doo's and I thought they were very nice, and they seemed to think they were the best from their experience with them (they have had other brands in the past, too). I think an Equinox would have no problem towing it, they don't weigh much at all. My neighbors towed one with their truck and the other with their ATV.

Apparently it is expensive enough that it doesn't make business sense to do. I wouldn't think it would cost all that much, but the Lambda comparison is not that similar. First and foremost, the Lambdas are much higher volume than the Velite, and more similar as well. The Enclave is very different, but the other two are the same A-pillar back and all seem to have nearly identical suspension tuning and such. The Velite and Camaro would be different in that sense. Also, they all share everything on the interior besides the door panels and dash. Same seats, storage bins, etc. I'd say the Acadia and Outlook are 99% the same not counting the front end, dash, and door panels. Velite and Camaro would probably not share anything you can see, and that is much more expensive and again, it is at a very low volume.

You're comparing a $50+k car to a $20+k car. I would hope the $50k one would be much nicer looking. I'm not saying the LaCrosse is a great car, but that's not a very good comparison at all. Wait until the next LaCrosse to see how Buick is going to be. It should be very similar to the Chinese one seeing how they are being developed together as one model for the most part, and it will show us how the "global" Buick will turn out. That's like comparing the Malibu to the CTS and saying the Malibu is complete crap because it doesn't compare in the least to the CTS.

Oh please... the cost of producing the Sixteen is a lot more than the cost to put 2 V8s together. Finally someone with some sense in this topic.

You really think GM is worried about a few million on concepts? The $5 million GM probably spends on concepts each year is nothing compared to what they spend on other projects. $2 million into a project being worked on is pocket change when those projects run up $500 million in R&D anyways. Another $2 million is nothing and wouldn't make any product significantly better. They also put lots of money into the engine/transmission plants. Again, $2 million is not going to prevent them from making it have more capacity. If they want X number of transmissions to be produced, they're going to spend the amount of money it takes to make the plant capable of doing so. They don't say, "oh, we need $250 million but we can only use $248 million because we spent $2 million on that concept." As Lutz said, GM has actually made quite a few concepts. Why build concepts? Well, they get you lots of feedback on what people want to see in the future. Auto shows are like huge focus groups, GM gets tons of feedback on what people like and what they don't like. I don't know the costs involved in focus groups and what the average amount of money GM spends on focus groups for a vehicle is, but I'd say $1 million on a concept isn't too big of a price to pay when you probably have 10 million people give you feedback on it (or $.10 per person, which I'm sure is less per person than a focus group). It's not going to be as simple as connecting 2 V6s. Even if that's the basis, they aren't going to put them together and call it a day, obviously. There's going to be a lot of new stuff developed for the V12 (if it happens) and they're going to have to do a lot of testing. The same goes for a V16. It's not as though the Sixteen's engine was tested and such and ready to go. Yes, it worked, but notice that they never let anyone see what it could really do, and it was never tested. I bet the most amount of power it has ever had to exert is about 250HP. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but again, it's not as easy as you make it sound. It would take a ton of work and testing to make it so that it was reliable and didn't have all sorts of problems. The other problem with making the V16 is the cost. If you bolt 2 LS7s together and have to do some more modifying, you're looking at a $40-50k engine. I realize it's going into a very expensive car, but in your previous post you said "if they price it at around the 6 figure mark... they can make a hefty profit." Well, when the engine is going to cost $40k, and the transmission isn't even accounted for in that, you've only got $60k to work with before you run into your for sale price (if you meant $100k). Then you'll want it to have all the bells and whistles (NAV, big sunroof, massaging seats, leather lined throughout, $8k worth of rims and tires, heated and cooled seats throughout, reclining rear seats, infotainment center, etc etc etc and you haven't even begun to account for anything other than the "wow" features or the huge R&D costs). If the XLR-V has a price tag of $100k, GM would command at least $300k for the Sixteen, and people aren't going to pay for that when you have the Phantom for not much more. Obviously, they know a whole hell of a lot more about the costs involved in producing such a vehicle than you (or me, or anyone here) and if they were going to make a "hefty" profit, they'd be green-lighting it. Oh please... it wouldn't be that hard? Think again... For everyone thinking the Sixteen is so doable, consider what you're asking GM to do: In order for you to get your 1000HP, you're going to have to put two LS7s together. LS7s cost $15k as a crate engine, which doesn't include the exhaust system or some of the other things such as the dry sump system. I'm guessing those push it to about $20k/engine. But you don't want just one of them, you want two. Price per engine: $40k. Now for your heavy-duty transmission. GM usually charges about a $1k premium for an automatic in such things as the HD trucks and in the CTS. That's in addition to the cost of the manual, and this transmission would be one-of-a-kind so I'm going to say it would need to cost $7.5k/tranny. Current price of your vehicle (which does not include anything besides an engine and tranny: $47.5k). Now, we're going to need a premium and very expensive suspension to put this vehicle on. I don't have a clue what that's going to cost per vehicle. I'll go with $10k, which I'm guessing is a bit on the cheap side. Current price of vehicle: $57.5k. Since this vehicle is the standard of the world, we're going to need the best sheetmetal available. Aluminum sounds good enough, what does that cost? It's not going to be cheap... Now to actually make that expensive suspension driveable, we're going to need some nice wheels and tires. Big ones, too. The rear tires have to be able to put 1000HP down to the ground. We're probably looking at $8k worth of wheels and tires. Current price: $65.5k, and without an interior. I could go on, but I have no idea what interior materials cost and I think I've made my point. And remember, you haven't figured out how you're going to build this vehicle either. Are you going to build a new facility to build it at, or hire a coachbuilder? Do you have $500 million to spend on R&D to make this vehicle absolutely perfect which it must be if it is going to be the Standard of the World? That doesn't include any of the cost of producing the vehicle or buying all the parts and materials for it, though. Good luck selling them at the price you're going to have to charge, too. So, who thinks the Sixteen is still a reasonable project to undertake, and who still thinks GM can make a profit.

The sub-CTS car will be a 3-Series competitor and the CTS will move up to the 5-Series class (as evidenced by the new one... I'd say the interior is very competitive for that class). The DTS/STS will be made into one model and compete against the 7-Series. Cadillac is in transition right now and that's why this idea seems sort of odd. The CTS currently competes with the 3-Series in price, so something under it suggests a $25k car; however, by the time that car is out (2011?) the CTS will have moved up a notch and the next one (around 2013?) will move into the 5er territory for good. I think there will be about 2 years where the BLS(?) and CTS cannibalize each other, but after that I think there will be a clear division.

No, the owners wouldn't care. However, Cadillac's image is not good enough to sell a $300k car. It can't sell $70k STS-Vs, $80k XLRs, or $100k XLR-Vs. You want them to start selling a $300k car when they can't sell exa car priced at 1/4 of that? You statement about the Velite is exactly the thinking that got GM in trouble. "Oh, this car is really cool, but the rest of our lineup is not very good, so let's make it and then we can have 1 good car that won't sell in high volume." GM is doing what it should do now: Before spending a large amount of money on a vehicle that is not going to sell in very big numbers, why not fix your bread and butter cars first? I'd rather see a great LaCrosse and Lucerne and no Velite than a mediocre LaX and Lucerne and a Velite. The first possibility makes a Velite-like vehicle more possible down the line. The second (yours) makes a dead Buick more possible down the line... and no Buick means no Velite. Decisions that make business since is what it is. GM doesn't have the money to make all these expensive cars that won't sell in any volume. Chrysler didn't build the Firepower or ME412. Are those examples of excuses? No, those are also smart decisions because Chrysler doesn't have the money to build them either. The Bel Air was really boring, nothing special about it at all. As I said above, I'd rather see Buick get it's bread and butter stuff right before it starts making a low volume car. If the bread and butter vehicles don't sell because their funding went to building a halo, that halo won't be around long anyways, because the brand won't be around long. They would have to sell a good number of Sixteens to make a profit. Do you know how much R&D goes into an ultra-luxury vehicle? If it was made as exquisite as the concept, GM would have to sell it at about $500k for a profit to be made, I think. Last I checked, Rolls Royces were $350k. Which one do you think buyers are going to pick? Not the Sixteen. Not unless they set the sales charts on fire with it. It costs a ton of money to develop a vehicle like that and it's not cheap to produce either. No it wouldn't. The Phantom is only $350k. They'd rather "rollin' in a Rolls" than in a Cadillac. No, the concept itself cost $2 million because it was a one-off. Even still, it would be really expensive, I think. More than the Phantom.

The Silverado with the G80 would destroy the Tundra in a tug-of-war regardless of what engine it had.

Very contradictory, no? First you say you can't tell anything, then you say the face (that you can clearly see is basically the Tundra) is going to make it aggressive and stylish... so can you tell or not? Anyways, I don't think the Tundra's front end is too attractive, and I will be very surprised and astonished if Toyota's sales don't start to fall with all of their horrific new designs. There must be some good $h! out there if there is a countless number of people who think the new Toyota's have any sort of attractiveness at all. Then again, maybe the people who buy them really don't care if they drive an ugly car and therefore we shouldn't care if they buy them.

Who would ever pay $50k for this? A Corvette with a few options can be had for less than that.

Did you not read the previous posts? It's available as a dealer-installed option.