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Originally Posted by ThirteenTwenty
Neither you nor I know how many Alpha vehicles need to be sold to reach black ink for the platform or Mustangs for that matter. I suspect they are well below that number given how poorly the Caddy's have sold and Camaro sales being what they are. I could be wrong , but it's hard for me to believe the production #'s have covered R&D and tooling at this point. Maybe Jim Martin can shed some light?
As far as "If it makes a profit does it justify its continuation?" Thats depends I suppose, If GM feels they could produce another vehicle that would cost similarly in R&D/tooling but sell much more and return more profit then no it doesn't warrant continuation. Same for Mustang, but I believe there is more at stake with axing Mustang for Ford.
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Jim has already shared eough information with us including outright telling us that sales was not even the reason for the Camaro being discontinued from 03-09. Page 48 and post 661. And that was not even the first time he explained this. And I'm pretty sure he explained the same exact thing over on M6G which GSJ frequents. So he (GSJ) has seen this info in great detail multiple times as recently as 2 days ago. Yet he continues to insist that sales are the only thing that matters.
GM is not going to drop the Camaro for some new model and to suggest that is a bit off if you ask me. Neither will Ford drop the Mustang. If you recall, they tried that back in the 90s with the Probe to which they received a very bad reaction and decided against it. I could see GM adding a better selling car to the lineup. Or adopting some features or even calling it a "Camaro". But they are not gonna drop the Camaro for a different model.
It isn't hard to believe that GM covered the R&D costs. They already had the LT1 and LT4 developed since it was in the Corvettes first. Same with the A8 trans. The chassis was shared. The A10 trans was co-developed. And they did not do any crazy revisions...certainly not having to re-build the entire car mid-Gen like Frod had to do with the Mustang. There were no recalls to the extent that Frod had with the GT350 that I remember. So all those items saves on costs tremendously. Running an efficient production plant saves also. So for all you know, GM could have spent very little on the Camaro and therefore only needs to sell a small amount of them to pull a profit. Perhaps the Mustang HAS to sell as much as possible to stay afloat. Perhaps Frod had to allow their engineers to build the PP2 off the books and off the clock and then decided not to throw coolers on it because they could not afford the costs of doing all that. Perhaps the GT500 was delayed due to costs and them not being able to afford to build it. There are soo many things that one could speculate. But if the Camaro is doing as badly as you wanna believe, then why isn't GM budging on price, offering more incentives, aggressively advertising it, etc?? If sales are that poor, wouldn't someone start doing something??