Quote:
Originally Posted by BlaqWhole
How do you know that 50,000 is a "low" number? You're basing your info off of 2002 sales figures. But look at how much these cars cost compared to how much they costed back in 02. GM is bringing in a lot more money per unit than they did back then. Plus you only have sales to go off of. You don't know how much it costs them to make each unit vs how much each unit is selling for. You don't know how much profit they're making off the car. All you have is one number which by itself tells you nothing. Example (and I use this often)...if I make $100K a year, and someone else makes $150K a year, then you can say that the other person MAKES more money than me. Now if I have $25K in expenses and he has $140K in expenses then you could say I HAVE more money than him. So just like income figures without knowing the expenses tells you nothing about a person's financial situation, so to, sales numbers without knowing production costs and profits tells you nothing about how good or bad a vehicle is doing. For all we know, GM might need to sell only 20K units to turn a good profit. We don't know that. And we don't know their fleet sales numbers either. So you're taking a blind guess and speculating.
ALso consider that the Challenger has sold horribly for years. Yet it is still alive and very well and has no indication that it will cease production. Again, their sales are terrible. That alone should tell you that there are many factors involved in whether or not a vehicle will cease production. The way I see it, the Camaro is doing just fine. Is it selling as good as the Mustang? No. But then again, Mustang sales has plummeted too. And see my example above about income. Ford sells the Mustangs for next to nothing...sometimes way below MSRP. The Camaro rarely sells lower than MSRP. So Ford is making little money off the Mustang per unit while GM more than likely is making much more per unit. Therefore the Camaro does not need to sell as many.
Again, this is all speculation.
|
On one hand, sales are sales, and to the average public, sales figures in a segment comparison
paints a certain perception... which
I believe can affect people's buying decisions. If it is assumed by the average public a certain car is supposed to compete in sales numbers with another,
the car that is selling less can present a negative, generalized view to someone who doesn't care to to do detailed research (i.e. Mustang is selling really well, so it must be the better car).
On the other hand, the average public doesn't know the details of a vehicle's business case, in what numbers are needed to make it successful (i.e.
what the profit is targeted to be). Comparing sales numbers to other cars wont tell you this.
This is, in my opinion,
Camaro's current problem: the car is executed in a way that it wants to be the top, value, high-performance coupe (regardless of any car; for me, as an enthusiast, this is why I bought the car). This is not what Camaro's typical competitors (Mustang and Challanger) are and are not executed as such (leaving special variants out of this). At the same time, it seems (this is the public perception part) Camaro wants to compete directly with it's typical competitors in sales. If Camaro is to continue, it needs to pick a path, make it known to the public what the intentions are, and stay to it.