[Evergreen6]

Originally Posted by lbls1

Lets take a good look at this. Mary's ship isn't the only one with gaping holes in its side. There is not one, that correct, not one manufacturer short of BMW and Mercedes (I'm not happy with those marques either) that is producing any meaningful or desirous content in terms of new automobiles. It is apparent that the trend in cars is the crossover body style (the carry all but with no meaninful content). In essence, these are rolling refrigerator-freezer style transportation, complete with the door thunk sound and door chimes. I am sure that technology dollars have gone into the design of these vehicles, but aside from safety, one crossover looks just like any crossover vehicle. No styling cues, no aspiration, no sense of style.

Now, if Barra has played a signifcant role in Chevrolet's decline, then certainly she should take blame for it. If she really wants to be remembered as an effective leader, then she should also admit her mistakes and take corrective measures in putting out meaningful car products. I'm sure all of GM's news isn't doom and gloom, but they are a far cry from automotive's glory days.

Your opinions are just that, and you have every right to be wrong as you enjoy

It's pretty hard to argue some extremely significant cars haven't been produced under Barra's leadership including the C8, Blacking, 6th Generation Camaro, and mass-production EV's. Look at their truck lineup. We didn't get that under Ackerson or Wagoner.

[Martinjlm]

Originally Posted by m6-lt1

I’m having a hard time understanding why y’all think Barra is running GM into the ground. The company has been more profitable under her than the last person in charge and probably more than the person in charge before that person.

I don’t like that the Camaro died under her leadership and I hate what happened to the corvette (no manual and ridiculous starting price now). I can’t say I wouldn’t have killed the Camaro too if I was in charge. The car didn’t sell. As ceo it’d be my job to make the company as much money as possible. Of course I’m killing a poor selling name on a very expensive platform. While it sucks that’s what ANY CEO would do.

I wish GM and other companies made cars I liked still but I hate to break it to y’al but we are the minority. There just aren’t many enthusiasts left for them to consider making more enthusiast vehicles.

If I was CEO of any car company I’d most likely opt to kill all my rwd platforms because front drive cars are cheaper to manufacture and would have a few awd cars. There just isn’t that many folks to cater to who would want a rwd option. While it would pain me as a car guy to do that the $100 dollar bills I’d be rolling around on on my bed would make my tears go away.

Dude, please stop making sense. That’s not what this thread is for.

[olrocker]

Originally Posted by Evergreen6

Your opinions are just that, and you have every right to be wrong as you enjoy

It's pretty hard to argue some extremely significant cars haven't been produced under Barra's leadership including the C8, Blacking, 6th Generation Camaro, and mass-production EV's. Look at their truck lineup. We didn't get that under Ackerson or Wagoner.

Rick Wagoner greenlighted the return of the Camaro 5th Gen back in around 2006-07 after the overwhelming success of the prototype making the autoshow rounds.

They were working on 6th Gen design by 2013 under Dan Akerson. Surely the 6th Gen was too far along in development when Queen Mary took her throne in 2014, so she pretty much had little to do with it other than maybe a color choice.

I bet Ed Welbourne and Scott Settlemire are glad to be retired.

There’s an interview with Bob Lutz on YouTube from maybe 3-4 months ago where he literally said the 6th Gen Camaro was the best chassis GM ever made and it’s a shame they are cancelling it.

Thats the guy who should have been CEO 20 years ago.

[ChevyRules]

Originally Posted by olrocker

Rick Wagoner greenlighted the return of the Camaro 5th Gen back in around 2006-07 after the overwhelming success of the prototype making the autoshow rounds.

They were working on 6th Gen design by 2013 under Dan Akerson. Surely the 6th Gen was too far along in development when Queen Mary took her throne in 2014, so she pretty much had little to do with it other than maybe a color choice.

I bet Ed Welbourne and Scott Settlemire are glad to be retired.

Wagoner also sent GM into bankruptcy chasing to keep the sales title.

Akerson bailed and ran and left the ignition debacle for Mary to handle.

I wouldn't classify either as good CEO's.

Car enthusiast products may have come out under them, but they created crisis's for GM as a company.

[Bhobbs]

Originally Posted by Evergreen6

Your opinions are just that, and you have every right to be wrong as you enjoy

It's pretty hard to argue some extremely significant cars haven't been produced under Barra's leadership including the C8, Blacking, 6th Generation Camaro, and mass-production EV's. Look at their truck lineup. We didn't get that under Ackerson or Wagoner.

The Blackwing debacle is not a great example of success. How they managed to drop the ball on something with so much hype is shocking.

The 6th gen Camaro flopped. A parts bin special with the bare minimum of development, ignoring all of the issues the 5th gen had.

The new Colorado is another cost cutting special. One body style, one powertrain, cheap lighting, limited options, and a damn prop rod instead of hood struts.

The Silverado and Sierra are a little better but that’s because they make so much money. Still, where’s the Raptor or TRX competitor?

The C8 is the only GM vehicle that is actually doing anything interesting.

So sure, she’s making profit at the expense of interesting and inspired vehicles. Can she maintain the success selling blandness? She’s fortunate most people just want 4 wheels to get from A to B.

[snizzle]

Originally Posted by Bhobbs

The Blackwing debacle is not a great example of success. How they managed to drop the ball on something with so much hype is shocking.

The 6th gen Camaro flopped. A parts bin special with the bare minimum of development, ignoring all of the issues the 5th gen had.

The new Colorado is another cost cutting special. One body style, one powertrain, cheap lighting, limited options, and a damn prop rod instead of hood struts.

The Silverado and Sierra are a little better but that’s because they make so much money. Still, where’s the Raptor or TRX competitor?

The C8 is the only GM vehicle that is actually doing anything interesting.

So sure, she’s making profit at the expense of interesting and inspired vehicles. Can she maintain the success selling blandness? She’s fortunate most people just want 4 wheels to get from A to B.

Toyota and Honda seem to do just that. Streets around here seem to be littered with RAV4s and CRVs (many are hybrids, GM has no answer). If full size trucks and SUVs struggle, not sure what GM would do other than look to the tax payer again.

[m6-lt1]

Originally Posted by Bhobbs

So sure, she’s making profit at the expense of interesting and inspired vehicles. Can she maintain the success selling blandness? She’s fortunate most people just want 4 wheels to get from A to B.

The final sentence you wrote is exactly why she’s been a successful CEO. It would lose the company money (because the resources could be used on another bland vehicle development for the masses that would be more profitable) if she green lighted something cool like a 7th Gen V8 Camaro, Chevy SS/Chevelle remake, Silverado with an LT4, etc. There just aren’t enough buyers for those types of vehicles. If we think Camaro sales are bad go look at Supra, Nissan Z, etc sales. It’s even less. There just aren’t many buyers for 50+k sporty cars anymore.

If I were a board member with a lot of shares in the company and she presents to me a slide with profit/loses by each vehicle in the lineup and I saw how small the profit was on the Camaro/CT4/5 I’d ask her why. After she tells me why I’d tell her she better drop it from the lineup and make something more people want if she wants to keep her job as would the rest of the members. It’s just the unfortunate truth.

The only way a car company can make multiple cool enthusiast products is if they either don’t go public and/or charge a high amount for each vehicle (Porsche for example).

[Evergreen6]

Originally Posted by Bhobbs

Can she maintain the success selling blandness? She’s fortunate most people just want 4 wheels to get from A to B.

Billions of dollars in profit seem to indicate your assertions are merely opinions, but you do have a point about the majority of buyers are looking for nice appliances on wheels. And so goes building and selling product that is in demand and returns profit.

Another hybrid full-size is being discussed because yeah, GM is the #1 seller of full-size pickups in the US (the world?). It seems Barra is staying on top of the game. Gas, diesel, electric, and hybrid.

I find it kind of hard to $hit on the Camaro since I assume most of us here own one or are dedicated enthusiasts. The 6th gen was literally the $40k BMW M3 that actually makes cool V8 noises and goes fast. If it's such a parts-bin piece of junk, get rid of it.

[arpad_m]

We don't care how much money GM makes, it's what they want, not us, and they aren't our families but a bland corporate entity nobody cares about apart from its actual products.

Indeed, we care about interesting cars and trucks, novel ideas that are useful and/or exciting, which is all but missing, so our opinion on GM's management is not positive, nothing wrong with that. If GM makes a truckload of money from manufacturing in China and Mexico, fine, but no enthusiast cares.

[Malbjey]

Doesn't GM have the most robust enthusiast portfolio right now amount the big three?

CT4-V, CT5-V, Corvette?

What does Ford have? Three thousand different Mustangs. Wow. They don't even have any performance sedans. What does Dodge have? Three million different Charger and Challenger variants. All of them boats. All of them marked up through the roof too, on decades old platforms.

You guys are butthurt because the Camaro is gone. Fine. That doesn't mean GM is failing.

The car sold like shit. You're blaming Barra like she personally designed the shitty trunk opening and shitty visibility. You know--the main criticisms of the car and the primary reasons why people didn't buy it versus the Mustang.

The big 3 had been putting out a lot of shit products for decades. If anything they are much more competitive now versus the 80s and 90s where the Japanese were eating their lunch. But no lets blame Barra for being a DEI/Woke/Affirmative Action/Political hire just because those are the buzzwords today. Lets ignore decades of GM languishing under white males.

[olrocker]

Originally Posted by Malbjey

The big 3 had been putting out a lot of shit products for decades. If anything they are much more competitive now versus the 80s and 90s where the Japanese were eating their lunch. But no let’s blame Barra for being a DEI/Woke/Affirmative Action/Political hire just because those are the buzzwords today. Let’s ignore decades of GM languishing under white males.

GM might have started building some garbage in the 70s, but from about 1978-87 they got a lot of things right. Cimarron, HT4100, and Olds 350 Diesel combined to devastate the company but the non-diesel C and G body mid and full sized cars sold like hotcakes and were super reliable and well built. IIRC the ‘85-87 Cutlass Supreme was one of the best selling cars in America, and all those G-bodies in every division were 150,000-200,000 mile cars so long as they didn’t rust out.

The downsizing or “rightsizing” of the Chevy Caprice in ‘79 was an overwhelming success. The car didn’t lose sales and fail in ‘96 because it was a full sized family sedan, it failed because in ‘91 they threw the inverted bathtub on the chassis and filled it with Fisher Price plastic. And that’s an insult to Fisher Price.

In the process of Moving to the front drive, smaller, downsized C and W chassis from ‘85 to ‘88 they GM lost their backsides. The cars looked like inverted bathtubs, had hard, cheapened plastic interiors that squeaked and rattled when brand new, and felt like crap compared to their predecessors. Replacing power window regulator motors with zip-tie ribbons to save cost was my personal favorite part of the fun (don’t ever try to roll them down if it’s cold out - you won’t get them back up till summer!) The only thing good to come out of it was the Series I 3800.

The company lost billions from that move. The point is did people go to Honda and Toyota because GM stopped building cars people wanted, or did GM try to be just like Honda and Toyota but failed miserably? Either way the mark was missed - they needed to continue building cars that were American, not try to be like Japan.

[Evergreen6]

Originally Posted by Malbjey

What does Ford have? Three thousand different Mustangs. Wow.

Pure shade. It made me laugh out loud. And it's so true.

[genxer]

Congratulations! They've milked a bull market letting dads keep up with the new truck Jones's, and giving old guys their trophies. Cadillac has their ultimate-drama-free-driving-machines. Even the Vette was given to boilerplate exotic for less people. They fixed things by giving the external validation crowd what they wanted. That is a job that's done. Except they can't match those smart Japanese with appliances, good thing they can't do sport or big trucks. (sarcasm)

I've blamed shitty product planning for the Camaro. They vampired off it to give more life to Cadillac. They've been willing to sacrifice it for that goal, going back to the '02 end. Other company f*ckups are immaterial. Enthusiasts are the canary in the coal mine for brand entropy. The drop off lags. Maybe a downturn will speed it up.

So, shake the woman's hand and tell her she needs a succession plan, and the current brain trust's vision needs replaced with predjudice. She would hopefully have enough fortitude and integrity to fire any bootlicker, virtue signaller, foreign inferiority cancer.

[Martinjlm]

Originally Posted by olrocker

Rick Wagoner greenlighted the return of the Camaro 5th Gen back in around 2006-07 after the overwhelming success of the prototype making the autoshow rounds.

They were working on 6th Gen design by 2013 under Dan Akerson. Surely the 6th Gen was too far along in development when Queen Mary took her throne in 2014, so she pretty much had little to do with it other than maybe a color choice.

I bet Ed Welbourne and Scott Settlemire are glad to be retired.

There’s an interview with Bob Lutz on YouTube from maybe 3-4 months ago where he literally said the 6th Gen Camaro was the best chassis GM ever made and it’s a shame they are cancelling it.

Thats the guy who should have been CEO 20 years ago.

As head of Product Development Mary Barra had more to do with 6th Gen getting greenlit BEFORE she was CEO than after. As head of Product Development, all the Vehicle Line Executive Chief Engineers including Tadge reported directly to Mary. Al reported to Tadge. If Mary didn't want 6th Gen to happen, Akerson would have never seen the business case.