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“The last time we looked at [the G8], we decided that we would continue to import it as a Chevrolet,” Lutz told Automobile magazine. “It is kind of too good to waste.”
44 Comments on “Quote of the Day: Maximum Bob’s Capriciousness Edition...”
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And why is what Lutz now says important? OH! He’s consulting for the New GM. Sheeesh…
Time to start GM Death Watch II.
I think this quote summarizes why the new GM needs Bob Lutz. He wants to continue on with a good product instead of killing it with a brand.
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/07/11/lutz-pontiac-g8-to-continue-as-chevy-caprice-in-u-s-z28-likel/
Autoblog is covering this at the above referenced URL. It’s the logical thing to do really. GM gets one right and then wants to ditch it and Fritz justifies the action through some chiseling, sad-sack corporate hor$eshit weasel words. If Fritz really believes in the “new GM” then he needs to be job #1 and act like it; this car makes too much sense to ditch (and that’s exactly what he wants to do.)
It’s good news but I don’t have a lot of hope for Government Motors with Fritz at the helm
G8 is a great car but a revisioned Vibe could be a volume seller for Chevy. Good gas mileage and a reason to kill the HHR. And they could learn from it, make a smaller model to replace the Aveo!
Thank you Maximum Bob!
Make this happen and I’ll forgive you for the SSR.
Of course it is too good to waste. The G8 was the best American sport sedan since the 1994-1996 Impala SS. Even now, nothing challenges the G8.
Only a few days after being born, and the New GM is already flowing with good news.
rather see it as a Buick Wildcat.
Good move – the G8 is the best 4 door in the GM product line.
I’d like to see the product live on – as a car guy I love the idea of a rear-wheel drive, roomy 4-door that has some grunt under the hood.
The problem? I’m a car nut/relic and that kind of car is *never* going to sell in volume again.
I sure hope they don’t label it the “Caprice.” The Caprice was a tarted-up Impala with Cadillac aspirations. The G8’s performance and handling are its selling points, neither of which were ever associated with the Caprice. If anything, the current Impala should be retagged “Bel-Air” or “Biscayne” and this become the Impala. Or given a new (non alpha-numberic) designation that doesn’t bring to mind the shitty bloated cars in Chevy’s past.
Frank Williams:
Maybe they could call it the Biscayne.
If it’s performance and handling then it should be an Impala SS. It probably deserves the name.
G8 is the best car GM makes. GM might have a chance if Lutz can save it.
Probably will sell as Chevy Lumina, like it’s called in the rest of the world (excluding Oz-land).
The hangers on from Old GM should understand how to do this:
1. W-Body Impala becomes the “Classic” and is sold only to fleet customers.
2. The north american VE is relaunched as the “all-new” Impala complete with SS model (aka G8 GXP). But how does the timing work with the revised VE???
3. When the W-Body replacement on Epsillon II or Super Epsillon is finally ready, launch it as the Caprice (thus stepping on the market of the cousin Buick model).
While I wouldn’t say the G8 is the best American sports sedan currently made (I’d give that honor to the CTS-V) it is a very nice car, and I’m glad to see it stick around.
That being said, I wouldn’t call it a Caprice. The Impala name has more going for it, and the current Impala is a non-starter of interest only to rental fleets. Don’t rename the current Impala – ditch it, and give the moniker to a deserving vehicle such as the G8.
May as well keep the W-Body around if only to keep the Malibu and VE-Zeta out of those markets. Maybe just put the Old GM chicklets on it.
Lutz is right this time. The car is too good to waste – assuming they can make any money importing cars from down under.
Call it the C8.
As an aside, I’m hearing a lot of people -non gearhead type people- saying Pontiac shouldn’t have been killed and that they always associate the brand with performance. I’m begining to think Pontiac still had some legacy to build on, if only they could have focused.
Pontiac had more brand awareness going for it in the US than Buick does by a long shot. How many people would still really rather have a Buick?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUvtCiNhc9Y
BTW, has Buick ever come up with a better tag line than Wouldn’t You Really Rather Have a Buick?
We should have a vote for the all time worst car advertising slogans. I nominate: “Pontiac is Car”.
John – I always chuckle at ‘Kia, the power to surprise’. I doubt I am alone in thinking that the surprises a Kia might offer would likely not be of the positive variety.
Dynamic88 – I heard a lot of people saying the same thing when GM chopped Olds in favor of Buick. Olds had a great car at the time in the form of the Aurora (if only it had been the LS instead of the problematic Northstar in the engine bay, I would jump on a cheap used one in a heartbeat), as well as the best GM interiors outside of Caddy in the other rebadges. I’m not sure what the GM management sees in Buick, after all, the only other halfway to luxury brand out there right now is Mercury, and Ford is slowly but surely killing it off.
I will admit that the Enclave is a great crossover, and that the upcoming LaCrosse seems appealing, but since GM killed off all the nameplats that Buick was associated with – Park Avenue, Century, Regal, why couldn’t those vehicles have come out under a different badge?
I hope he (Lutz) can pull this off. I like the Impala SS moniker… or Chevelle?
What I would like to hear from Bob.. What would give hope that they finally get it!
“The leaner/meaner GM can only afford to develop and maintain a total of X vehicles. The G8 inspires awe. It is EXACTLY what we must do with EVERY model we sell in order to save this company from liquidation. So we are rebranding it as a Chevy and shutting down production of the Boringcrapster 6100
I wish we had the money to sell boring crap right along side cars like the G8. But unfortunately we blew it all to pay for 45 years of Viagra pills for guys that worked 30 years and retired at age 50. In hindsight we realize that it was a big Ponzi scheme, but hey live and learn…”
Everyone still buys the same old Lutz BS.
They’re going to keep the G8 around because they’ve got agreements? Well, wasn’t walking away from just about every agreement GM ever made, with dealers, white collar workers, suppliers, and the UAW the basic deal with Barry O? Of course it was. More Lutz nonsense.
The new GM seems to be the old GM, same old geezers running the show included, absent only a lot of debt, but without a scintilla more of capial.
The G8 is a cool car and it may have a place in the product line-up. But, first there need to be a coherent product line-up.
Truth is, Lutz is a dinosaur, who has done nothing useful for GM, and is mostly feeding his own ego – has for years – and can’t let go.
As long as GM management, whether it’s Obama or Red Ink Rick, keep this guy around, it’s a symbol of how little GM has changed. It’s still in denial, only now the taxpayers are footing the bill instead of the stockholders.
Lutz ain’t no fool. But the people who haven’t fired him are.
If the “G8” (stupid name for a car by the way) is just 1/2 as good as my papas LS5 454 Impala, they have a winner.
Well said Packard! Never a fan of Maximum Bob Putz here either. He wasted more of GM’s resources on crappy RWD niche vehicles over the last decade like the SSR, Solstice, Sky, GTO, trucks, SUVs etc. when he should have been bringing GM a real four door RWD sedan flagship for all brands and a F-body replacement for Chevy and Pontiac YEARS ago.
I’ve got six letters to offer on why the Impala name isn’t going on the G8, repeat after me, R-U-I-N-E-D. Ten years as a FWD rebadged Lumina rental car will do that to a nameplate.
Now why the hell they are bringing the Caprice nameplate back boggles my mind too though.
What I find interesting is the same week we are hearing from the CAW at STAP that the CV/GM/TC/Panther are done in 2011, here’s Maximum Bob Putz back un-retired with a RWD option for fleets/livery just in the nick of time!
Snicker all you want, GM has kicked itself for giftwrapping the easy money that is the police/livery market to Ford’s Panther in the 1990’s with the discontinuation of the B-bodies. They tried getting it back with the 9C3 Lumina, the first gen PPV Tahoe and every PPV Tahoe since, and the 2000 9C1 WImpala and have failed miserably.
I can’t fathom another reason to specifically bring the “Caprice” nameplate back other than to appeal to livery/fleets.
And I should know because I have owned 10 B-bodies and 7 of them were Caprices and two of those are still in my driveway.
From a pure product point of view, I’m happy to see the G8 stick around in any form. It’s apparently a great car (I haven’t driven one but the word of mouth is pretty unanimous). And honestly I don’t think people care that much about the name unless the name carried unfortunate baggage. Bel Air is too far in the past; Lumina was never anything other than a dismal instance of GM at its nadir so I cannot imagine that name coming back. To me, Caprice still has some pleasant historical resonance so…why not?
The real question is whether this decision makes any sense from a business perspective. I haven’t seen any convincing analysis of how much, if anything, GM makes from importing Australian cars, but the anecdotal commentary suggests that the G8 program was marginal at best from the start–another Lutzian performance fantasy without much of a profit rationale.
The change in exchange rates only makes things worse. A year ago the US dollar was worth $AUS 0.96. This month is it worth $AUS 0.79. That’s a notable drop; if the G8 was marginally profitable last year, it’s probably unprofitable now.
Moreover, wasn’t one of the main points of ditching brands to streamline the GM operations? How does splitting Chevrolet’s large-sedan sales into two smaller, less-profitable slices improve things? Seems to me what Chevy needs is a simple set of class-leading cars: Spark, Cruize, Malibu, Impala (or whatever they end up calling the next generation). Same on the truck/CUV side. If Chevy can’t come up with best-in-class products in each category and focus the marketing to make them move, the new GM is in the same old trouble.
A G8 is a far better car than any “Pelosi” would ever be. Therefore, if he has any say-so, having Lutz around at least gives some hope that interesting cars will be built, and the government types will be kept at bay.
The CTS-V costs twice what a G8 does. The G8 is in a price range, it can sold as a mainstream car. When I say the G8 is GM’s best car, here is a car which outperforms BMW for $30K. This car is good enough, re-badge it and sell it. Sell it as a police car, sell it as a premium Chevy, sell it as a Buick. They have their best hitter sitting on the bench, and they are sending Pee Wee Herman to the plate.
Don’t worry about exchange rate. Continue to build the car in Australia for export to other countries with stronger currency, build the G8 in the US for the US market. Now you have hedged against the US $. Dollar goes up, run more shifts in Australia. $ goes down, run more shifts in the US.
Buick Roadmaster, sold primarily as a police car. Perfect. Fleet sales without being a rental lot staple, and lots of cop wannabes will want it.
It’s never going to be a real Impala until it sits on a B-Body or similar platform and at least offers the option to seat six people. Sorry. Name it Chevelle.
Lutz has a point, but he misses a key problem: the G8 is not that good of a car.
Sure, it looks and drives better than the other dreck that GM has produced in North America. But it has some of the same old quality problems that other GM products have.
JD Power confirms it: http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/PrintArticle.aspx?id=39115 The Commodore is more problematic than other cars sold in Australia. Review the table at the bottom of the article, and you can see that the only vehicles that have more problems are other Holdens, and some of the Fords and Volkswagens. Its quality is below other vehicles in its class, and below the market as a whole.
GM clearly has a reputation problem in the US with respect to quality. Unless improvements have been made, the G8 does not appear to be equipped to solve them.
GM needs to take quality seriously. Is there any indication that GM quality isn’t, at best, a hit-and-miss effort that management does not prioritize with any real vigor?
The change in exchange rates only makes things worse. A year ago the US dollar was worth $AUS 0.96. This month is it worth $AUS 0.79. That’s a notable drop; if the G8 was marginally profitable last year, it’s probably unprofitable now.
You have this reversed. A stronger US dollar should make the G8 more profitable (or less unprofitable,) because the corporate mothership has to pay fewer American dollars to buy the vehicle from the foreign subsidiary. The US dollar is stronger when an Aussie dollar costs US$0.79 than when it took US$0.96 to buy one.
What Lichtronamo said. I can’t imagine many Impalas are being sold to non fleet customers anyway. Actually, if you want to preserve the nameplate hierarchy, call the W-body the Bel Air, focus it on the fleet, taxi and police market (remember, Ford is killing the Panther platform, what will they have to offer cops and cabbies?) and call the revived G8 the Impala and the hi-po version the Impala SS. We don’t really need a Caprice. There’s a strong argument that the Caprice was part of the problem anyway, especially beginning around 1971 when it was consciously made into a pseudo Cadillac. That cheapened the Cadillac brand and at the same time stole sales from Olds and Buick.
@Pch101:
The link you provided says its data is based on the time period of ownership from January to June of 2006. The VE Commodore was released in July 2006, so I think those bad scores your article talks about deal with the VZ Commodore.
I haven’t seen anyone on G8 forums-or elsewhere- complaining about the HVAC system or body integrity (the biggest complaints for the Commodore in your link) so it seems that those problems might have been sorted out by now.
However, the JD Powers initial quality scores for the G8 from a few weeks ago were very low. I wasn’t able to find anywhere that the biggest complaints for the car are listed though. Or, a breakdown between the V6 and GT if any difference exists.
TrueDelta rates the reliability of the G8 as just barely above average. The Edmunds long-term G8 had to go in for service early on for a problem with the traction control system, the key fob is having some issues, and worn brake pads at 23000 miles are causing a vibration through the brake pedal. It is also notable that the dealer service they’ve received with the G8 has been absolutely atrocious.
Overall the biggest quality problems I’ve read about with the G8 deal with the electronic key fobs breaking, the V6 doesn’t like to be high in the RPM range, and the transmission on the V8 isn’t as smooth as it should be. There’s also the problem of the G8 having a short options list and not offering things like a Nav system or cooled seats that one could get with the competition.
I still wouldn’t say that “the G8 is not that good of a car” though. It has received universally glowing road test scores. Everybody loves the thing (except for Fritz Henderson it seems). I can’t think of the last time GM released a car that is highly praised by every automotive outlet.
The real test for its future viability in the US is going to be Consumer Reports. That’s the quality score people seem to take as the most credible. If they give the G8 an above average reliability score then I bet a Chevy version will do fine.
The VE Commodore was released in July 2006, so I think those bad scores your article talks about deal with the VZ Commodore.
Of course, you’re right. My point here, though, was to point out that there were historical challenges right out of the gate, and knowing what we do about Lutz, it’s unlikely that he would have bothered to address them.
The JD Power IQS scores for the G8 were terrible. In all four reliability categories (Overall, Powertrain, Body and interior, Features and accessories), the G8 received bottom scores of 2 stars out of 5. (2 stars is the lowest grade.)
I’m not holding my breath that they got it right, given the long track record with previous models. With the possible exception of Cadillac, GM seems rather indifferent to quality issues and only gets things right on occasion.
I am glad to hear the G8 will continue, in whatever guise
The quality isn’t where it has to be. Get it up to German, or better still, Japanese standards and put a lengthy, comprehensive, no-weasel warranty on it and I’ll buy it.
They can call it Sh*t-on-Rye, I don’t care as long as they keep building it.
The Lumina name is truly damaged here, because the car that bore the name was never ever a good vehicle. The Impala was more of a tarted up Caprice than the other way around, at least in the ’90s. The Chevelle name sounds like the best one to me (SS for the GXP equivalent). If they bring the G8 back as a Chevy, I’d like to see a few changes: V6 version gets that DI 3.6 V-6 that was originally rumored for the 2010 G8, autodimming mirror, and memory seating/HID headlights in the premium pkg (would be happy to pay extra for that).
I think it would have to be built in North America to come in at a reasonable price though. I got my G8 GT at $8K off sticker, which is a great buy. Would I have paid sticker for my loaded car? Probably not, as that would have put me in CPO 335i range.
As for reliability, I had a sometimes incorrect compass that required a mirror replacement, and a bad gas cap. Annoying to say the least, but after hearing about the 6-7 problems problems in my coworkers’ 2009 Cayenne (aren’t Porsches supposed to be reliable?), I don’t feel so bad. I did have amazing service when I took my car in, which was never that good when I had my previous car in at BMW dealers. My friend with a GXP hasn’t had a single problem and Edmunds’ G8 GT has been much more reliable than most of their long-termers.
I second the idea of making it a Buick Wildcat. What a great name!
If they do bring it over as a Chevy, though, I think the Caprice would need to replace the Impala.
They don’t seem to have a problem in the middleeast, where they are sold as chevy’s. At least GMH can stop producing dorky pontiac bonnets and just divert a ship bound for Saudia Arabia to California. No need to change the badges. Just add a decent advertising campaign for the “New” Caprice and Caprice SS
I have a feeling that this will be just as successful as when Ford rebadged the Five Hundred as the Taurus…..
A stronger US dollar should make the G8 more profitable (or less unprofitable,) because the corporate mothership has to pay fewer American dollars to buy the vehicle from the foreign subsidiary.
Quite right–I got confused about the direction of the exchange rates. Sorry about that. But the wild gyrations in US-Australian exchange rates surely make a business plan difficult to execute.
US assembly would eliminate that problem, but it would not address the more fundamental question: How does splitting up GM’s large-car sales into two smaller segments on two totally unrelated platforms improve the profitability (or rather, reduce the unprofitability) of “New GM”?
There are LWB Holden Caprice and Statesman models of the Commodore. These have acres of rear leg room, and may suit the NA market as well.
I personally think it should remain the G8 as it’s started to develop a product identity of its own. It’s certainly a step above the Impala rental PoS I hired a few times.
Chevelle makes sense only if it has the performance end of the market. It’s an old name with a muscle car (i.e. compact / mid size body + BIG engine). The G8 is a full size car with some decidedly not so big engines. I wouldn’t call it that unless they keep the models to the very high end, which is not where Chevy needs to be.
So, in short:
* Keep the G8 name. It has market legs of its own.
* Kill the Impala. The G8 is bigger in every sense and a better car
* Bring in more models, including the LWB Caprice … and keep calling it the Caprice.
thanks,
Andrew
Thanks for making me read more RF.
After reading the entire article I have my doubts about this. Sure the G8 is considered a Chevy in other markets, but does that mean it will come HERE as a Caprice? Or will it be kept alive in those other markets as such?
The Impala may be a great seller here, but it’s no match for the much improved, all new Taurus…not even in V8 SS trim. A little tweaking of the Zeta platform would make the G8 a great next-gen Impala.
The Zeta platform (along with the Kappa) is just too good a chassis to kill off.