You can send them $250 a month in payment of a new car or truck. Buy a few of them while you are at it, one for you, the wife, the kids, grandma and grandpa, your uncle, your 2nd cousin, and pick me up one while your at it.

 

Your suggestion is really the only true way to help out the company, I don't think a 50.00 charity donation from a few people is going to do anything more then buy a few GM execs. lunch for the day.

 

I think that the post earlier hit the nail on the head. You can't make people an inferior product for decade after decade, then wonder why no one wants it anymore. I hope GM can pull out of this tail spin, but until then I will be doing my part by sending them $289 a month for the GTO.

BTW: When Harley Davidson was in trouble, didn't the government place limits on the number of bikes imported above 'X' CCs? Would the government do the same to help GM & Ford by allowing a limited number of imported cars to be sold? Not that I think it would, or should happen. I am just wondering if that could happen.

 

Well,

If you really wanted to save GM, you could start pushing for nationalized health care. It's a complicated issue, and there are lots of opinions on both sides, but when GM's healthcare and legacy costs are $1200+ Per car and Toyota's are only like $200 or so, some simple math will show that that's the difference betweeen gigabillions in profits vs billions in losses.

 

ahh geeze, this post got moved into 5th gen forum.

this could get very funny very quick.

 

1. GM started going downhill when they put all thier eggs into the SUV basket. Suddenly caving in to the UAW during the '98 strike didn't help either.

2. GM throughout the 1980s was tearing itself apart. Cadillac became a joke. They came within a whisker of turning the F-body into a version of the W car. And GM's CEO at the time, Roger Smith, went on a buying spree that almost on the day he retired, cause GM's finances to implode. This all but wiped out & delayed new products (ie: the C5) and cost his replacement (car guy, Robert Stempel) to get booted out before he even had a chance to turn things around.

3. Check Old's sales figures before GM killed it. GM invested BILLIONS in Olds. Aurora was it's own body. Old's got their own version of the Northstar V8 and even a Northstar V6. GM redid every car in the Old's lineup while other divisions made do with what they had. They got their own SUV. In 2003, the entire Oldsmobile division was outsold by the Saturn Ion (103K vs 117K in case you wondered). Olds was hopeless.

4. Daewoo enabled GM to move the Cobalt upmarket, and profitably sell a car for 12K (list price, w/o rebates).

5. The '89 Turbo T/A was expensive as h*ll when it was new! It cost as much as the starting price of a Corvette! It sold barely a couple of thousand, if I remember. Hardly a ringing endorsement, and it was meant as an image vehicle. Ditto Syclone & Typhoon. Both hyper expensive, both sold in very low numbers, and both barely a drop in the bucket.

6. The current trucks (even with the latest sales declines) are selling better than they did before they got "car like rides".

7. Cavalier looked nothing like GM's other low end cars?! You gotta be kidding me!! A Cavalier didn't look like a Firenza, or a Cimmaron, or a Sunbird, or a Skyhawk? They all even went so far as having the same dashboards! At least the Cobalt isn't shared with another division in the US.

9. Finally, as I mentioned before, the timeframe you point to as GM's finest hour (late 80s early 90s) was the exact timeframe GM came the closest to going belly-up as it's ever gone in it's history...... including today!

Hopefully, this all puts some perspective on some of your points.

 

Not true:

1. The Aurora was based off the Seville platform, with a 112.2 in wheelbase.

2. Own version, kind of. The Aurora V8 was a slightly smaller displacement, 4.0 vs. 4.6, not a totally reworked Northstar. They'd have been better using a 4.6 with 275hp, as the Lucerne is, instead of a 250hp 4.0 version.

3. The DOHC 3.5 V6 started out in the Intrigue and Aurora and was going in, at least, the Grand Prix if Oldsmobile wouldn't have been phased out.

4. GM re-did the lineup as it goes for styling for Olds, yes, but styling changed for all the other lines too in time with their product cycles.

5. Own SUV? The Bravada and Silhouette were shared corporate platforms.

6. MY2003 was AFTER the announcement of the phase-out. What else would you expect. Before time, their numbers were not far behind Buick, as I recall.

 

$50 can feed a starving GM executive for 3 whole days. Have heart, donate today.

 

Red's gonna have a ball with this one.

 

Are some of you guys serious? Anybody who would 'donate' money out of their pocket for nothing in exchange to GM has just raised the GM fanboy flag about as high as it can possible go.

 

 

The Aurora body was a few years ahead of its time, and maybe a little too aerodynamic.
Olds was just begining to hit its stride when killed, the Intrigue and Alero were a step ahead of GM counterparts, at least visually, just needed some time for public reaction. And some hotter Buick powerplants would'nt have hurt, like the SC3800. Today they are still selling good.
Only, I believe, the Silhouette and Bravada should have been left to Chevy & GMC truck divisions.
Same applies to Pontiac.

The Aurora and Alero look right at home even with today's NEW cars...

 

1. Aurora came out in '95 on a massively upgraded G body. Seville became based on this chassis in '98.

2. Very very true. The point is the engine was a premium engine unique to Olds (though based on Cadillac)

3. Grand Prix was never slated for the quad cam V6. Death of Olds had no bearing on the plan, and if anything would have made putting the engine in the Grand Prix even more attractive... just like how the Bonneville GXP inherited Old's cammer V8.

4. Oldsmobile got facelifts across the board and a new logo. Aurora wasn't shared with any other division till GM later used the chassis for Cadillac, Buick, and Pontiac.

5. True, the minvans were shared with all divisions (save Cadillac). But outside of Chevy, only Oldsmobile got their own SUV.

6. Oldsmobile's sales plunge actually slowed down after the announcement was made, before dropping again. Olds dropped 23% before GM's announcement. The following year it dropped just 17%. It wasn't till 2002 that Olds started to plunge (32% that year).

Bottom line is that no matter how much you and I think it was a mistake to kill off Oldsmobile, GM invested $3 billion in new products for Olds; spent additional money in an extensive "It's not your father's Oldsmobile" ad campaign; made Oldsmobile the leading GM division as far as quality as it pitted Olds against Japanese luxury brands like Infinity & Lexus with high tech engines; then finally resorted to a "No money down, no payment for 12 months" gimick, and still no success.

GM announced that it was phasing out Oldsmobile December 13, 2000.

Oldsmobile produced 216,801 vehicles in 2000.
Saturn which had essentially little investment since it's creation sold 271,800.
Even Buick sold 404,000.
Pontiac's Grand Am alone did over 214,000.

Personally, I think Olds and Buick took up the same customers in the end, and could have combined the way GM intends to combine Buick & Pontiac. It would have made even better sense IMO.

 

Exactly...killing them off may even prove to be a mistake.

 

Not quite.

#6..... 23% drop in 2000.

Other Olds stories on sales drops.
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/d...news01861.html
http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/WardsA...65?extID=10026

Doubtful:
http://www.rgj.com/cgi-bin/printstor...tory=977201423