Originally Posted by guionM

As one wise man said, "Just because you see a lot of a certain car in your area, doesn't mean it's a success".... and the opposite is true.

Another thing that's true is the definition of flop is fluid. The new Camaro sells at a rate of about 5,000 per month, yet in the grand scheme of things (ie: next to Camrys, Fusions, and Impalas), the Camaro is a huge flop.

What determines a success is how well is a vehicle doing against projections and is it earning a profit. The Fiat 500 is certainly doing well. Even though you rarely see it in your corner of Georgia, they're all over the place here in California and even in Phoenix. I hear there's quite a number of them in New York as well. It's more of a car that people buy in congested areas, and that's how it's marketed, and Fiat isn't trying or expecting then to sell at the level of Impalas... or even Fiestas.

Remember how certain magazines and people called the last GTO a "flop"?

Yet the car outsold the similarly priced and marketed Mustang Cobra, and Holden made 3 times the projected Monaro production numbers (more than thrice the break even point) due to GTO sales in the US (it was created to break even or turn a small profit at 15,000 cars over 3 years. What happened was it sold a combined 65,000 over roughly 5!

Some flop.

Originally Posted by guionM

2. Europe's economy is simply going from bad to worse, mainly because most all countries there are tied to the Euro, and the auto industry simply isn't recovering there as it has here.