Another reason to compare a 2001 car with another 2001 car, right?


So, you're going to take that same position regarding the pushrod V8 GM used in the 4th gen Camaro over the OHC V8 Ford uses in the Mustang? Afterall, the 4th gen did a great job of competing against the Camaro, right??

Does the Mustang's up to 150K sales over Camaro's 35-40K prove that Mustang has the superior engine, & that's why Mustang is here & Camaro isn't?

Since the bulk of any car is image & reputation far more than advanced technology alone, there's obviously far more to this equasion than just "[i]which car had the best technology vs which had the inferior.

What would you have done differently under the same circumstances with the same options?

No doubt. But consider that the current management brought up the Olds debacle everytime the question of killing Pontiac came up.

I think that the death of Olds and the fallout provided a lesson on how not to do things that the current management is using.

Correct. Just checked. It was torque.

 

Ok well at least I have an idea of what it was supposed to be now. The 442 was a cool looking car. I have to ask though, emotions aside, why cant Buick be the Audi/infinity equivelent? Give Buick some power and incorporate those things into it.

 

Guy, I'm not sure why you're being obtuse about this point I'm making. My comparison between the Lucerne and Aurora was to point out that the Buick offers nothing new. If I did a comparo between the Olds and the cars of its day and found that the it was back of the pack, then that would only be a further condemnation of the Lucerne.
Again, you're really stretching to make a point. Obviously I don't think that the LS1 is the reason the 4th gen Camaro failed. The musclecar market and its demands are far different than that of the mid-size sedan market. Should GM and Ford put live axles in everything because it works in the Mustang?
No, but there is a point at which old-school components indicate a lackluster, go-nowhere product effort.

The point I have been trying to make, perhaps not clearly enough, is not that the Aurora was some sort of terrific car. To the contrary, it was at best a mid-pack performer, at worst it was irrevelant. The Buick Lucerne is the same car! Same G-body. Cheaper engine and suspension components in a market segment, where believe it or not, expensive components do mean a lot. It's available for less money sure, but with a lot less content. As a LeSabre replacement, it might be enough. As a competitor in the near-lux division, it sucks. It sucks worse than a pretty sucky car sucked 6 years ago.

Kill Buick. They have zero - read zero products that other divisions do not. Other than the 3.6L V6 powered LaCrosse CXS, they don't even offer a car with an engine that another GM division does not or has not. They have an ancient group of buyers that actually would find other GM cars, and in any event, is not long for the car-buying marketplace.

Oldsmobile was sucking wind, but they were fighting back. They had sleek looking product. The Intrigue, for a brief moment (before reliability numbers started to flow in) was a relevant, competitive mid-size vehicle. If GM had given them an ounce of support, the next generation of vehicles could have broken through, could have competed with the likes of Lexus and Acura. It was much closer to this goal in 2001 then Buick is today.

 

I think the lesson of Oldsmobile is that if you try to change a brand image too rapidly, all the old customers leave before the new ones show up.

Honestly, I don't see the problem with "Let Buick be Buick" until all of the people who buy them have died off. GM has enough other brands to make up the slack if used properly.

 

Minor nit. I don't know where you got this, but it's not true. The highest advertized power Olds had was in the Toronado, and it was 400. The most powerful car they sold was likely the W30 442, rated at 370. Of course, we all know how fictional horsepower ratings were back then. If you look at period magazine tests and compare to cars of today with similar weight, I estimate the top 442 had around 350 net hp.

BTW, the best tests of the era were in Car Life, a magazine that unfortunately died in 1970. You never knew if the others were getting ringers, though C&D was pretty good at finding those out in the late 60s (obviously not in the early-mid 60s!).

I think GM made a mistake dumping Olds, not because they had a highly differentiated product, but because of all the money they had to spend to cancel the franchise. It would have been better to drop to 2 models that were not clones of the Buick -- maybe a midsized sedan and the Bravada. Give Buick the fullsized sedan and the Rendezvous. Or something....

 

Before you wax too nostalgic about losing Oldsmobile, consider that with Saturn officially moved into the slot formerly assigned to Olds (above Chevy/Pontiac and below Buick/Cadillac) maybe for all intents and purposes we still have Olds around, just not any Oldsmobile dealers.

Just a few short years ago, GM was struggling to give Oldsmobile a fresh image and a new name, reduce the number of Oldsmobile dealer contracts out of the 2800 strong dealer network, maintain Olds’ place in the GM’s hierarchy (above Pontiac, below Buick) and exploit it’s recent mission as an import fighter.

Oldsmobile was at one time not to long ago the purveyor of the most popular car in America, the Cutlass Supreme, which held that number one spot for several years in a row. Olds dealers at the time came to number around 2500 nationwide. By the late nineties Olds was on life support due to reasons that have been detailed here in this forum. It was no secret that GM wanted to change the name of the division to Aurora or possibly merge it with Saturn. But there would still be one problem that a new name, well designed product and even the OSV performance models couldn’t fix, the problem of those huge numbers of dealers, 2800 as of December 2000.

Meanwhile, at Saturn, Roger Smith’s baby was finding little support at GM, and Chevy dealers could not have been happy that Saturn was receiving product that competed with their own. At the time GM eliminated Olds, it was felt by some within GM's other divisions that the ax should have fallen on Saturn instead. Saturn’s greatest asset to GM however, was the network of 400 odd Dealers with their high Customer Satisfaction ratings and high sales per dealer numbers.

So, GM’s answer? Terminating the contracts with Oldsmobile’s 2800 dealers, then announcing that Saturn will move “upmarket”, essentially occupying Olds’ former slot and mission statement, but with a mere 450 or so dealers. Problems solved. Brilliant!

Better still, now that Olds has been renamed, er, replaced by Saturn, maybe GM could start letting Saturn use some heritage names, like Rocket 88 and 442, without any legal problems with former Olds dealers.

If I were a former Olds dealer though, I’d feel a little bamboozled, after all they were told that Olds was gone forever and asked to sign a termination agreement with GM only to learn that Saturn’s are to be marketed in Olds’ former slot.

P.S. One of my fondest memories is visiting my cousin in Detroit, stealing my Uncle’s keys and cruising Woodward in his 1968 Delta 88 with a Rocket 455. Air cleaner cover turned upside down, natch!

 

Great minds think alike. http://web.camaross.com/forums/showt...ght=oldsmobile

And yes, flipping the aircleaner lid over was critical for full effect.

 

I agree with that point. But , that is just a small fragment of the whole picture.

GM is a corperation. If brand X is dropping in sales and doesn't seem to be salvageable no matter what money you put into it, there is limited funds, brand y is making clear profits, has strong loyal following, and is cheaper to make, if the subject was washing machines, soap, televisions, or anything else other than a historic car name, I doubt there'd be any doubt about the outcome.

No, Buick didn't offer anything as technically modern as Aurora in 2001. GM also sells a mid size chassis that dates back to the early 80s with pushrod V6s that date back to the early 60s. Yet a single version of that car (Impala) outsells the more modern offering currently from Ford & Chrysler.


You already see the point I'm making. You just essentially repeated it.



Perhaps..... But can't argue with success. Until Buick attempted to combine 2 car lines into 1 with 1st the Lacrosse and then the Lucerne, Buick was still selling quite a few cars.

The Lucerne you bashed is the only Buick I've ever seen (outside of the musclecar era) that people here say they'd be willing to buy. To top it off, Lucerne also in many ways far more advanced than the Aurora, far better made, and priced abit lower where a V8 Aurora would be priced were it still around today.

I agree. But I think this is your real sentements.....

..... and that's an emotional point that ignores alot of things (not the least is that Oldsmobile has always had cars other divisions had and the fact they had indeed moved away from their core, "ancient", group of buyers!)

If you had to make a business decision, you'd have to consider these items:

1) GM saw Oldsmobile sales were in potential decline and had an image problem.

2) GM took action and spent billions to create a new Oldsmobile exclusive structure. They took the most advanced engine they had from their top division (Cadillac) and created a new Quad cam V6 and a V6 derivitive.

3) This is money that GM didn't really have. In the late 80s, early 90s, GM nearly went bankrupt (makes their current problems seem like a fiesta). C5 was cancelled for a number of years, the revised W cars were delayed till the end of the decade. Yet, GM spent bank in Oldsmobile. At one time, Oldsmobile's rebuilding was one of the biggest tasks GM undertook.

4) Sales continued to slide despite these new Oldsmobiles. The idea that Olds paid for this themselves isn't entirely true. The money came from General Motors. Oldsmobile's "account" was charged, but if I borrow money from you and can't pay it back, who's money is lost???

5) Studies at the time showed that the name, Oldsmobile, as well as it's image of being an older person's car turned off the very buyers GM was trying to attract. They were going to Lexus, Infinity, and the other "new" luxury sedans. Older people were turned off to the "new" Olds (The "not your fathers Oldsmobile" campaign didn't help, no doubt), and went to other makes (including Buick).

6) Other GM studies showed that buyers of Intrigue and Alero showed no partiular loyalty to Oldsmobile, and bought their car based on "value".


I know that you hate Buick, and feel Oldsmobile was "fighting back", or that GM gave them "no support", and feel that somewhere in the "future" Oldsmobile would have staged an huge, full blown comeback, but these feelings don't support what actually was happening and the evidence at the time.

I was just as shocked and angry as anyone at the time, and took this as another example of a bungling GM and their clueless "Brand Managers" who didn't know anything about cars.

But when you start digging, and start talking to people who was in the company at the time, you get a feeling that Oldsmobile was the one thing GM was actually trying to do right. Save the C5, there isn't a another GM car I can name that came out that decade which was either memorable, broke new ground, or was even all new. Yet, when you look at Oldsmobile, that's hardly the case.

I'm not sucking up to Buick, I'm not bashing Oldsmobile. But under the same circumstances, what would you have done?

 

Oldsmobile's "exclusive" structure was also shared with the Buick Riviera.

The 4.0 Aurora V8 was a smaller displacement 4.6 Northstar and the "Shortstar" 3.5 DOHC V6 was the DOHC V8 engine less two cylinders. It was also planned to be put in the Pontiac Grand Prix until the entire Olds line-up and Shortstar V6 were axed.

 

Does it actually give more power, or does it just seem like it?

I've flipped the lid on my '71 Cutlass, and it at least sounds faster

 

sorry -- didn't have time to read thru the entire thread.

Let's take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

(but before we do, let me say that nearly every employee at GM was upset that Olds went to the great showroom in the sky -- it had HUGE heritage -- you don't lose a 100 year old brand and not go thru shock!)



Olds became #3 in the U.S. in the 70s....for many reasons.

One was there wasn't much foreign competition....the "big three" were Chevy/Ford/Plymouth (Divisions!)......................not GM/Ford/DCX (Corporations!)..............

Two -- an Olds Cutlass cost the consumer on average about $150-175 more than a similar Monte Carlo.....yet the internal costs were several times that much........

Three-- the world changed......more players in the market with more models from those players........

Four -- GM lost as much money on an Intrigue as they made on an Impala........

Five -- go read number 4 again -- and again -- and again -- and then think about that statement.............

The bottom line is that Olds was given new products and continued to lose money -- a LOT of money.

.....and for what it's worth.....a killer 442 would not have saved Oldsmobile.

 

Yes, but it would have made me happy

But GM still got my business when I bought a Camaro.

Interesting the relevance of this thread to Charlie's Pontiac thread.

 

Not really emotional - I don't have a particular affinity to either of these brands (if we were talking about Pontiac you'd have a point). My point is that at least in my opinion, canceling Oldsmobile epitomized what was wrong with GM in that era, what they are still trying to overcome. They put some money and effort into something - but not quite enough. Then, when it doesn't immediately turn a profit, the beancounters run around like chickens with their heads cut off. I hope GM is over that - I think they are. My parents just bought a new Aura. Like the Aurora with which it almost shares its name, it is a truly fresh, solid product from GM, one that has something interesting to offer the import buyers. The ultimate test will be to see if this car is actually a good, reliable vehicle, or if its a bucket full of problems like my grandparents old Aurora.

 

Hmm, I just can't resist chiming in on this one. When Olds was killed I couldn't believe that Buick and Saturn were to be spared. Buick had a few sizes of the same "bland sedan" and crickets chirping in their display at the auto shows. Saturn was a years-long, money pit of an experiment that made no sense at all. So, I wondered, why kill Olds? At the same shows where the buicks were gathering dust, swarms of people were crawling all over the new Oldsmobiles. The Olds products, while not exactly to my taste, were interesting. I just couldn't understand it.

Then I was fortunate enough to have this discussion with some good folks on the inside of all of this. It was a long discussion. I came away from it with a better understanding of the how and why of it all and have the following impressions.

1) For GM, killing Olds was an act of self-defense as the division was bleeding cubic money and GM had insufficient resources to bring the brand back and reverse the public perceptions of what the brand meant.

2) The Buick buyers don't go to auto shows

3) People attending auto shows aren't necessarily in the market for a new car.

4) Sometimes bland sells - witness the Toyota Camry

5) The fortune spent to create Saturn was just that: spent. If GM hadn't beaten that particular dead horse for so long, they might, just might, have been able to afford to save Olds. Don't get me wrong here, what Saturn has lately become gives me great hope and I applaud the new Saturns. However, what Saturn is now has little or nothing to do with what it was conceived to be.

6) Sad as it may be, I believe Oldsmobile's time was simply up and the world had moved on. I really don't believe that any amount of effort,money, or promotion could have brought it back. I do wish GM could have afforded to give it a better send-off though: one that befitted its long and storied existence. One last 442 would have been nice.

 

Who knows. Depending on who you talked to, it was worth from 0-10 hp. FWIW, it felt faster to me.