You're absolutely correct. That's about the time frame before everything gets sorted out/decided upon.

That's also about how long the NA rwd's get delayed also.

 

All Corvettes are Red.

Great read.

Highly recommended by Red Planet.

Follows the C5 from start to production.

 

Not having sub-Cadillac RWD sedans and coupes now is costing GM millions in lost revenue. They will just lose revenue that much longer.

I'll probably be in the Buick demographic by the time they come to market.

 

From what I understand....everything.

Maybe we can have some engineers jump in here, but Holden's whole manufacturing process is different from GMNA. The order in which components are assembled, the order in which welds are welded, the way that components and systems are certified is different.

One of the reasons that the GTO didn't get the 18" wheels from the Monaro, is that Holden felt it was a waste of resources to put these low volume wheels through the GM certification process. GMNA, on the other hand, said no validation - no wheels.

You might say - "why not make Holden design cars our way"?

Easier said than done. Holden has excellent engineers. But the reason they're so fast on their feet is because they do things a certain way. There are simply not enough Holden engineers to do things the GMNA way, in a timely fashion. Not enough to convert a Holden program into a GMNA program.....before the end of this decade.

You can slam GMNA about alot of stuff, but as far as validating components and processes go.....they cross all the T's and dot all the I's. Holden on the other hand...sometimes flies by the seat of their pants (which I think can be a good thing), but it's not the GMNA way of doing things.

 

Ya, I got though that one a while back, but I didnt know if the processes had changed over the past 7 years or so. As many hoops as the C5 had to jump though, this just seems rediculus.

 

But, for the nuts and bolts assembly order, any plant that is going to be changed over to a new platform is going to have to be retooled and refit anyway, so what's the real big deal?

I can understand this though. GTO was a bit of a unique offering... low volume exported to the U.S....



This is more understandable... so if I am reading this right, the real problem is something like this:

Zeta is moving along... at pace or too slow for Holden (they want to get it to market ASAP), and too fast for GMNA... (they want more testing and such) ????? Does that make any sense??

 

All of this would not stop GMNA from building and exporting sedans based off of Sigma and Holden from building and exporting coupes based off of Zeta (or vice versa).

 

That is why it took Holden less cash to design the Monaro from the Ground Up then it took Chevy designers to upgrade the exterior body panels from the 2002 Cavalier to the 2003 Cavalier. They fly fast, fly hard, and get it done. Details (I's and T's) arent as important in some markets. For example, the Monaro, if it has a slight defect during manufacture, is a lot easier to fix on a 10,000 vehicle line as opposed to a production run of several years and 100,000 vehicles. So the additude from an Engineering standpoint is very different.

Also as an organization, GMNA is much larger - and thusly different divisions, production groups and design teams never interact.

Meet a person and spend an hour having them talk about their design, discuss it for another hour. Now imagine learning the same amount from paper alone. It'll take 10x the paperwork to cover what a smaller group that is well knit just understands about each other. A picture is worth a thousand words. So is meeting someone, asking them questions, and trying to understand who they are and why they do things.

Holden's advantage is incredible in some aspects - but when the groups in GMNA - they have disadvantages too. It's like a job shop mentality vs a standard product mentality. Mistakes cost you more when you build it ten times. Doesnt imply Holden makes them though, their team is killer... for their market.

It easily could. The reason is where do you want to export what? You cant just take a Manaro and import it Stateside over a certain volume of units (very few) without having it meet US critera - which means testing. Which means certification from the results of those tests. Which is why it took so long to get the Manaro here in the first place.

By the same token, our laws arent the same as Europe or Australia. The slight and sublte paper trail alone is a nightmare. My company does not do CE work and we also sadly dont have ISO 9000 or ISO 9001 status. I said we should a while back, but people here arent interested. Now when going to send something to the EU, the associated paperwork changes alone are huge. Then there are the physical design changes. Exporting anything involves extra care and concern - and when a group of engineers arent familiar with it - there are time delays and cost adders that can be so dramatic the exporting itself just lost you your profit margin and it's no longer worth the time to build the thing in the first place.

You also cant just change tooling. Tooling for a design is great - but it doesnt come back to the fact that the tooling and design must meet critera. Also the assembly plant order/layout changes - which comes into safety codes for workers and such. OSHA regs these days... espicially in the automotive business, is crazy. More hassle.

The amount of capital and labor to reorganize the tooling for an assembly plant is epic. That's only if the designs/plans/layout/tooling/equipment already meets standards and codes. It will still need to be inspected and approved before production.

Crossing Oceans is not easy. Even for Toyota and GM. These delays are not suprising. Hence honestly why I figured GMNA would take the holden platform, say "thats nice", throw it out the window and design their own to be visually similar to the average consumer. It'd probably be easier and faster for GMNA to start their way ground up then start from Holden's product and make it fit the GMNA way of things.

 

Wow, definetely some good dialog in this thread. Learned more about designa and production processes in this thread, than I think ive learned ever in this forum!

 

Now there's food for though. Personally, I never thought that the rumored Zeta timescales were do-able for a company like GM.

 

Yeah, could go something like that. Although, I believe all the coupes...including the next gen Monaro....will be built here.

 

So, after all this, a car that was suppose to be out MY 07 still doesnt have a platform to be built on?

 

All of this gives me the impression that,built with some serious commonalities, my next Camaro will be built on this continent and my next El Camino will be built in Australia.

That works for me.


Now, which one will I see first?

 

Yeah I thought we would be seeing a new El Camino here before to long?

 

And Ironically one of the platforms that it could physically have been built on was avalible back in 2002 ('03 CTS launched in Jan. 2002)

Even if there was cost issues with Sigma a more expensive V8 only Camaro probably could have been built priced $26K-$32K. Even if it had not V6 model and no T-tops I bet it could have sold at least 40,000-50,000 units at that price. Would have been a nice stop gap until the 2008 Zeta/Beta/Sigma2 Camaro.

We should all be speculating about the 6th Gen right now