No.
There never was any success for GM in the eighties. I stumbled into this last night, and realized this very famous Fortune cover wasn’t exactly as I remembered it. I’d forgotten the words “Will Success…” in the headlines. The eighties were disastrous for GM, with its biggest loss of market share ever, which really is what set it up for its eventual demise, as its fixed and legacy costs became an inverted pyramid as it had to par its current operations. But in 1983, that hadn’t yet set in yet, as GM’s market share was still 44%. But the timing of the article was highly prescient, as GM’s crash started in the 1984 MY, and by 1987, GM’s market share shriveled to 37%. That has to go down in history as one of the most momentous five years ever, in terms of market share loss.
The Fortune article rightfully put its finger on the key question: GM Chairman Roger Smith was convinced that robotic factories spitting out essentially identical cars–like these four burgundy A-Bodies–was the way forward. It was the biggest blunder in automotive history: forgetting that it’s all about the product. No wonder two of the four brands shown would have to depart. Meanwhile, Smith was busy putting preparing the launch of a new brand.
In retrospect, the question would have been better asked about Ford, which gained market share in the eighties.
Celebrity, Cutlass Ceira, 6000, & Century. For GM a sows ear (X-body) into a silk purse.
I had forgotten about this cover. Everyone forgets how at that time, GM was viewed as a fearsome, unstoppable juggernaut. Chrysler and Ford had only recently been fighting for their very lives while GM had a seemingly permanent lock on 45% of the business in the US.
GM was a company with a virtually unlimited checkbook and the ability to smother the competition with new and up-to-date products while everyone else (particularly Chrysler) would be left to scrap out an existence in the dusty little corners of the market that were too good for GM to waste its time in.
What is really fascinating to me is how badly GM botched things. With all of its resources, it would have been bad enough if GM’s products had merely been unappealing and unpopular. What nobody saw coming was how GM would lose its quality edge over Ford and Chrysler, which had been substantial in the late 70s.
I believe that it was in the early 70s that John Delorean observed that GM was so big that the company could be managed terribly and it would be ten years before anyone really noticed. I think he was about right.
DeLorean’s book is prophetic, to say the least.
I never noticed this before, but I just realized that these cars have two sets of door skins – one for Chevy/Pontiac and one for Olds/Buick. That means two sets of rear quarters for the wagons, even though they all have the same taillight housing.
In short, GM spent even more money than I thought to make these cars look identical. Stupid. Ford and Chrysler sold clones, too, but they never sold four (or, in the case of the J-car, five) versions of the same car simultaneously.
These were decent cars for the time. It would take Ford another four years to field a front wheel drive midsize car (although that car was a blockbuster) and was stuck selling crappy Fairmonts and stupid Granadas. Chrysler had front drive, but they also had an awful reputation and only offered the cars with lousy four cylinder engines. GM still owned the market in 1982, and they completely frittered it away.
The sharing of main body shell parts like doors goes way back in GM with the common version being one set for Chevy and Pontiac and another for Olds and Buick. The short respite was the 59 and 60 with all four brands sharing the front doors on the 4dr version and the original “senior compacts”.
And wasn’t the firewall/cowl the same across all 5 divisions since the early 50’s or so? Perhaps earlier?
I believe that the cowl was the same for any given body (A, B or C), so an A body Chevy and Pontiac shared a cowl with each other, but not with an Olds 98 or Cadillac. In addition to a cowl, each given body shared inner stampings, a floorpan and the greenhouse/roof structure. To me, that was always the easiest way to distinguish between an A, B or C body GM car from the 60s and before was to look at the windshield and greenhouse/roof.
Ah, excuse me, Fairmonts were NOT crappy!
I agree, but did you see the Fairmont on TV (Velocity I think)………they didn’t know what it was, thought it was the equivalent of what a child would draw (kinda true in base 2 door) and made it into a “chromed” drifter.
They liked it better when they figured out it was a Fox Mustang under the skins.
That was the show “Fast N Loud”.
The Fairmont is lost to young drivers, the “F&L” guys were disrespectful, saying “I never seen one, I guess it didn’t sell well looking like that”.
They finally acknowledged it was basis for Fox Mustangs. DUH!
In general, I can’t stand when younger car fans make assumptions and snap judgements about car history. I may not be into 1930s/40s cars ‘Classic era’, but won’t disrespect them.
Fairmonts weren’t great cars- at least in 4 cylinder form. My Aunt Cheryl had one and it left us all stuck regularly. This is what led to the Ameri-go-round. As a result, they traded it in on a Citation. That wasn’t good. My parents saw Aunt Cheryl’s luck with the Citation and the Fairmont, and decided to go with an Aries. That wasn’t good. Both then thought maybe we should give Ford another go- and by that time, Aunt Cheryl’s Aerostar 3.0 and Mom’s Taurus were both very good cars. Come trade in time, the Aerostar was swapped in on a 3.8 Windstar. That was poo, so my parents got a Honda and haven’t owned American since.
And so the story went for many of the American car buying public.
Well, I’ll be as polite as I can since your opinion is your opinion
But which would you rather own:
A 1979 Ford Fairmont?
Or a 1969 Ford Fairlane?
Uh, EXCUSE ME… YES, they were GARBAGE.
Did you ever OWN one? I think not… youre probably on the Fox body fanboy bandwagon.
I owned a 79 Mercury Zephyr… the Fairmont’s TWIN.
Those cars were cheaply made, hardly ever start JUNKS… check out how THIN the doors were compared to American cars at the time… the only car that had thinner doors was a VW Rabbit.
If you don’t think Fairmonts were not JUNK, then you NEVER owned one.
They are only good it you drop a 5.0, 351 or 428CJ into them… otherwise, they were pure RUBBISH.
Trust me pal.
The very first car I drove was a 1981 Fairmont, that champagne color they made back then, maroon interior, with the 6-cylinder. It started life as my Grandma’s car. She bought a Dynasty in 1988, and the Fairmont became my Uncle John’s car. He drove it awhile, then it became my Uncle Jim’s first car (it was under his stewardship I got to drive it, at age 9, and on a state highway no less). He bought a brand-new Chevy pickup with the money from his first job out of high school, and my dad bought the Fairmont. Dad got it stuck at the end of the driveway and was late for work one time, so he sold it and has been driving 4×4 pickups ever since.
The Fairmont, went through four members of my family, with which two learned to drive, without so much as a hiccup. Dad sold it in 1992, and we regularly saw it around town for another 10 years after that. Grandma actually regretted selling the Fairmont for the Dynasty after she’d done it, and mom didn’t yet know the LeBaron we’d just bought would be such a colossal POS.
So, based on all that, I am completely comfortable saying that the Fairmont was a fine car. It was reliable as the sun, seated six, and served our family well.
Wow what a pic. I’ve never seen this before.
They frittered away Oldsmobile and Pontiac with phoned in efforts such as this.
You have it exactly. The problem GM created for themselves is as plain as that picture: there really wasn’t any reason to choose one label over the other. A Chevy could be as plush as a Buick, as fast as a Pontiac, and as conservative as an Oldsmobile especially since the same engines were common to all platforms. It simply put the different divisions in competition with each other over who would give the best price for the same car. By the 80’s even everybody’s grandma knew that Oldsmobile and Pontiac were meaningless distinctions.
Further, once that impression was made, it stuck. Although GM finally woke up and started making brand-unique products, no one believed they were even vaguely unique. For example, I loved the Aurora but by then the only hope for Oldsmobile to separate them from the impression of just simply being a fresh skin glued on a rotten peach was to completely leave the name Oldsmobile OFF the car. That was very very sad.
One random unintended consequence of GM’s uniformity I think is that any quality problem or engineering flaw affected ALL of their lines, not only making the problem bigger in scale but worsening the impression all of GM. Problems with the Corvair meant nothing to Oldsmobile or Pontiac customers in the 60’s, and if, say, Buick had a bad year customers might move to Oldsmobile for a while. However by the 80’s a bad experience with any GM car meant the only way to escape was to leave the GM fold completely.
That’s a fantastic point I had never considered. I suppose that helps explain how it is my parents went from an Oldsmobile Firenza that was an utter POS to a Cavalier. That Cavalier turned out to be a great car, reliable like the sun until mom totaled it.
To that point, though, the J-Bodies were produced at enough plants that odds were still good an Oldsmobile buyer and a Chevrolet buyer would have wildly different ownership experiences.
You know though, those A-Body cars were pretty darn good cars. I’m still driving an ’89 Celebrity to this day. It’s a work horse and I rarely have any problems with it. This is my second Chevy Celebrity, my first was an ’89 Celebrity Eurosport and it too was a great car for me. I’m planning on passing my current Celebrity on to either my Daughter or Wife. I’d still like to get a hold of one of those Renault Alliance cars, but if I can’t find one then I’d like a late model Celebrity Eurosport Coupe with the 5 speed Getrag Manual… Which is probably just as hard to find as the Renault Alliance these days. Hey, at least I’m realistic and not looking for a Celebrity Eurosport VR!
My first car was a 1982 Chevy Celebrity. Were the fundamentals there? Yes. Suspension was fine, great winter traction, decent stereo, good utilization of interior space, big trunk.
But… No brake proportining valve and a great willingness to swap the back for the front. (Just as my mother who had one realy nasty 180 degree spin on a winter morning while going at a rather slow speed.) An Iron Duke that needed to be rebuilt at 100,000 miles, headline fell down, rusted like a son-of-a-bitch within a few years, wouldn’t hold alignment, and ate front brakes like candy.
Typical GM by the time that GM quit building them (which by then they were no way class compeditive) they were bulit proof and the line workers could have put them together in their sleep.
IF the cars had been that good from day ONE I would join you in singing their praises. The A-bodys are much like the W-bodys. Would I want a 1988 Cutlass Supreme when it was brand new? NO. Would I take Zachman’s 2012 Impala off his hands? In a heartbeat. After 20+ years did they finally perfect it? Heck yes.
I had two Celebrities – both wagons. One an ’88 and other a ’90. The ’90 was traded to a Chevy Venture which soldiered along quite well being sold w/144K on the clock to a family up in Kodiak, Alaska (bought new at Spitzer Chevy in Northfield, Ohio). The ’88 we gave to the realtor who sold our house in Cleveland; it had 145K on the clock. For what it was worth, on the Celebrity and Venture, only things replaced were general maintenance items. A mass air-flow sensor and water pump on the ’88 (2.8L V-6) Celebrity were replaced around the 100K mark; a transmission pump on the ’00 Venture @ 96K. Brakes on the front of the Celebrithy (I bought it used with 88K on the clock) around 95K – rears never needed replacing. Brakes twice on Venture. Once at around 60K, next go around at 120K.
The Celebrities were great in snow; the Venture was OK . . . street tires no studs.
I have heard the Iron Duke ones were crude and rough by comparison as in the day I rented an ’89 Celebrity with a four banger. The 60 degree Chevy V-6s, with regular maintenance were indestructible.
Very telling photograph, especially viewed with some hindsight, Bet that you could replicate it today with all of the current midsize offerings out there, and people would be hard pressed to distinquish between the makes/models…..Jellybean #1 is a Nissan, nope, it;s a Kia or Malibu,etc.
I agree. I bet if you lined up a bunch of todays midsized offerings in the same color 99% of the people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Heck, if you liked up the mid size offerings in 1969 from GM most non-car people wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
Just another way to take a shot at GM by the ones who like to do so.
There is one very *slight difference: Nissan and Kia and Honda and Toyota aren’t the same company.
*enormous
The problem was that GM wanted to have its cake and eat it, too. It wanted the cost savings of building nearly identical cars. But it wanted buyers to believe that Buicks and Oldsmobiles were really a step or two up from a Chevrolet.
By 1985, people were figuring out that the differences between the divisions were minimal, and the sales slide began.
Each 1969 GM intermediate featured engines developed and built by the parent division, so you did get a different driving experience as you moved from, say, a Chevelle to a Cutlass.
I agree with some of these comments about this being *slightly* unfair to GM, and also to these particular ’80s models. There has always been a lot of platform sharing, and cars of a certain time period do tend to look alike, especially if from the same company, and in a shot like this with the front and rear fascias not visible, even more so. If you recreated the shot with A-body Colonnade 4-doors from the ’70s, in the same color, the cars would look almost as similar. There would be a bit more difference in the sculpturing of the hoods and trunks, I suppose, though. I guess the ’80s made the sharing even more blatant, because the styling was downsized and simplified and there were less opportunities for styling differences and flourishes.
Well said, Dean. Lol
This post should be required reading for those that disagree with the DS series. It cleared up a lot for me.
Though this, in my eyes, makes Saturn a DS as a whole.
The architecture of failure may have already in place but Smith and Saturn really started nailing the Coffin shut.
Saturn is one of if not the biggest DS of them all. While the ideas behind it sounded good considering the general state of GM a the time it just didn’t work out as the GMification quickly worked it’s way in. By the time the cars made it to market they were years behind the competition that had moved on since the models used as the benchmarks/targets for the original model. Since they had made every nut and bolt on the vehicle a Saturn nut and bolt it meant in addition to spending too much time designing parts that should have come from the standard GM part bin, they spent too much money so they couldn’t afford to redesign.
Throw in the dealers and customers saying they wanted a bigger model/SUV/Minivan and it was back to badge engineering as usual. Despite the increase in models they still only attracted the same dozen or so buyers giving them no increase in overall sales, only an increase in costs. From what I’ve read overall they never made a dime from Saturn, instead they just kept throwing more good money after bad.
i think they would have been far better off keeping it a single model and putting them in Olds dealers, it could have saved both brands. Make the Olds more like Saturn in the sales model and let those brought in by the original models move into Olds when they needed a larger car, SUV, or Minivan. There were a number of styling cues shared between the two brands including the basic theme of the badges.
The idea of Saturn being Oldsmobiles entry level car was closer than you think, they idea was seriously considered, the fact that the SL has the same roofline as a W-body Cutlass Sedan is not by luck, Oldsmobile came close to Saturn-izing its pricing and customer service too, Oldsmobile was the first division after Saturn to have a 24 customer assistance line, 30 day exchange, like Saturn, and the “one price” strategy was tried at several select dealerships, of course Olds tried most of these after Saturn launched. But the idea that was floated at the time was to have Saturn handle the small cars, eliminating things like the Firenza and Calais that Olds never did that well with, leave the bread and butter Cutlass, Delta 88, Bravada and mini-van and the Aurora would have been like Oldsmobiles “Lexus” at the top of the line up.
The problem with Saturn is that is was a very GM way of solving a problem, here was a company with 6 automotive divisions that were already starting to go astray and the solution was to create a 7th, and of course it being GM, it had to go all out, it was a whole other car company, with its own plant, parts, dealer network ,parts network, etc. Really, if GM should have just designed a kick ass Cavalier replacement for less than the billion plus or so it cost launch Saturn.
Carmine is that a billion for Saturn the company including or excluding the car?
It would be an interesting study to compare the costs of launching a new division from scratch, versus reinventing an existing division to the point where old preconceptions, stereotypes, jokes etc were forgotten. It might be cheaper but I’m not sure it’s really possible, as awareness or perception of companies lags so far behind the time (eg 5-10 years for those not paying attention). On the other hand, awareness of a new company (or product) has a similar slow uptake.
Off the top of my head, GM’s total loss on the whole Saturn fiasco was something like 5 billion. I’m quite certain it was more than just one.
It was a couple bil from 83 til launch. Then what ever came after…..
Saturn likely cost GM several billion. From what I’ve read they only had an operating profit one of the years they were in existence. The development and tooling of the original car was never fully amortized.
By 1983 my father was 68 years old, and had been out of the Chevrolet dealership 18 years. At that time he was still a lifelong GM owner (minus one ’81 Dodge Omni which didn’t last long, too small for him), and a long term GM stockholder. And he hated Roger Smith with a passion.
“The worst president GM has ever had.” and “This man is going to be the death of the company.” were the two mildest comments I ever heard him make. The stronger ones were rather unprintable in this forum. Dad, having sold Chevy’s since 1940 had made his fortune on the old GM, when the divisions were independent, reasonably different from each other, and a step up so you knew who your customers were and were able to sell to them.
I’m always glad that dad (who died in ’93) didn’t live long enough to see just how prescient he was. The bankruptcy would have really hurt. This guy lived an bled GM.
Think it was also around the same time frame that Smith rolled the dice in acquiring Ross Perot’s EDS. There’s some that argue that acquisition vastly improved GM’s IT functions but I always thought it served as a distraction from where GM should have been directing its formidable resources at the time – product development – which was where they failed miserably and had their hats handed to them by the Asian and European manufacturers.
I was working at Delco Electronics when EDS came into GM and it wasn’t pretty. All IT work was previously done in-house by GM employees, who were then offered the ‘opportunity’ to become EDS workers (including losing their then-excellent GM benefits) if they wanted to stay on.
And to add insult to injury, at the same time they started charging each group for computer support (whereas before it had been part of company-wide overhead) – one IBM terminal with full support cost about $1K/yr (IIRC) which was a lot in 1985. One group I worked in managed to sneakily procure a “laptop” PC as “test equipment” so we didn’t have to pay the monthly support fees for it!
Since the 78-79 mid size Aeroback Olds/Buicks were flops, GM brass ordered all ‘formal roofed’ cars for the 80’s, and we got the famous look alike boxes.
From the unique brands to just namebadges on boxes. GM also figured they could ‘cover the market’ offering same cars at 4-5 dealer groups. As if people wouldn’t care what car looks like, drives, etc. Olds/Buick became ‘old folks cars’, Pontiac for teen/kids, and Chevy good for trucks only. Caddy? It was way off the radar then!
The difference between GM’s fortunes in Europe and the US is very striking. In the ’70s, Vauxhall was an also ran, not able to live down its reputation for making sub-par Fords that would rot in three years. However, with the alignment of resources between Vauxhall and Opel, the euro-Cavalier, mk2 Cavalier, Astra, and Nova/Corsa were products that had German quality fit and finish compared to the prettier, although slapdash Fords of the time. A Sierra door shut with a clang, while a Cavalier went thunk. Nowhere was this more apparent than comparing the Fiesta, to the Corsa. The Fiesta was tinny and rattly, using an engine dating back to 1959. The Corsa felt modern, and even in el-strippo Merit trim, seemed like a mini luxury car. The knobs were chunky, and the bits stayed together.
Sadly today, GM Europe has lost its way. Nobody will spend £9000 on a new Corsa when a superior Skoda or Hyundai is £2000 cheaper and with a nicer dealer experience. Similarly, as cars have all gotten lardier, both the Mondeo and Vectra/Signum have become too big for European roads, and worst of all, Vauxhall has developed a nasty reputation for expensive and unsolvable electrical problems that often result in scrapping of near-immaculate 7 year old cars due to the cost of repairing a little black box. Worse, GM’s cynicism has come home to roost in making ‘consumable’ parts needlessly expensive. The catalytic converter on my mate’s 2001 Astra IS the exhaust manifold. Thus, not only do you have a cat that costs £400 for the part alone, but also you have a 100% chance of shearing a rusty manifold stud in the head, requiring the head to be removed so that you can drill and tap it. You can take GM out of America, but you can’t take GM out of GM.
While the look-alike cars didn’t help GM, the big problem was that GM cars broke and broke again and again.
Does anyone know someone with a FWD GM car of the ’80’s or ’90’s that didn’t have a transmission replacement once or twice?
Does anyone know a Honda, Nissan or Toyota customer with the same complaint?
That’s what sounded GM’s and frankly Chrysler’s and Ford’s death knell. The US car companies have been given chance and chance again and until they have the same kind of frequency of repair average that the Japanese cars have they will continue on their downward slide.
Short answer: Yes.
I grew up in a GM household, my parents being soured on Fords when their 1970s Ford pickup stalled as they were racing the 2-year-old version of me to the ER in 1983. Trouble wasn’t that all GMs were bad. It was that GMs were hit-or-miss in that era. If you’d been burned, you weren’t about to go stick your hand back in the fire! You either got a rock-solid car designed by intelligent people and assembled by professionals with pride… Or you got a shitbox designed by idiots and put together by drunks. Depended on the model, the crew that was working that day, and whether it had rained the Tuesday before or was coming onto a full moon.
After the 1986 LeBaron fiasco (1991-1997 for my parents, 1997-1999 for me as my first car), the family went back to GMs. I myself had an ’89 Bonneville, a ’95 LeSabre, and an ’89 Riviera, all of which were fantastic cars of which I have nothing but fond memories. Mom and Dad’s subsequent cars have been typical GM-they’ll run badly longer than most others cars will run at all. The only bad car they’ve had since the LeBaron fiasco was dad’s ’99 Chevy pickup, in which the transmission was failing at 50k. The Grand Am, the TrailBlazer, the ’92 pickup, and the ’05 pickup were/are pretty decent vehicles overall.
All that said, had it been a Chevy pickup that stalled out for my parents in 1983 instead of a Ford, I guarantee there wouldn’t have been another GM in the household. 32 years later, my mom’s just finally started to consider the idea of owning a Ford again, and that’s mostly because she really likes the Edge and has been hearing good things about Ford.