Everyone here remembers the brand bloat of pre-bankruptcy General Motors of the early 21st century with no less than nine distinct brands: Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, Saturn, GMC, Hummer, and Saab.
Surprisingly, that wasn’t the high water mark of GM brands, as demonstrated by this 1930 Fisher Body ad, which also showed nine different GM brands. If we include GMC (not shown in this ad), that actually makes for a total of 10 GM brands.
1930 Marquette
While this ad doesn’t have a year, the presence of Buick companion brand Marquette, which was only sold for one model year (1930) clearly dates this ad to the same year.
Also present are Oldsmobile companion brand Viking (1929-1931) and junior Cadillac brand LaSalle (1927-1940).
Easily the most successful of all the companion brands was Pontiac, which began as a companion to Oakland in 1926, and whose “light six” model famously offered a six-cylinder engine for roughly the price of the competition’s fours. The Pontiac 6 was a hit, and sales quickly eclipsed those of parent Oakland. As a result, Oakland was shut down in 1931.
It really is amazing how long it took for Detroit automakers to understand sub-branding. Alfred Sloan’s a car for every purse and purpose segmenting strategy was built out of the necessity of GM’s rise through the purchase of many formerly independent brands with established dealer networks and brand recognition. This history meant that every new purse and purpose needed a new brand such as Pontiac or Viking rather than simply making an “economy” or “deluxe” or “GT” version of the already established brands such as Oakland or Oldsmobile. Ford and Chrysler has different histories, but the success of GM meant they tried to copy the GM model with their Plymouth, DeSoto, Imperial or Mercury, Edsel, and Continental with mixed results at best.
I think it might be argued that it wasn’t until the success of the 4-seater T-Bird in 1958 that the light bulbs started going off that people would buy an expensive Ford if it came in an enticing package, which was shortly followed by Falcon, Fairlane, and Mustang “family of fine Ford cars” and similar proliferation by GM and Chrysler brands, and the eventual termination of brands with no remaining purpose such as DeSoto, Mercury, Plymouth, Olds, and Pontiac.
Ford had dipped their toe in the water with the imported English Fords in 1948. But if you look at those as well as the early T-bird they all had their *model* names in pride-of-place badging in or just above the grille. Early Anglias even went as far as having “Anglia” in the same script as the “Ford” one but on a *red* oval background.
Even when the full-size Ford line went to two wheelbases in ’57, Fairlanes had a Fairlane script in that spot, with “FORD” reserved for Custom/Custom 300 and wagons. The 1960 Falcon was the first line-extension model to have FORD spelled out in chrome letters across the front with the model name banished to the sides and back.
Wow, (Not the brands, indeed … what brands); that is quite a daring drawing.
Thirty five years before Vance Packard published his book on the way ads speak covertly to the sex-sells concept, we have… a clear, unambiguous, and overt message that sex sells.
Oh… shame on me; perhaps that’s just a father’s day dinner celebration. What was I thinking?
Indeed. For 1930, this was at least as racy as the swimsuit in the Imperial ad that I wrote about a few weeks ago!
It is a nice illustration though and an example of a car ad without an actual car (I think that’s probably a trope too).
Her eyes are possibly looking at a car. The direction of his gaze is left a little more more vague. If it were clear, one way or the other, it wouldn’t have worked. The subtlety of advertising… 🙂
“? can I squeeze this fool for a Pontiac ? maybe I’d better just take the Chevy drop top he offered” .
-Nate
Sex sells unless its trucks.
Then chrome sells.
The title states “Too Much of a Good Thing”.
Sound like GM in the 90’s with Chevy, Olds, Buick, Saturn, GMC, Hummer, Cadillac, & Pontiac with SAAB 9-2X,4X & 7X of North America.
Today, global GM is a shell of it self after shedding Holden, Vauxhall, Opel, Hummer, SAAB, Pontiac, & Oldsmobile.
Actually, I think it was the right move, on GMs part to shed the Vauxhall, SAAB, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Holden brands. The Holden brand, only existed as brand for a short 69 years. Many incorrectly claim a 100 plus years, but this is not right.
Prior to late 1948 Holden was not car, it was an Australia car body builder who after becoming bankrupt and was purchased by General Motors to form the now former General Motors Holden (GMH).
In Australia the former GMH have in recent times been replaced General Motors Special Vehicles (GMSV). Australia’s former GMH dealers (often incorrectly referred to as ‘Holden dealers’) have become Chevrolet dealers who I think will eventually also sell Cadillac in Australia.
GM needs to also sell off the Buick brand to the Chinese and focus its efforts worldwide on just three brands. Cadillac for the high end market, Chevrolet for the mass market and GMC for trucks, SUVs and other commercial based vehicles.
And interesting to note then VW with VW, Audi, Skoda, Seat along with trucks (MAN) seems to imitate GM as well as, to a latter extent, Stellantis with Dodge, Ram, Chrysler, Jeep, Fiat, Alfa-Romeo, Lancia, Peugeot, Citroen, Opel and… Vauxhall.
Wasn’t there a recent directive from Stellantis senior leadership that each brand would have to carry its own weight.
Still, some brands need to let go. Not enough capital to support this many brands on six continents. Also, I feel the Jeep mystic has been watered down with too many models and lack of investment in updates. Watch it get rationalized down to 4 or 5 key models.
Don’t forget Bentley and Bugatti for VW. Well these two outfits you mentioned did it the GM way, by purchasing established brands. However, Ma Stell has hived off DS from Citroen, and seems headed to making Wagoneer a separate marque.
VW is also planning to introduce (or revive) Scout as a separate brand for off-roaders
VW is doing something similar to GM in its earlier days. Basically being a holding company for numerous subsidiaries. Scout, Bentley, etc are literally being run as separate companies. The Scout will be a home grown American design with manufacturing in a new plant in South Carolina. The Scout is heavily using the brand cache of the original International Scout.
How many brands did Leyland ‘manage’ at their peak/nadir? Every time I try to keep them straight I wind up with a headache. Maybe I should pass this question over to Roger… 🙂
Austin, Austin-Healey, Princess/Vanden Plas, Morris, MG, Wolseley, Riley, Triumph, Rover, Land-Rover, Alvis, Jaguar, Daimler, plus commercial and bus brands, at the time of the 1968 merger. Though I bet I’ve missed one.
I’m surprised VW doesn’t sell Skoda’s in North America, or at least in Canada. A cheaper, more basic version of VW models would sell well here. They sell considerably fewer cars than Honda or Nissan, so they definitely have market share opportunities.
Skoda was sold in Canada pre-VW; they were even sold in the US briefly in the early ’60s. I’d like to see Skodas here in the States too; they have several attractive cars with nicer interiors than the corresponding Volkswagens that are sold here.
Holden started as a saddle makers about 100 years before GM bought it
Kiwibryce,
You are right and I did acknowledged the fact a company known as ‘Holden Body’ existed prior to the GM take over. However, its important to stress that Holden Body never manufactured a car called a ‘Holden’.
Holden Body built car bodies for anyone who wanted them. Their customers included Ford, Chrysler, British makes as well GM. Holden Body only built body shells. They had no involvement with mechanicals and were just a subcontractor to various car companies.
The reality is that Holden Body was a failed company that went bankrupt during the Great Depression. If GM had not taken them over and formed GMH, the ‘Holden’ as a brand would never have surfaced at all.
So, as a car brand, Holden existed for just on 69 years! A very short period when compared with most other GM brands. The Holden brand should have been retired long before GM finally kill off the brand.
Holden lasted 72 years as a car brand (69 as a manufacturer) which was in 2020 only 22 years less than Pontiac, or 55 more than Hummer’s last appearance. Perhaps I could divide them both by the square root of SAAB’s 60 years, or add them up to exceed the 120-odd of that now non-entity brand, Cadillac? Remember, Honda is only about 60 years old as a car brand, and hugely successful, so length of a brand’s existence isn’t a relevant thing. In any event, the brand “Holden” was respected across the country as the body-building entity long before the ’48 car appeared (partly because US cars were well-suited for here and fully-bodied imports were highly restricted by protectionist rules).
Holden totally dominated the market here, for decades after 1950. It made Detroit lots of money, until the ’80’s, when changed national economic structures and internal inefficiencies nearly killed it. Restructured into two entities in 86, it had to survive without Detroit money from then on, and did (with Oz govt help).
Eventually, with the country maturing further into a service economy by the 2010’s, manufacturing at this scale became unfeasible, but rest assured, the brand itself still had enormous local equity. Canny management could have made the brand to survive as an importer, sending a nice little niche bundle of $ back to Detroit each year (and from a stable, wealthy democracy at that): hell, they were still selling 50,000-odd imported cars (in a small market) when they chopped it. But utter incompetence and Detroit arrogance saw the whole thrown away (including a decent proving ground they’d literally just spent millions upgrading and had promised to keep as a GM testing location).
There was zero reason for GM to retire the brand either “long before” they did, or even when they did.
Much of what Rusty Baum states is historical fact, however the quality of Holden car bodies did not significantly improve until the company had been taken over by General Motors who had then established General Motors Holden (GMH).
But above all, the single most point point that Rusty Baum has not included and very reason why GM agreed to establish an Australian only brand (Holden) in the first place was a 45% Import duty imposed by the Australian Government.
This 45% import duty effectively provided GM with its own market. Fully imported vehicles could not be competitive on any level and its the reason why from 1949 to 1970 Chevrolets and Pontiacs sold for three times more than any Holden. But they were still well regarded and considered far better cars than the much cheaper Holden.
GMH’s domination of the Australian market during 1950s and 1960s with its ‘Holden’ had nothing to do how good or bad the Holden might have been. Put simply, every other fully imported car sold for two to three times more.
On a ‘level playing field’ the Holden during the 1950s and 1960s with its cold vinyl seats, cheap rubber floor mats, aging 6 cylinder engine and zero equipment such as a heater or AM radio (both were expensive extra cost accessories), Would have not sold so well and would have been the failure it should have been in the first place.
Sadly, people often recall history not how it actually took place but how they want to recall it. Yes in the early days GM did make lots of money from their Holden, however they were only able to do this in a highly regulated and protected market. A 45% difference in purchase price is significant!
As Australia progressively lifted the 45% import duty, Holden sales dropped off. GM was RIGHT to exit the Australian manufacturing market and remain in Australia in reduced form as General Motors Special Vehicles (GMSV).
Oh dear.
GM agreed – after nagging by GMH’s UK ex-Vauxhall boss Laurence Harnett – to develop an Oz car, but Oz govt bank loans paid for the building of it, because US GM refused to. As for the duties, they were long in place, as I mentioned above, and btw, duty actually peaked at 57.5% in the ’70’s. Rather than “sadly” remembering that past in some rose-tinted view, I didn’t for a second suggest the cars themselves were necessarily anything like the best in the time they dominated, though the simplicity and ground clearance stuff did suit a dirt-road, much-less-wealthy-than-US market. In fact, parochialism or nationalism was as big a factor as tariffs in Holden’s dominance, as you seem not to know that plenty of others assembled or manufactured here under the same tariffs. As for the “aging” six, it was new in ’63, reasonably up-to-date (thinwall cast, hydraulic tappets, etc) and almost bizarrely, almost identical to the Chev six introduced the same year in the US, so it was ok for a good ten years after that (if starting not to be thereafter). As for the Cheviacs of the period ’49 to ’70, if they were regarded as better it was because of the brand history, and because by Oz standards, were luxurious, what with V8’s and carpet(!) and so on: in a world-familiar pattern, they were considered better cars largely because they cost a bundle – the old snob-value equation – despite being assembled from Canadian kits locally, by GMH.
I covered the content of your last line above, but for clarity, yes, manufacturing locally was not world-viable after about 2010-ish: but to ultimately trash a valued brand rather than manage it as an imported thing, was, unfortunate as it is to say, a prime example of US corporate myopia that the rest of the world has had to put up with far, far too often.
Yes, Durant and Sloan were very smart men and they created and/or managed one of the world’s largest corporations. However, there was a lot of overlap in the prices and features available in the various car lines of the Sloan ladder. In the beginning when the company was getting started and up to speed, this may have been a good thing offering customers a whole gamut of choices within one car company, but as time and the decades wore on, the Sloan ladder became a hinderance to the company as it had too many overlapping models among the various divisions and the company resorted to “badge engineering” in many of its lines of cars. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20 and at the time I guess it seemed like a great idea!
The thing is, car companies sell to dealers, not consumers. Heading into 1960 dealers were clamoring for compacts. GM tried to give each marque something different, in sheetmetal and mechanics. All well and good. Soon each marque has a subcompact, compact, midsize and full size, with a ponycar or PLC thrown in. The bean counters wonder why each marque has their own engines with a few cubic inches of each other, as the expenses for mileage and pollution control rise. Customers start to wonder what a Bonneville (or 88 for that matter) have that a Caprice doesn’t. Major badge engineering ensues, and the smaller dealerships are replaced by ones that can be seen from space. The mid/premium car, where the real corporate money is made, shrivel up and die.
Billy Durant was a tyrant. He pissed off the founders of Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Buick. They all left their companies. David Buick died poor. It was sad when GM celebrated Buick’s 25th anniversary David was not invited. He did patent the porcline enamal process. Louis Chevrolet went on to make performance parts for Fords! Under the Frontenac name. And Ransom Olds went on to make REO cars and later trucks including the Speedwagon.
Billy Durant also left GM a mess. It took Alfred Sloan to figure it all out. Louis Chevrolet wanted his company to to be what we refer to now as a near luxury (think Lexus, Buick). Ransom Olds wanted to compete directly with Ford. Needless to say they got mad and left. Louis before, along with his brother Arthur were race car drivers for Buick.
The era from which this ad hails has always fascinated me, and the artwork seems perfectly evocative of that time.
That whole companion car period is perplexing. It is hard to blame GM after the Pontiac turned out to be such a success. But as ever, too much of a good thing is still too much, especially once the Depression got going and sales volumes plummeted.
That “Marquette” i beautiful!
I love the sexy lady in the advert .
-Nate
He probably owns an upper brand. She’s clearly 20 years younger.
That is an awful lot of leg to be showing in the 1930s! But she must be attracted to successful older men, of which he clearly looks the part.
Wonder if he holds GM shares.
If you go looking back into the Durant years while GM was being formed it gets even crazier. Billy Durant started General Motors with Buick, bought up Oldsmobile, followed by:
Cadillac
Elmore
Welch
Cartercar
Oakland
Rapid (trucks)
Reliance (name later changed to GMC)
and then attempted to buy Ford in 1910. That fell thru because Henry wanted cash, not stock trades. Due to the Panic of 1910-1911, Durant got overstretched and forced out. He teams up with Louis Chevrolet to form Chevrolet, then started his usual stock manipulations that ended up with Chevrolet owning General Motors in 1917!
Post WWI, the country went thru what was then a fairly sizeable depression (well, it was considered sizeable until 1929-34 redefined the term “depression”) putting GM back on the ropes again to the point that they (semi?) seriously considered dropping Chevrolet because it could not possibly compete directly with Ford.
Durant’s out for the final time, Sloan steps in, the Sloan Ladder is invented, and Chevrolet’s rung on that latter was defined as being 1/2 step higher than the current Ford, which is what saved the marque. By the late Twenties things were rolling around well enough that GM decided to further tune the Sloan Ladder by adding brands in between the existent brands. Pontiac undercut Oakland, I think (please correct me if I’m off, I always confuse these two) Viking and Marquette were in between Oldsmobile and Buick, LaSalle was under Cadillac. Of the new marquest Viking and Marquette werre easily the weakest – as in “do you really need cars in between Oldsmobile and Buick. There were some interesting engines though (Viking was a flathead V-8 not used by anyone else).
Sounded like a plan until the entire economy went to hell.
Don’t forget that GM was buying up or establishing suppliers (Delco-Remy, Harrison radiator, Rochester carburetors) which lead to economy of scale and control of component costs. Another factor in the GM ramp up.
There were even some other GM makes in the early 20s: Sheridan and Scripps-Booth!
I believe Viking was Oldsmobile’s sub brand. Marquette was Buick’s sub brand. When GM did away with sub brands, the cars become lower trim levels of their “host” brands, the exception being Pontiac, which superseded the Oakland brand. Chevrolet didn’t have a sub brand at this time.
The key factor in all of this is the price spread between the bottom (Chevrolet) and top (Cadillac). In 1930, the spread was 1:7, comparing the roughly median price of a Chevy with the highest volume V8 Cadillac; 1:14 with the V16 Cadillac.
That huge spread in 1930, the result of the very high income inequality (and extremely low taxes) of the times, made for gobs of room in between. Hence all those brands. They each had a niche, with little or no overlap. The Sloan Ladder was very tall then!
Obviously the Depression destroyed that, collapsing that spread. In 1940, the spread between a Chevy and Cadillac had collapsed to 1:2.3! An implosion! The Sloan ladder was now drastically shorter, meaning less room for any rungs in between.
By 1950, the spread between a Cadillac hardtop coupe and a Chevy hardtop coupe was down to 1:1.8.
By 1955, that spread was down to 1:1.7. And a ’55 Chevy Nomad narrowed the spread to 1:1.49. That obviously left very little room for three brands in between, which now had to fight with styling and performance and other qualities, as price became largely irrelevant, thanks to growing incomes and easy financing.
The Sloan ladder was only truly relevant for a short time, in the late teens and twenties. The Depression effectively killed it, for the most part. Yes, buyers kept identifying the brands as they once had when they were young, but the reality is that a rapidly increasing share of Americans could afford any GM brand, if they were willing to stretch a little. Which of course explains why Cadillac’s sales and market share increased much faster in the ’50s and ’60s than income growth.
Basically, once Cadillac went all-in for the mass market, doing away with the V-12’s and V-16’s the ladder was getting too short to be viable anymore. And the market for the big multi’s was getting too small to be worth keeping.
What’s always amazed me with GM’s lineup between the wars is how each brand had such mechanical and production differentiation from the others. Engine’s were very unique to the point that the the saving of LaSalle in 1934 (it was scheduled to be dropped after the 1933 model year until Harley Earl showed the board what the ’34 was supposed to be – yes, it was that striking) by utilizing the Oldsmobile straight eight with some internal upgrades (aluminum pistons?) was very noteworthy.
Off the top of my head, I don’t remember many details about the Marquette engine, except that it was a flathead six, which would have been disappointing . . . . and definitely weird, seeing that the Viking gave you a V-8. Probably says a lot as to why it only lasted a year.
Keeping these differentiations going must have been a constant chore. Pontiac succeeded by being a “Chevrolet with a six” . . . . . which was great until Chevrolet got it’s six in 1929. And it was overhead valves, not Pontiac’s flathead. Which meant Pontiac got a straight eight in 1932. Which wasn’t quite a good as Oldsmobile’s straight eight (based on articles I’ve read, I’ve never driven anything GM of that vintage except Buick).
Very heady days for GM.
From reading contemporary sources, it was not an uncommon opinion that an L-head was better than an ohv engine, for practical purposes. The L-head had a much quieter valvetrain. The new Wilcox-Rich hydraulic valve lifters were used only in a few expensive makes. The mass-market engines of the time didn’t really run fast enough to make use of the ohv’s better breathing, which was limited in any case by tiny carburetors.
Second, after the development of the Ricardo combustion chamber (famously used in the groundbreaking 1924 Chrysler), L-head engines were able to use a higher compression ratio in practice. Buick introduced a kind of domed piston in 1938 which seems to have eliminated that problem, and of course it was not an issue at all in the advanced postwar ohv V-8s.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do remember some older relatives saying they used to debate which was the better system back in the Thirties. The point being only that a lot more of the people buying flathead engines didn’t think they were getting an inferior engine, at all.
I will fully admit to a bit of bias in the flathead/OHV argument, both from a modern knowledge standpoint, the clarity of hindsight, and as being more than a bit of a vintage Buick junkie. No doubt I look down upon a flathead with a point of view that didn’t exist back then, given that all but three American car marques used the design exclusively up until the end of the Forties.
The design had to be legitimate if all those massive V-12’s, and even the final V-16 were made with that design. Other than the classic three (Chevrolet, Buick, Nash) the only other manufacturers who avoided flathead engines during this period were Stutz (SOHC, DOHC), Duesenberg (DOHC) and Marmon V-16 (OHV).
Inspired by your comments, I went through car prices to check for two key moments: the first Corvette to have a higher base MSRP than a Cadillac and the first non-Corvette Chevrolet to have a higher base MSRP than a Cadillac.
The first time a base Chevy was more than a base Cadillac was 1980 – as the Corvette jumped from $10,220 to $13,140, it put a glitch in the Matrix by getting $241 ahead of the Coupe de Ville.
Contrary to my expectations, the Cimarron didn’t lead to Cadillac undercutting any non-Vette – a base 1982 Cimarron was still a good $2400 ahead of a base Suburban, and the Cavalillac remained ahead of all metal-bodied Chevrolets until 1988. Neither did the Catera upend the Sloan Ladder – its starting MSRPs were safely above those of Suburbans.
The Cadillac that broke the system was the 2003 CTS. The first of the “Art and Science” Cads was just two-thirds the price of a Deville – $29,350 vs $43,225. More importantly, it undercut the base Suburban by nearly $7,000.
One ATS and one CT4 later, the cheapest 2023 Cadillac is $34,395 and the cheapest 2023 Chevrolet Suburban is $57,200.
Thanks for taking the time to research that… I didn’t realize that the “Sloan Ladder” shrank into a “Sloan Step Stool” quite so early. I had imagined that most of that happened when the compacts started arriving in 1960-61, but here we are all the way back in 1940!
British Leyland in 1968 also managed 9.
Austin, Morris, MG, Riley, Wolseley, Vanden Plas, Triumph, Jaguar, Daimler and Rover.
(You could be pedantic and make it 11 with the Authi and Innocenti.)
British Leylands ladder didn’t make any difference because the dealers never had any parts in stock .
-Nate
The big difference between BL and GM is the British Leyland marques heavily went into badge engineering: The various divisions, putting out cars that sold at different price ranges to different social classes, were in fact the same automobile differentiated by changes in interior, front and rear clips, and nameplates.
General Motors cars, while using many interchangeable parts, and sharing basic bodies between two and three marques, had individual drivetrains and had a lot more individuality between marques. If you were buying a Buick, you were definitely getting a car that was a lot different from a Chevrolet. Something that Wolsley buyers couldn’t say about Austins.
Great ad. The gent looks like the late actor, Harold Gould.
I remember as a kid seeing Body by Fisher and wondered what that meant. Well, thanks to that ad poster, I now know what kind of body they were talking about. Could we make mine raven haired instead of red?
Actually my infatuation with raven hair dates back to a 1965 movie about racing. It was The Great Race and seeing Natalie Wood at the age of 11. Been hooked ever since.
One thing that surprises me is just how long GM allowed each division to remain fairly autonomous. Through the 1960’s, all six of the American divisions had bespoke engines… even GMC had its own 60 degree V6 that wasn’t available in a Chevrolet. Many different transmissions, brakes, frames, and suspension arrangements. Even when they did mostly rationalize stuff, all of the car divisions were still producing their own engines up until the late 70’s and early 80’s. The ubiquitous, (roughly) 350cid V8 was produced by Buick, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac- none of which shared parts with each other… enough so that people were PISSED when they found out that their new 1977 Oldsmobiles had a Chevrolet 350 occupying the space where a Rocket 350 was supposed to sit. That had to play a huge part in how GM was able to keep three separate makes between Chevrolet and Cadillac while Ford and Mopar could only manage one. I mean, imagine someone getting steamed because their 1977 Mercury has a Ford engine?! I suppose Oldsmobile got the last laugh once their 350 diesel started appearing under the hoods of Caprices…
As a kid, I was baffled that our elderly neighbor would only have a Plymouth, but never a Dodge. This was in the K-car/minivan era, so both had long since devolved into direct clones of one another. He had formed his allegiance to Plymouth back in the 1930’s, when they were different cars, and it stuck with him all those years later.
On every car that GM sold, there used to be a badge on the interior door step panel that proudly proclaimed: Body by Fisher, with a picture of a carriage. From what I understand, Fisher was the division of GM that made the body stampings. GM had divisions that did everything, besides the marques themselves, there was AC Delco and GMAD, General Motors Assembly Division. The engines and transmissions were assembled somewhere else and delivered to the factory. When I worked at Fremont, the stampings arrived and were welded together to form the body, on site, the chassis arrived from another source.
It seems that there were a lot of semi autonomous entities contained under the GM banner and from what I’ve read, they were often free to compete with each other. Until Roger Smith shut all that down.
That illustration was one of many, the Fisher body “Girl”, was a long running advertising personality, and was portrayed in many different situations, some formal like this one, some sporty, some athletic, or just looking fashionable. “Look to the Body!” Not very subtle, and obviously sexist, but pretty much par for the course.
I saw an ad for a ’65 Buick Riviera and the woman was seated in the car holding her finger to her lips, the copy asked, “Who puts the “shh” in Fisher Body?”
By the 1980s, GM’s switch to unit-body construction for passenger cars had eliminated the need for separate Fisher Body plants.
GM had also removed all of the assembly plants from divisional control and placed them under the authority of the General Motors Assembly Division (GMAD), which had been created in the 1960s.
Roger Smith’s infamous reorganization tried to address these changes in how GM operated. It wasn’t an unnecessary reorganization. The problem was that its execution was terrible, and had a direct impact on the rollout of the W-bodies.
You say that ‘By the 1980s, GM had switched to unit-body construction’.
However, my 1983 Cadillac is a passenger car that’s built on a traditional frame? And, while I stand to be corrected, I think Cadillac, Buick & Chevrolet continued to built full size rear wheel drive passenger cars (not truck based SUV’s) by the body on frame method until at least 1996.
In addition, GM in Australia continued to build traditional full size rear wheel drive passenger cars through to 2017. Examples are the stunning early 2000’s Pontiac G8 and Pontiac GTO as well as the equally stunning 2013 – 2017 Chevy SS and long wheel base Chevrolet Caprice Police cars. All imported to the USA in LHD form, from Australia.
I should have said that GM had largely switched to unit-body construction for passenger cars (I believe those final Holdens used unit-body construction). As the 1980s progressed, the full-size, body-on-frame cars were decreasingly important to GM in North America.
Roger Smith’s 1984 reorganization affected the North American operations (and no Holden-manufactured cars were sold in the U.S. at that time).
It was stated at the time that GM’s conversion to unit-body construction eliminated the need for separate Fisher Body plants, which is one reason for Smith’s reorganization.
As this discussion has been going on, I finally started looking in more deeply to the Marquette brand, something I’d never bothered to do in the past other than noting that it was a smaller, cheaper Buick and priced slightly ahead of the Viking. Looking at what the car turned out to be was a bit of a shocker: Smaller wheelbase than Buicks and Oldsmobiles, a flathead six (that’s Pontiac territory, now being encroached by Chevrolet), no real design or engineering features that made good ad copy (the Viking’s V-8 was a fascinating engine for what became a dead end). And they were sold by Buick dealers, they didn’t have their own dealerships.
It sounds like Buick was crying for their own “Plymouth” to be sold alongside a car that directly competed with a Chrysler. I get the feeling that Buick dealers looked at the success of Pontiac and felt it was a threat to their sales. It was definitely hurt by the flathead and six cylinders. At that point, Buick had put everything into OHV’s and eight cylinder cars. The realization that the Marquette’s engine was nothing more than a reworking of the Oldsmobile six cylinder couldn’t have helped, either.
Compared to the other companion cars, I’m left with the feeling that Marquette was done on the cheap. And customers realized it. At their height (1929) the pricing range for all the GM brands in order from lowest to highest:
Chevrolet
Pontiac (slight overlap with the cheap Oldsmobile)
Oldsmobile
Marquette (both ends totally within Oldsmobile’s range)
Oakland
Viking
Buick (which completely covered Oakland’s and Viking’s ranges plus went well above)
LaSalle
Cadillac
Wikipedia has a nice article on the “General Motors companion make program” which I used for some of my initial research.
Henry Ford closely studied the Viking “monoblock” V-8 when he was developing his Flathead V-8 for 1932.
As for the Marquette – the medium-price market had been softening even before the Great Crash in October 1929, with the weaker entries such as Jordan already in trouble before that year. With the Marquette slotted to fill a small niche below Buick, I’m guessing that the dealers initially welcomed the prospect of a less expensive model to shore up their business.
The L-Head Marquette six (3 1/8 X 4 5/8) 212 ci. was just one more version of what was already available at the Pontiac dealers: (3 5/16 X 3 7/8) 200 ci six and the Oldsmobile (3 3/16 X 4 1/8) 197 ci six. Fisher bodies were all shared across the nameplates, the Oldsmobile and Marquette were a half inch difference in wheelbase. But both Pontiac and Oldsmobile undercut Marquette in price.
From day one, Buick had promoted their “Valve-in-Head” engines as compelling superiority over L-head as a reason to choose their cars over all others. An L-head six at a Buick dealership seems anathema, except that the basic Chrysler Six was selling pretty well at approximately $1,000 range where Buick had nothing to offer. Sloan was enamored with his companion car concept with the success of Pontiac and LaSalle, so mix-‘n-match out of the GM components bin, maybe source a six from GMC truck/Yellow Coach, let Buick dealers give it a whirl. When 35K sales were all it could muster they weren’t out much nixing it.
It seems they sold brands, not cars.
It made more sense, I guess, when each of these brands acted more like a model does today.
And did you know this GM existed too?