Sports Car Declining in Sales : GM Planning Face Lift for Antiquated Camaro
Back in 1964, General Motors Corp. had a big problem. Lee Iacocca and Ford Motor Co. had introduced a sporty two-door car called the Mustang, and it quickly became a hit. To catch up, GM’s Chevrolet division designed a car to match the Mustang, and unveiled the new model in 1967. Its name: Camaro, taken loosly from the French word for comrade or friend.
Like the Mustang, the Chevrolet Camaro became a best-selling domestic sports car for 2 decades, but today the Camaro is but one of many problems for GM. Camaro sales have steadily dropped the last 4 years, adding to a slide in GM’s overall share of the U.S. car market to 36% from 43% 5 years ago. Last year, about 100,000 Camaros were driven off Chevy showrooms, down from 202,200 in 1984, says J.D. Power & Associates, an automotive research firm in Agoura Hills.
Few Changes
The auto business is a lot like the fashion industry, and critics deride the current Camaro model as an automotive dinosaur, with a bulky, garish design inside and out that makes the car look dated compared to today’s sleek sports cars, such as the Toyota Supra and Nissan 240-SX. The Camaro’s looks have changed little since 1982 and by automobile standards, the Camaro needs a face-lift.
The Mustang also is based on a design several years old. But periodic updates in Mustang’s body, suspension and horsepower--together with a generally lower sticker price--enabled Mustang to outsell Camaro by nearly 2 to 1 last year.
Now GM is trying to engineer a Camaro comeback for the next decade, starting in 1992 when the company will roll out a redesigned version of the car. GM won’t disclose specifics on what the car looks like but said the 1992 model takes some of its styling from a radical “concept” Camaro that was created at a cost of $500,000 by GM’s Advanced Concepts Center in Newbury Park and built by a small Burbank firm, Acsco Automobile Development.
The concept Camaro, a futuristic car shaped like a bullet, was on display last week at the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show and “is quite a ways advanced” compared to the Camaro that will be sold in 1992, said Robert D. Burger, general manager and the top executive at Chevrolet. The 1992 Camaro will use a blend of the current model and the concept car, Burger said.
Whatever it looks like, the 1992 Camaro could have a major impact on Los Angeles. GM builds its Camaros and Firebirds at its assembly plant in Van Nuys, but the plant’s contract runs out in 1991. GM has not yet decided whether to award the new models to Van Nuys, although a decision is expected within a few months. Even if Van Nuys does get to build the new models, the plant’s long-term future will rest on whether GM can breathe new life into the car.
Opinions vary about why the Camaro slumped. Ron Sessions, an editor for Road & Track magazine, is a Camaro fan, but he said that “they are cop catchers” prone to getting tickets, and that “they are loud.”
Drivers also have been turned off by Camaro’s high insurance costs, particularly in California, where one-third of all Camaros are sold. Even with a good driving record, a single, 30-year-old driver could pay more than $1,500 a year for insurance on the least powerful Camaro. “Insurance is killing the Camaro market,” Sessions said.
Camaro drivers also tend to be in more accidents than drivers of most other cars in its class, said Rick Dinon, a spokesman for 20th Century Insurance in Woodland Hills. In fact, 20th Century and Allstate Insurance won’t even insure the IROC-Z--the most powerful Camaro--because they consider the car too risky.
And Camaro’s price tag, which can exceed $20,000 for an IROC-Z, steadily climbed above Mustang’s price in recent years by $1,500 to $5,000, a not-so-inconsequential amount to Camaro’s target audience of drivers under age 40. Buyers noticed. Ford sold nearly 170,000 Mustangs last year.
During a visit to last week’s auto show, Chevrolet’s Burger conceded, “we lost of lot of business” to Mustang because of the price difference. He also admitted that GM neglected Camaro’s styling. “We let the car go quite a long time,” Burger said. “We we sort of put it on the back burner.”
To try to revive the Camaro’s sales, GM turned to its Advanced Concepts Center a year ago to design a Camaro for the mid-1990s with the idea of immediately using some of the car’s features on its 1992 model.
Chris Cedergren, a J.D. Power analyst, said most auto makers build concept cars “not to say to the public that these will be in production, but basically to show consumers and the press the level of technical and engineering and design prowess the manufacturer has.” They also give auto makers a chance to get some public opinion before spending millions of dollars on production.
“We’re not going to design cars in a vacuum and say, ‘Here: like this,’ ” said James S. Bieck, chief designer at GM’s Advanced Concepts Center.
Creating a successful new car is as difficult as creating a new look in clothes, because the designer must guess about future tastes in fashion. But whereas an apparel designer might be drawing clothes for next fall, car designers are creating vehicles that won’t go into production for 3 or 4 years.
Indeed, former GM Director H. Ross Perot has complained that it takes GM longer to get a new car into production than it did for the United States to win World War II. Such long lag times increase the odds that the car won’t appeal to drivers once it finally rolls off the assembly line.
California Design
In hopes of coming up with a Camaro design that would sell well in California, GM farmed out the design to its California design center. “California sets trends,” Bieck said, and GM wanted to “get our input, so there’s not the inbreeding of Detroit. We have another point of view, and we’re remote and removed.”
Once Bieck’s staff of 40 got the assignment to rethink the Camaro, “every single person, right down to the people in the shop, felt the car was too big, the existing car, so we started with the premise of doing a smaller car,” Bieck said.
Each decade, new automobile designs come to be dominant and other car designers take cues from it. In the 1980s two of the most important designs were Ford’s so-called jellybean look, where its cars were overhauled with a more rounded, aerodynamic shape, as well as Audi’s aerodynamic design where the nose of the car was significantly closer to the ground than the tail end.
The Camaro concept car is 15 1/2 feet long, 6 inches shorter than the 1989 Camaro, Bieck said. But more importantly, the streamlining of the car’s body--with its severely rounded front end that dips to a point, flush-mounted glass and side-view mirrors that are built into the body--makes it look even slimmer, he said.
“We wanted to get a more fluid, rounded car yet keep the aggressive quality a Camaro should have,” Bieck said. His designers sought a “purposeful, lean, fast, sleek” look that would give the car “an emotion, a personality,” he said.
Clay Models
The concept car, which is made of steel and has a six-cylinder engine, was designed and built in six months by GM’s design team and Acsco. GM started by making small clay models of several design ideas, and then choosing one style. A full-scale clay model of that car was made, and its dimensions were then copied into steel by Acsco.
Fancy interior parts also were custom-made. They include a black, padded wrap-around dashboard that literally places controls in a sweeping arc from the driver’s left arm to right. To emphasize the driver, the seat is red; the other three seats are black. The car’s 18-inch rear tires had to be specially made by Goodyear, said Acsco President Tom McIntyre.
Will all of this effort restore Camaro’s past luster? Cedergren of J.D. Power said he’s seen drawings of the 1992 model and, although it is more conservative than the concept car, “from the rendering I’ve seen, the car is going to be impressive.”
But the Camaro’s looks won’t solve the car’s insurance handicap, and it’s still up to GM to keep its price competitive. Ford won’t sit still with the Mustang, nor will Camaro’s import competitors, such as Toyota and Nissan.
After all, Camaro had a new look in 1982, but that alone wasn’t enough to sustain the car’s sales for the next 7 years. The Mustang and the imports hurt, Cedergren said, “but what affected it much more was a lack of attention by GM.”
