5 marques born under a bad sign
The causes of General Motors’ descent into bankruptcy are complex but its failures are tangible enough, in a rogue’s gallery of unloved and unlovely cars and trucks. Here are five vehicles that helped push GM down the road to ruin.
Chevrolet Corvair, 1960-69
GM’s answer to the first wave of European imports, the Corvair was a bold and stylish, rear-engine, air-cooled car with a slightly treacherous rear suspension that could provoke the car to spin or roll over in extreme handling. In his 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” Ralph Nader accused GM of cheaping out on the Corvair chassis engineering and putting consumers at risk. While Nader’s accusations against the car were debatable, he made the case that GM’s product managers had ruthlessly calibrated safety by per-unit cost.
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Cadillac Cimarron, 1981-88
Perhaps the lowest point in the noble history of Cadillac, the Cimarron was a tarted-up, schmaltzy, re-badged Chevy Cavalier rushed to market to compete against small premium cars from Mercedes-Benz and to help lift GM’s corporate average fuel economy. It was a disaster. The car was dead-slow and unrefined (with a four-cylinder engine and either a three-speed automatic or a four-speed manual transmission), and GM had the temerity to charge about double what a comparable Cavalier cost. Tellingly, GM at first wanted to bill the car “Cimarron, by Cadillac,” but the double talk only infuriated customers more.
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Pontiac Aztek, 2001-05
The punch line to whatever joke about GM you care to tell, the Aztek began as a good idea -- a crossover model, combining the high seating and ground clearance of a sport-utility with the drivability of a car -- that went astonishingly wrong. It was terribly, empirically ugly, with the weird doubling of hood nostrils and headlamps that made it look as if it had been hit in the face with a shovel. The rear of the vehicle, which had been enlarged by product planners in a dubious attempt to make the car more versatile, was an awkward steel and glass bustle. The Aztek has since become a cautionary tale of design by committee.
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Saturn Ion, 2003-07
The Ion was, on balance, merely representative of the widespread mediocrity of GM’s small cars (Pontiac Grand Am, Chevy Cavalier) in the early part of the decade, and a time when Japanese and Korean carmakers were mounting a fresh campaign of excellence. The Ion was intended to go after Gen Y buyers who favored the Honda Civic, but between the tepid design, the palpable cheapness and almost schizophrenic use of interior materials, the Ion was passionless, a non-starter. That it was badged a Saturn -- the brand that once meant to represent the reinvented GM -- only underscored GM’s drift.
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Hummer H2, 2003-present
The Hummer is not a bad vehicle. It is powerful, reliable and will climb a tree, precisely as advertised. But it was easily the most despised vehicle GM ever made and a classic example of GM’s missing the pulse of the market. By building the Hummer H2 -- indeed, by setting up a whole division to support it -- GM unwittingly reinforced its image as an environmental nightmare and pawn of big oil, and that image problem certainly cost GM more than the incremental profit on Hummer sales.
