“The End of Saab…” by Richard Johnson
If this truly is the end of Saab, maybe it’s just as well Bob Sinclair isn’t around to see it.
Sinclair, who died in May at age 77, made Saab a success in the United States. As head of U.S. operations in the 1980s, he pushed his reluctant Swedish bosses to add content and luxury to their cars.
We forget just how well Saab was doing in this country a couple of decades ago, nearly hitting sales of 50,000 units before the October 1987 stock market crash. Saab was quirky, but also cool.
“GM Needs a Phe-Nom of Its Own” by Richard Johnson
In the new Detroit, it’s all about the CEO, all about having the right guy in command at the right time.
We are in the era of the outsider hero.
The relative calm at Ford Motor Co. these days is attributed to Alan Mulally’s arrival in September 2006.
Chrysler Group’s future is bound up in the style and personality of Sergio Marchionne, who as an outsider transformed Fiat and now tries to do the same in Auburn Hills.
“Whitacre Must Lead…” by Peter Brown
| Five things about still another changing of the guard at General Motors:
1. Fritz Henderson did a heck of a job as the bankruptcy/reorganization CEO of GM. He dumped $90 billion in liabilities from an utterly failed financial wreck. Fritz systematically went after all GM’s creditors and — with, of course, a massive assist from the Obama administration and U.S. bankruptcy code — cleaned up the company’s balance sheet. He’s the finance guy’s finance guy. There were no mysteries for him in this radical remaking of GM’s finances. During the humiliating rinse of GM, his regular press conferences kept the country informed. I think he assured people that they could buy GM products, and the company has performed pretty much in line with this terrible market. (Bankruptcy buddy Chrysler Group has grossly underperformed this terrible market.) Henderson leaves a company with a clean balance sheet, competitive costs and some fine cars and trucks. Read more “Pontiac Joins the List of Extinct Brands” by John K. Teahen, Jr.
Going. Going. Gone. Any day now, a revered 83-year-old brand — Pontiac — will be a relic of the past, and a relic of what General Motors used to be. Pontiac was introduced in 1926 to fill the price gap between Chevrolet and Oldsmobile, and the brand has had an up-and-down life. It was a solid performer in its earlier days. But sales were unsatisfactory in the mid-1950s, and I’m sure some GM executives asked, “Do we really need Pontiac?” After 1956 the answer was a thunderous, “You bet we do!” That year, Bunkie Knudsen, Pete Estes and John DeLorean took over Pontiac — Knudsen as general manager, Estes as chief engineer and DeLorean as assistant chief engineer. Their first car was the 1959 model, and it was a sensation. It had great styling, a split grille and, most important, “Wide-Track Drive,” a phrase coined by Pontiac’s ad agency, MacManus, John and Adams. Buyers told salesmen, “I want one of those Wide Tracks.” The Glory Days Estes and DeLorean succeeded Knudsen in the general manager’s office, and that decade was Pontiac’s golden age. In 1962 the brand was No. 3 in U.S. sales, and it stayed in third place until 1971. Sales peaked at 896,980 in 1978. Before Wide Track, Pontiac usually was in sixth place. Today, all that is history. GM, as we knew it, is gone, and so is Pontiac. The new downsized General Motors dumped it, along with Saturn and Hummer. The latter two were relative newcomers; Saturn arrived in 1990 and Hummer came in 2000. I’m sure there was a hot debate in the GM boardroom when it came time to kill a few brands. Saturn had never been success (it was supposed to be an import fighter, remember?) and the humongous Hummer was a remnant of the SUV craze. Out they go. But do we keep Buick or do we keep Pontiac? Pontiac partisans surely stressed sales; Pontiac has outsold Buick in 42 of the last 51 years. Pontiac clearly has the edge in styling. It’s GM’s sporty car division, and it has a fleet of small cars. They kept Buick Buick backers had history on their side. Buick was the foundation of GM when Billy Durant began putting GM together; Pontiac is a relative newcomer by comparison. Buick also could call on GM patriarch Alfred Sloan and his theory of brand progression. Sloan felt buyers should step up from a Chevrolet to a Pontiac, to an Oldsmobile, to a Buick and, finally, to a Cadillac as their economic situation improved. Chevy to Pontiac is a mighty small step indeed, but Chevy to Buick is a significant step up the ladder. But in the end, Buick lived and Pontiac died. On Oct. 1, Pontiac dealers had 14,200 new cars and trucks on hand. Since then about 6,900 G6 models have been built for fleet sales. October sales totaled 10,646. Thus, about 10,450 remain. All should be sold by the end of this month. Pontiac then will join Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Studebaker, Packard, Winton, Duesenberg and many other proud brands in the automotive graveyard. Pontiac will have sold an estimated 41 million cars and trucks during its 83-year life. Column courtesy of Automotive News. “The Travails of Smart…” by Peter M. De Lorenzo
Two weeks ago, in an item in our “On the Table” column, I suggested that the Smart adventure was nearing an end, saying the following: “Back when this venture was first announced I went on record as saying it would last 12 months, tops. Well, 20 months in and with sales trending downward month after month - October sales were down a staggering 70.4 percent - I think we can safely say that the Smart experiment is a bust. Even with an electric version allegedly coming here, it doesn’t matter. It’s a niche car, and the niche has been filled. Buh-bye now.” “How to Raise the Gas Tax” by John McElroy
Raising taxes on gasoline is political suicide in the United States. Any politician foolish enough to propose raising the gas tax would be hounded out of office, or never elected in the first place. We, the American people, will see to that. You see, we don’t like taxes of any sort. And we especially hate gas taxes. Owning a car in America isn’t so much of a privilege as it is a necessity. Most our communities don’t have public transportation. So we need our wheels to get to work, or school, or going out for fun, or whatever else we want to do with them. In America, even the poorest among us drive cars. And none of us want the government taxing our mobility out of our reach. But maybe the problem is that the American people have never been properly sold on the need to raise the gas tax. Here’s my pitch. “The Big Picture: Reality Bites” by Angus MacKenzie
A reader writes: “After subscribing to your magazine for more years than I can remember, I was amazed that you actually tested a (gasp!) Buick. With all your cheerleading for BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche, you actually came down to testing an affordable, dependable vehicle driven by more people than you care to admit. In case you haven’t noticed, in most of the country there are laws that work against a 224-mph road bomb, so what’s the use of having one. Let’s have more articles on affordable cars more suitable for daily use…” “A Point of Historical Interest” by Mark Vaughn
On this date 20 years ago in Berlin, some minor East German Communist party leader named Günter Schabowski was giving a press conference. The party is adapting to the needs of the people, he was saying, the party responds to the needs of the people, blah blah blah. And, oh yeah, pretty much anyone who wants to can go to West Berlin whenever they feel like it. When an Italian reporter in the press room asked Schabowski when this policy was to go into effect he famously replied, “Immediately.” “Mini to Make Big Impact” by Anthony Peacock It may not appear obvious at first glance exactly what Princess Margaret of England, John Lennon, Peter Sellers and Rauno Aaltonen had in common–apart from a love of hard liquor. When sufficiently sober to do so, however, all four of them drove Minis.
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“Why the Reorganization of the US Auto Industry was Handled the Way It was” by Eddie Alterman
Earlier this summer, after GM had run through bankruptcy like a greased pig, our John Phillips threw a page of questions onto my desk. The queries sought to make sense of the rearranged domestic car industry. There were a lot of them, but they demanded answers. Here are the most pressing five:
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