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Comment by dkokelley | Hacker News Reader

Most of their flagship brands (Chevy/GMC, Cadillac... actually, those are their only flagship brands I guess) are decent cars. I don't think bad cars are GM's primary problem (though the cancers that are Saturn, Pontiac, Saab, HUMMER are certainly hurting GM).

From my subjective observations, the things that are hurting GM the most are rising gas prices (and cars that use too much of it) and unfavorable employment contracts.

Note: I haven't seen the income sheets for GM (at least not one that breaks down the brands), nor have I seen any study that shows the quality of their cars vs. others.

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For years, the quality of American cars was vastly lower than the Japamese. Things have gotten a lot better, but now it's the overall design and market positioning that's really lacking, as well as a lack of cars that really target the market.

There's a line out the door for the Smart car. How hard would it be for GM (or Ford) to grab one of their little, gas-sipping city cars (like the Ford Ka), and sell it in the US? It's obvious that consumers want them, and it would give American automakers a domestic answer to the Honda Fit and Toyota Yaris.

The interior styling needs to stop being so disjointed; I have yet to sit in any American car and get the feel that people actually cared when they laid out the inside of the car. The Saturn Sky is a great example -- I can't operate the controls on the driver-side door, because they are placed right under the middle of my forearm.

It's even worse in the economy segment -- Ford and Mazda share technology, yet the interior of the Mazda 3 is such a wonderful place to be, whereas the interior of the Focus is just... dreary. The Mazda feels like a downsized BMW, and the Ford feels like... well, a Ford.

What's amazing to me, is I think the quality gap is much smaller than people tend to think but the American companies just let that image get created. Regardless of how the actual quality compares, people think American cars are lower quality. It didn't happen over night either. I can't imagine what went through their minds as they just let it happen; there was probably a lot of corporate thought control and it was un-PC to actually drive a Japanese car or say anything good about one for decades. You know you contrast that to like MS and their approach to Linux, MS is on top because they fear EVERYBODY and give them some respect. I just can't imagine letting my company develop and image of creating lower quality products than my competitors, for years and years.

Now the bigger difference is when you buy an inexpensive, smaller Toyota or Honda, they are radically different than an inexpensive, smaller Ford or GM car. The styling choices are different. For years Americans associated big and heavy with quality, they always thought the Japanese cars are tinny and flimsy. It really seems like when you buy an inexpensive American car, you get a cheap car but when you buy an inexpensive Japanese car you get a cost reduced version of their nicer cars.

Well it probably took years to bring the quality up to par, so in the meantime, there wasn't much else they could do to fight that perception.

Now they suffer from a branding issue (on top of their other problems). It's like when the original AT&T was split up, and one of the companies to come out of it was GTE. GTE had horrible service and customers hated it. It perennially ranked at the bottom of the baby bells for customer satisfaction, etc. So GTE went and rebuilt it's whole network and suddenly had the best service and support. But when people heard 'GTE' they still thought 'crappy and unreliable'. The solution? They changed their name to Verizon.

So building high quality cars that are stylish and true technical leaders might not be enough. (Especially now that the public associates 'GM' and 'Chrysler' with 'bailout'.) In all this bailing out they might have to change their brand name as well.

According to Wikipedia, GTE was independent even during the AT&T monopoly. It wasn't until the Bell Atlantic merger that they changed names to Verizon.

You're very correct about the corporate thought control -- for years, GM employees were forbidden to buy anything but a GM car, and foreign cars were often vandalized in Detroit. There's still a mantra that 'Americans don't buy small cars.', even with the success of the Miata, the Mini, the Civic, and so on.

> How hard would it be for GM (or Ford) to grab one of their little, gas-sipping city cars (like the Ford Ka), and sell it in the US?

It wouldn't help because the fuel-efficiency of imported cars doesn't count for GM's domestic CAFE.

I don't think you fully understand the market either. The Ford Ka is not in any way in the same league as the Smart car. IMHO the Big Three's obsession with out-competing the Japanese in the econo-car market contributed no small part to their demise.

Entire lines of "all American" cars were scrapped in favor of inferior ripoffs of Toyota creations. This continued well into the 2000s; look at cars like the Chevy Aveo, a Korean-made, budget econo-mobile that couldn't hold a candle to the Echo/Yaris' fuel efficiency nor reliability.

Ford was the first one to recover from this and reintroduce big muscle, which in the end was what the American market wanted all along (but couldn't justify).

I do agree on the interior point though. Why is it that I can sit in a Toyota and feel like I'm in a luxurious, well-appointed interior, and then sit in a similarly-priced Ford and feel like I'm sitting in someone's high school science project?

I don't think many people have seen any studies that compare quality of GM cars versus other brands.

It's probably more of a perceived quality than anything based on numbers that is detrimental to GM.

If GM cars are at par in terms of quality but nobody believes it, that still hurts GM.

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