<VV> No Corvair - advice?

[Tony Underwood]

At 07:16 AM 1/21/2007, BBRT wrote:
>If GM and Chrysler would ever get their heads out and try and catch 
>up to the Mustang...... (w/ Challenger and Camaro)... Nothing like 
>bringing your best stuff to a fight where the outcome is no longer 
>in doubt...  Can you say, "A day late and a dollar short"?



Add to this the fact that DC is gonna be asking a serious price for 
the new Challenger.    Too much, IMHO, for it to be a threat to 
anything.   The  best thing about the new Challenger is that it at 
least has only 2 doors (in spite of the rhetoric preached by 
Chrysler's design market/manager Trevor Creed a couple years ago, who 
for all the world reminded me of Terry McAullife in the way he was so 
confident in every move he made...  like initially announcing that 
Chrysler was going to continue with FWD and 4 doors with *all* its 
cars, in SPITE of a growing dissatisfaction in a large market segment 
with 4-door cars...  and then Bang comes the 300, followed shortly by 
the "Charger" albeit both were still 4-door cars.    While the 300 
was a hit, the new "Charger" caught a lot of flak from traditional 
performance car fans who expected this new car bearing the sacred 
name "Charger" to have more in common with its legacy than what 
Daimler-Chrysler laid on us, courtesy of Trevor's mandated 4-door 
sedan platform.    Creed also dropped the ball with the Crossfire 
project, claiming that it would fill a niche for which no US car 
offered a candidate.   Maybe there was a reason...

Elitists in Europe may well spend a boatload of money on small glitzy 
fanatically overpriced obscure sports cars, but here stateside the 
consumers stayed away in big crowds.    Trevor likely explained its 
failure as caused by its not being FWD... ;)  ...and too few doors.

While Mustangs were selling out, and Ford was having to start running 
overtime and 3rd shifts to keep up with demand, customers for the new 
Dodge were slow in warming up to the latest "performance" Mopar which 
in fact was the first real standard design performance car that 
Chrysler had produced since the last Volare  based Roadrunner in the 
mid-1970s.

Trevor maintained his 4-door mandates so vehemently that people began 
to wonder how long before DC would introduce a 4-door Viper.    This 
seems to have changed with the new Challenger... along with 
clandestine rumblings from dark and mysterious circles within 
Chrysler that there's a notion being discussed to eventually redesign 
the LX platform basis for the "Charger" so as to make it a 
2-door.    Not likely to come to fruition (IF it ever does) for 
several years so that DC can milk as much as possible from the 
tooling currently in place.



All the while, DC's beancounters (of which Creed was one) kept 
following the dollar's bottom line instead of listening to what 
consumers wanted.   Like GM which insisted on 4-door everythings, 
they chased a lot of customers to imports which not only did supply 
them with a coupe, the product was usually cheaper as well.

People wondered why sales were down.    Ford, meanwhile, made the 
most of their Mustang which had maintained at least some of its 
legacy the entire time.   So far, the new retro Mustang has sold 
close to a half-million examples while the DC effort ("Charger") 
remains a distant 2nd.

Now:   The new Dodge has some excellent engineering and the new Hemi 
engine is a real tire burner that still manages to squeak some 
mileage...  but the Mustang gives that percentage of the people with 
a sports coupe addiction what they want... in the form of a sleek 
muscular 2-door coupe that looks like a performance car.


The Challenger is a slow to appear competitor... not because certain 
design & marketing people among Chrysler weren't interested, but 
because the suits in the top floor offices weren't.   It took the 
success of the Mustang to convince them.   GM was even slower to 
catch up, in SPITE of Bob Lutz and his rants about the blunders and 
goofs they'd been committing the entire time.    Among the first 
things he said when hired on was that GM blundered when the killed 
off their RWD platforms for the Impala and Roadmaster etc, as well as 
having turned their only ponycar into an expensive inefficient 
wannabe which seemed to draw more inspiration from Rice than from 
Beef... as well as pricing the car out of range of those who would 
have wanted it most, whom the car was originally marketed for in the 
first place.



The gist of all this is that US car makers have gotten so far behind 
rational decisionmaking that it's now turning into a frantic catch-up 
exercise, crippled by unions and obsolete logistics and plain bad 
policies.    Even though the engineering has become quite advanced, 
there are still some serious faults in the system which do nothing 
for regaining the confidence of the US consumer...  such as the new 
Dodge "Charger", filled with technology, which still weighs over two 
tons in spite of its being smaller than any of its original 
forebears.    In their infinite wisdom, DC chose this same LX 
platform for every RWD car they intend to make for the next several 
years.   The LX is a RWD variant of the LH...  which is sorely in 
need of an update.   ...and a diet.

Picture a new Dodge Challenger that weighs two tons...   when DC 
finally announced that they were gonna produce the new Challenger, 
Mopar fans everywhere perked up with High Hopes.    Now that the car 
is on the way and soon to appear on showroom floors, more and more 
people are finding out that it's not gonna be cheap, it's not gonna 
be light, and it's not gonna be built in the numbers the Mustang is.

...why do I keep thinking that the Camaro is not going to be much 
different?


The Camaro is still a question mark.   What will it sell for?   Can 
people afford it?



Ahh...  automobiles...  what would we do without them?



tony..