Word: buick
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...country's favorite family car and one of its all-time best sellers, totaling more than 6.5 million cars in a 20-year run. A year later, Ford claimed that turf with the Taurus. In the next 10 years, Chevrolet and Pontiac sales slid 37%, Cadillac's 42%, Buick's 49%. Oldsmobile's crashed 71%. The company lost a total of $30 billion from 1990 through 1992, a cash drain that amounted to nearly $50 million for every working day every year for three years, before the GM board finally staged the 1992 coup that installed the present management team...
...survived until this year by giving away the store--lightly restyling and updating its 12- and 15-year-old workhorses such as Buick Centurys and Chevrolet Corsicas and underpricing the competition. The company also went on a brutal cost-cutting crusade throughout its production system, beating up suppliers for price rebates and consolidating 27 separate purchasing organizations into one worldwide group that "commonized" such once disparate auto components as braking, air-conditioning and radio systems. Under the new purchasing program, for example, instead of buying 123 different steering columns, GM will stock 50. The company can still produce totally different...
...first daylight. Chevrolet needs to get its [sales] volume base back. Pontiac is our sports segment, but the challenge is to take that image and convert it into more volume units. Oldsmobile needs to reposition itself to sophisticated, refined midsize-car buyers who will be new purchasers to GM. Buick's great focus will remain on premium American road cars, but it needs to recapture that traditional element from a younger customer base. Cadillac really needs to make its breakthrough as a global player. Saturn's image is just perfect. All they need to do is execute product growth." Whew...
...time to bring them back into the fold. We need to launch these products, put them out there and let the customer decide. This is put-up or shut-up time." Fighting words, Mr. Middlebrook. But as Alfred Sloan might also urge on his new generation at Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac and Chevy: There is still much to do, and little time left...
Meanwhile, virtually every major automaker is spending heavily to make the dream come true. Chrysler has the 1.3-mile-long test bed I'm bouncing along in Chelsea, Michigan. General Motors is outfitting a convoy of 10 Buick LeSabres that are scheduled to make a test run next year on a modified stretch of I-15 outside San Diego. Five leading Japanese automakers, meanwhile, are members of a government-led consortium that turned a four-mile stretch of new expressway near the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics into a smartway proving ground...