This site suggests that it is still going on: These are American senior citizens' favorite cars - Autoblog
You won’t be seeing this with a Opel or Vauxhall badge anytime soon. We may be seeing a Chevy SS version of this but they will be few and far between; the stock Chevy SS version should be hitting the floor rooms anytime now. The stock itself is a bad assed ride. Worked on that one too.
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That must be why I asked the question. The divisions of the Japanese cars are clear-cut. (Although when Lexus first came out, I called it a ‘Camry with a facelift’.) I didn’t start driving until the late-'70s, and it appears from your post that not only were there not simply ‘regular’ and ‘upscale’ divisions; there were three or four tiers. And those tiers had become fairly blurred (except for Lincoln and Cadillac) by then.
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From what I’ve read, the system was falling apart by that point. I started driving in 91, and most of my friends and I drove 70s and 80s cars, and by that time, you had to get pretty close to tell if it was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, Pontiac 6000, Chevy Celebrity, or a Buick Century.
Didn’t they bring a few Holdens to the states as Pontiacs? I recall the last Pontiac GTO was a Holden Monaro, and I think that the G8 was a Holden as well, wasn’t it.
The modern-day American car companies are the stripped-down remains of a larger system that attempted to cater to everyone except sports-car enthusiasts and even that came later. The Big Three took recognizable shape in the early 30s.
General Motors had six tiers:
Chevrolet
Pontiac
Buick
Oldsmobile
LaSalle
Cadillac
Chrysler had five:
Dodge
Plymouth
DeSoto
Chrysler
Imperial
Ford had five:
Ford
Mercury
Edsel
Lincoln
Continental
This is way oversimplified so please car buffs, don’t hurt me. The companies had other marques at various times - the Merkur is one forgotten example - and the rankings were sometimes switched; Dodge was higher end in the beginning. The Imperial started as a Chrysler and the Continental as a Lincoln before being split off as their own marques. The Thunderbird and the Corvette have sort of a dotted line relationship to the hierarchy, since people tended to think of them as separate marques but their comparative rank was in the eye of the beholder.
The Continental came and went several times. It was distinctly higher than a Lincoln - they tried to place it against Rolls Royce. I don’t know if anyone believed that, but I’m also sure you could buy and service a Continental anywhere in the U.S. and you’d be an idiot to try that with a Rolls, so they undoubtedly had most of the market outside a couple of big cities.
They sure did. It’s too bad Pontiac had to go under because that was a decent ride.
Don’t expect to many of the Chevy SS versions of the Commodore here in the states because GM isn’t pushing it since it is subject to the gas guzzler tax. I believe they are only bringing it over and selling it so that they could race it in NASCAR. From what I’ve seen they are only going to have 1 for every 3 dealers this year; so if you see one look fast.
In GM pickups, Chevy is the value brand, and GMC is the upscale brand. GMC Sierra = Chevy Silverado as far as platform is concerned. Ford and Chrysler don’t have separate marques- they just have multiple trim levels.
For the blurring of lines in GM, see “Chevymobile” - they actually put Chevy engines in Oldsmobile.
Some buyers were less than amused.
American cars went on a steep downhill slide in the 50’s. I blame it on the failure of the once-magnificent Packard line - they went from producing huge dual-cowl (two windshields) phaetons to re-badged Studebakers.
Studebaker started in the 19th century, producing wagons. They never did quite figuure out how make a car (one exception: the Avanti was a Studebaker - and it actually made a profit! Management didn’t know what do to with a profit, so the sold the line for cash so they could continue losing money on every Lark the sold the Post Office.
Example: Before the mid-50’s, cars had 6 volt systems. The headlights were not bright enough for the new highway speeds.
Everybody else switched to 12v. Studebaker used 8v.
Their only redeeming feature was Raymond Lowry, the body designer. In addition to the Avanti, see the 57-58 Hawks (Gold and Silver) .
I’m not a big car guy but read enough of the business journals that some of this has leaked through.
Ford and GM both wanted to trim a bunch of strange and overlapping marques and drop random companies they had acquired after the financial crisis. Ex, Ford used to own Jaguar and Volvo. But neither was considered a “luxury version” of say the Ford, they were luxury/upscale brands that sort of were their own subsidiary companies of Ford. (They also owned Aston Martin and Land Rover.)
GM had so many different marques and subsidiaries it was impossible for anyone to know what was going on.
In all the initial marketing when Ford did its trimming I remember it being sold as Ford–>Lincoln–>That’s it. Ford was there main line, Lincoln was their luxury line.
GM being GM couldn’t get that simple, but compared to what it was before it’s very simple.
Chevy–>Buick–>Cadillac
Then Corvette is part of the Chevy division, but has its own logo/badge and obviously just makes the sports car.
Then to make things a little different in light trucks, Chevy is the base model, GMC is then the higher end, and then Cadillac also has its own selection of light trucks in terms of SUVs but obviously no Cadillac vans or pickups (although they have wagons and the Escalade EXT is akin to the Avalanche in that it can convert to having a bed.)
I wouldn’t really call GMC the “luxury” model of light trucks for GM, because you don’t see quite that delineation. For example the GMC Terrain is the Equinox with a different look, but I don’t know that anyone would consider the Terrain a luxury SUV. The base model Terrain has basically almost everything you could get in a decked out Equinox, but a decked out Equinox I think is slightly higher MSRP than the Terrain. That isn’t the kind of delineation you see between say, the Chevy Malibu–>Buick Lacrosse–>Cadillac CTS.
Was there much of a difference between Oldsmobile and Buick, in average price, cachet, stereotypical customer, etc.
Is the cheapest Lexus much better than a Toyota Avalon ($30k+)?
It seems to me the average Old or Buick customer was somewhere between 50 and “dead”. So I find it a bit odd they chose to drop the enthusiast brand Pontiac rather than the stuffy brand Buick. Was Buick actually doing that better rather than Pontiac, or did they want a brand more upscale than Pontiac, or did they have some delusion they could make Buick appeal to younger buyers.
The idea, when GM set up its hierarchal brand structure, was that Chevy was the basic car for the common man. Cadillac was the top end of luxury, a true status symbol. (Which is was: Cadillac became a word for the luxury product in any field.)
After LaSalle died in 1940, mostly because it cannibalized Cadillac sales without adding anything new, the middle three were harder to distinguish, and GM kept moving around its expectations. As another overgeneralization, Pontiacs were where a Chevy buyer went to show he was getting ahead in the world. The Buick was distinguished rather than luxurious. Doctors were always the fallback target audience. Olds had to find a niche somewhere between. (Actually, Olds was above Buick at first and then moved under, a reminder how much a generalization this is.) Usually GM aimed for a younger audience than the Buick. The hard thing to remember in today’s world, where a brand can have cars costing several times as much from top to bottom, is that brands were totally price controlled. The top Chevy cost as much as the bottom Pontiac, and the top Buick cost as much as the bottom Cadillac. So what you could afford described the car you’d get as much as its image.
This whole world didn’t make much sense by the 60s, and one of the big faults of the American carmakers is that they tried to keep the distinctions going long after they had no point, although that was heavily influenced by the power of the dealers. I think the Japanese separation of cars into a basic brand plus a luxury brand makes far more sense today.
In Japan there is no Acura, the higher end line there is still called Honda. Not sure if that is true for the other Japanese brands.
I always thought of Chevy as the consumer brand and GMC as the commercial.
The 50 to dead crowd tends to have more money and stick to the trade in and buy new every two years paradigm. Were as Pontiac fit more of a niche. Traded in Buicks also held their resale value better by being traded in newer. Pontiac owners tended to hold on to their cars far longer.
This was definitely true for years. So for example Chevy vans or trucks might not come with a total bare bones option, but the GM van came as basically an empty metal-interior work van you could add options to, and the GM truck might have more engine options but probably didn’t come standard with all the cab creature comforts. So basically the GM brand was sometimes potentially a bigger engine and a more bare bones build that could be customized more for a commercial purpose, but you might miss out on creature comforts (unless you added them in.)
But now across most of the GMC light trucks it basically seems like GM is the “decked out” equivalent of their Chevy counterparts. So the GMC Terrain is equivalent to the Chevy Equinox, but the base model Terrain comes with almost all the special creature comforts that the decked out Equinox comes with.
Browsing through the GM brand website, it looks like it’s all geared to the consumer/creature comfort concept. But if you dig around a little bit you can get to their “Commercial Vehicles” area which is more akin to the traditional GMC concept from what I can tell.
I see the “We are professional grade” advertising has struck again.
Back in the day GMC and Chevy were different trucks, almost no parts were shared. (Funny story I was working in a gas station in 1969 had a GMC in that needed a new carb. None to be found. My boss commented that owning a GMC was like owning a foreign car)
Anyway with the advent of strict smog controls and safety it became much cheaper to “badge engineer”* GMC from a Chevy truck.
This brought the problem of how to get customers to buy a GMC instead if a Chevy.
Thus was born the “We are professional grade” ad campaign that continues today.
The drivelines, frame, and running gear are identical, but through the magic of advertising GMC sales were rescued.
Automotive news had a great article on this campaign several years ago.
- Badge engineer = don’t build a different car instead engineer a new name badge for an existing car. See Toyota Camrey and Lexus ES300.
I’ve always been a Ford man for work vans. The only problem I’ve seen common to the E series is front end alignment after a couple hundred thousand miles or so. New ball joints and the body and frame are good till half a mill. My current one is closing in on a quarter million miles and still running strong. But I’ve been religious about scheduled maintenance since the companies I’ve worked for paid the bill.
This whole issue gets very murky. A book could be written on it but I will try not to do that.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler used to have distinct brands. For economy sake they started to share parts. For many years each brand had their own designers and engineers who could operate as an entity but for cost reasons there was pressure to standardize parts. Things were going along pretty well. Chevrolet developed the Corvair which they didn’t share with the other brands. Oldsmobile developed the Toronado which it didn’t share. There are other example that made the brands distinctive. Body panels, grills and tail design were unique to each brands.
Then GM moved further towards standardization. GM created BOC which stood for Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac which was somewhat separated from the Pontiac/Chevy division. Basically GM was producing 2 lines of cars but was only distinguishing the brands by trim pieces. Within the divisions the brands were basically selling the same cars with different badges and trim. (The were a few exceptions like the Corvette,) The public realized this and it didn’t go over well. Even with the split to two divisions it wasn’t entirely clean. There were Cadillacs that were basically Chevy’s.
Ford, with Lincoln/Mercury and Chrysler with Plymouth/Dodge did much the same thing. Chrysler’s Jeep were a bit distinctive because that was a purchase from the failing American Motors.
Fast forward. GM decided to again let the brands have some autonomy but a lot of that didn’t succeed which led to the demise of the Pontiac and Oldsmobile brands. Likewise, Ford killed Mercury and Chrysler killed Dodge.
On the other side of the ocean it made a bit more sense as to what was going on. Toyota, Honda and Nissan were very successful with the mass market and decided to go after the upscale market held by Mercedes, BMW and Audi. Their approach was to have the top designers and engineers design superior cars. The idea was to utilized step-down engineering. What you saw in their premium brands, Lexus, Acura, Infinity, would appear in the standard brands within a few years after the premium brands had further improvements. That doesn’t mean there was no sharing of parts but the distinction of brands was clearer than what was happening with the American auto makers. The step down process made for some interesting competition and resulted in some damn fine cars at affordable prices due to market competition. All the manufacturers had to step up and start making better cars. That has a lot to do with why cars from all the manufacturers are so much better, durable and safer than the crap that was being sold.
I know I’ve oversimplified but I told you I’m not going to write a book.
Just to clarify: Chrysler killed Plymouth (in 2001). Dodge still exists, though it is now a car-only brand (the truck line was spun off into the Ram brand).
It’s like Cadillacs were the Rolls-Royce of automobiles.
Thanks for the clarification. I was recalling off the top of my head. I’ve never been a Chrysler guy so it was easy for me to misremember. I think the underlying point still stands. Branding has more to do with ad campaigns than the DNA of the vehicle, particularly with American brands. With that being said, the Germans and the Japanese have certainly been pulled in that direction. I mean, who would have ever thought that there could be so much in common between a vehicle branded Porsche and a vehicle branded VW?