Well they started out the same it stands to reason that they end up the same.
I believe that Buick was doing well in China, while my beloved Pontiac’s were rebadged clones of a stock platform. GM wanted to kill off Dealerships and consolidate, so Pontiac went for the high jump.
Declan
There is no Infinity either. And Lexus only became available in 2003. Toyota had, and still has, a luxury series for their domestic market – the Crown. Nissan has the Fuga and Honda, the Legend to cover the upscale market here.
… and then there was Saturn, which pretended to be an independent automaker, but was just another GM (I remember seeing them referred to as a ‘baby Olds’). As soon as they started getting successful, the mother company rushed in, cannibalized the company, and forced them back into the GM way of doing things - which, of course, destroyed the company.
That’s not the way I remember it. Saturn was always marketed as a GM brand, not an independent. It was equivalent to a Chevy or Olds or any other brand.
They may not have hidden the GM connect, but they sure didn’t push it. You see any mention of GM in these commercials?
Note the slogan: “A different kind of company. A different kind of car.” Not exactly screaming out the connection to GM, are they?
It was a GM brand, but at the beginning their models were completely separate from those offered by other GM divisions (that is, they were not badge engineered). Later on came the Saturn Sky (shared with Pontiac and Opel) and the Saturn Vue (similar to Chevy Equinox and other models).
However, for the last few years before it was closed down, Saturns were basically just rebadged Opels.
Your memory is a bit off. Saturn was absolutely marketed as “A Different Kind of Car Company”, with minimal reference to GM. The cars they first produced shared almost nothing major with other GM models and that was a selling point. The dealerships were independent and never carried other GM brands. They sold cars differently and made them differently in a plant built just for them.
By the time the second generation of cars came along they were rebadged Opels.
ETA - Curse you, **lawroot **and RwS!
OK, I suppose that people who were totally oblivious to the years of publicity leading up to and following Saturn’s launch and never read a single article about Saturn at any time might have thought it wasn’t a GM brand.
If you paid even the slightest amount of attention to a single piece of news coverage in any medium you wouldn’t think this for a second.
You can pick which group you were in.
They do already sell the QX56 (Infinity version of Nissan Armada) in Japan are going to start selling more of the Infinity brand in Japan soon. The only reason they didn’t do it before is because the Nissan’s that they make and sell in Japan would be considered Infinity level cars here.
There’s a difference between “marketing Saturn as a GM brand” (which they didn’t do, IIRC) and “trying to obfuscate the fact that GM owned Saturn” (which they obviously didn’t do).
Exactly, they took great pains to disassociate the Saturn brand with any other GM product or infrastructure. Yes, anyone who followed cars knew it was a GM brand, but it was clearly differentiated from the GM family. I encountered many people who didn’t know that Saturn was by GM (I owned an SW2 for 7 years).
Do any GM brands (with the exception of GMC) actually market themselves as such? I mean, they don’t specifically deny it, but I don’t think they go out of their way to mention it, either.
I think you have it backwards. Chrysler is more upscale than Dodge. Dodge is more comparable to Chevy or Ford, while Chrysler is more comparable to Cadillac or Lincoln.
I wouldn’t say this is true. Chrysler was the top brand of the Chrysler company back in the day, but in the 50s they introduced the Imperial brand as their luxury marque and Chrysler became the “number two” more akin to Buick today than to Cadillac. It mostly remained that even after Chrysler dropped Imperial in the 70s/80s, because I know by that point Chrysler was not selling cars under the Chrysler brand that were really positioned against Lincoln/Cadillac.
I think Chrysler has always gone for some level of premium, in that you didn’t say the true entry-level vehicles branded as Chrysler, but for most of my adult life they’ve been a midlevel type brand in terms of price–not as expensive as a Cadillac or Lincoln.
Right now Chrysler branded vehicles start out in the low $20,000s, a little bit cheaper than the cheapest Buicks. The cheapest Cadillac starts around $33k.
I wouldn’t even really say Chrysler has a luxury “brand.” Instead they market both fairly mass market cars like the Chrysler 200 (starting around $20k), and the Chrysler 300 (marketed more as a luxury vehicle) under the same marque.
Thanks to you and the others who reported this for confirming my opinion about the American people. I think it also explains why they vote the way they do.
The Infiniti QX56, now QX80 starting in 2014, has not been based off of the Armada since 2011, when they drastically changed the body-style. Since 2011, the large size Infiniti SUV has been based off of the Nissan Patrol, which is manufactured in Japan and currently only sold in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Middle East and Africa. The Nissan Armada is made in Mississippi.
I knew that, but you miss my point. They are selling the Infiniti brand in Japan now. They did not before, only Nissan branded vehicles were sold in Japan before.