Senior citizens and Buicks

[Acsenray]

@yabob

You forgot LaSalle. Sloan’s ladder wasn’t so much “stage of life” as “size of wallet”. He wanted to assure that as the customer could afford a more expensive car, they could stay with a GM product. He found that he had two major gaps - between the entry level Chevrolet and the Oldsmobile, and between the Buick and the Cadillac. He acquired a company called “Oakland Motors”, which became Pontiac to fill the gap between Chevy and Olds. The gap that existed between Buick and Cadillac in those days was losing GM a lot of money to Packard and Auburn from customers who could afford a step up from a Buick, but not the leap to where the Cadillac was priced then. Enter the Lasalle, which was sold as a “companion car” to the Cadillac, and sold through Cadillac dealerships. Eventually, the gap between Buick and Caddy disappeared, and so did the LaSalle, which had increasingly come to resemble the Buick.

You’ve got it a little mixed up here. The original lineup was Chevrolet-Oakland-Oldsmobile-Buick-Cadillac. They filled in price gaps and came up with Chevrolet-Pontiac-Oakland-Oldsmobile-Viking-Marquette-Buick-LaSalle-Cadillac. It lasted only a few years before they cut it back down to Chevrolet-Pontiac-Oldsmobile-Buick-Cadillac.