No, I distinctly recall it being a 3.0 litre displacement engine. It predated the 3800. The car was a 1984 Buick Century.
From Wiki:
Engines
1982–1985 Tech 4 2.5 L (151 in³) I4
1982–1985 3.0 L (181 in³) V6 A whopping 110hp!
1982-1985 4.3 L diesel V6
1986–1988 2.8 L (173 in³) V6
1984½–1988 3.8 L (231 in³) V6
I got you… maybe I’m out of touch with the common man. I didn’t honestly think anyone really thought this way any more! It’s just absurd.
FWIW for the Toyota/GM thing, well, Toyota and GM operate some joint manufacturing facilities in the USA and Canada. You can still choose between a Matrix and a Vibe, for example.
For the Mercury example, it’s often stated that it’s cheaper to badge them than the buy out all of the dealer franchises. Ford does quite well without Mercury in Canada, for example. Personally, I tend to think that the Lincoln dealers don’t need Mercury as a stepping stone, as the Lincoln brand would have a little more cachet by making the dealership more exclusive. Maybe not exactly today-today, but with the MKT and the MKS coming out, it should be a good marque again.
I’ve heard that one reason for this is that people tend to be (or used to tend to be) very loyal to dealers and/or brands. “I shop at Smithjones Buick,” or “I’m a Buick man!” So by badging that Chevy as a Buick also, then you get access to all those customers.
But I don’t know how much people still hold to those sentiments in this day and age.
In the case of the US manufacturers, remember that each of these brands was once an independent car company.
The wave of merger/acquisitions came immediately pre- & post-WWII. So people who bought their first cars in the late 40s had real separate brands which were actually different vehicles. Those folks are now in their 80s & are almost entirely past their car-buying years. But many still hold to the idea that a Buick is different from a Chevy. And that driving a Cadillac signals that You Have Arrived.
Their kids, who grew up riding in distinct brands, are now in their 50s & 60s and are getting close to the place where they’re gonna stop buying soon. As well, they’ve lived through the last 30 years of steady erosion in brand differences. So for them, Olds vs Pontiac vs Buick is mostly (but not entirely) meh. And we’ve seen that GM was able to kill one (Olds) without too much harm to their repeat customer demographic. Soon enough (10 years?), they’ll be able to prune another.
So these badge-engineered brands of the 1990s & 2000s are remnants of historical accidents 50 years ago. I believe neither Ford nor GM would choose to create another new brand now just for marketing reasons. Saturn was created essentially for union-busting.
The non-US car makers historically have had fewer brands because the parent company wasn’t some Frankenstein result of M&A. So the invention of Lexus & Infiniti are simple brand extension plays. And as others have noted, in most cases the differences are deeper than mere badge engineering.
We can expect to see Hyundai & perhaps Daewoo add an upmarket brand in the next 10 years, at least if their current aspirations succeed.
As the whole dealer industry morphs from single-location single-brand stores to multi-location multi-brand and even multi-manufacturer chains & franchises, we’ll see an increasing ability for the traditional companies to kill off their now-superfluous brands.
And non-traditional distribution channels will only increase the speed of brand restructuring.
:dubious: Then why’d they move all those unionized workers down here to run the plant? And why is it still a union operation?
FWIW there was an article in Automotive News several years back about the challenge that GMC faced with selling what is in fact a Chevy with a different name badge. The article mentioned that they were going to try a new ad campaign about GMC being professional grade truck.
So if someone buys a GMC because it is “better” than a Chevy, you have to remember a couple of things. First off Chevy is not running any counter ads that say, “No its not, they are the same damn truck”, and for a non-gear head, it can be hard to tell if the ad claims are true or not.
Along the same line, we had a thread awhile back about the Toyota truck ads showing them doing some wild stuff. (I can’t find it on search) One of the ads showed a Tacoma pulling an empty cargo container up over the edge of a cliff. One new Toyota truck owner popped in and said he would like to see another truck do this. I posted a link showing that an F150 could easily do the same stunt, and if you grabbed it’s big brother the F450 you could park the Tacoma inside the cargo container and pull them both over the cliff. The Toyota owner got miffed as I recall. Such is the power of advertising.
Popular Mechanics has a piece on “rebadging.” Now, the cars they looked at aren’t ones that simply have new pieces of plastic grafted to them, but in many cases have substantial differences between them. It’s interesting to see the amount of changes they make to some models. Interestingly enough, they don’t pick any models made by a GM company, just Ford and Nissan. I guess its because Ford divisions and Nissan do a better job of it than GM does. (And just to be clear, no Ford product shares anything with a Nissan product. However a Nissan car does share a lot with a Nissan SUV.)
That is not an article on rebadging, but rather on platform sharing. Not the same thing.
A example of platform sharing would be the Volvo S80/S60/V70/XC70/XC90 and the Ford Taurus (nee 500)/Taurus X (nee Freestyle) All of these vehicles share the same platform. I seriously doubt that anyone would say an XC90 is a rebadged S80 or that a Taurus is a rebadged S60.
Rebadging would be a Taurus and a Sable.
A platform is the base structure and denotes where some critical components are located.
Well, it depends if you’re GM or not. 
Seriously, though, the Ford Focus and the Lincoln featured in the article look really close cosmetically in the photos to my eyes. Sort of like how that one Ford and the Jag which shared the same platform looked danged near identical to me. Platform sharing is one of the things which confuses folks when it comes to rebadging. Originally, rebadging was the only kind of platform sharing that car makers did. Now, however, it’s gotten a lot more sophisticated.
Now I’m a little confused. My understanding is that “platform sharing” means using the primary car frame and internals, but that the external portion and interior of a shared platform car may in fact look and be very different from the other car(s) it shares platforms with.
With that said, cannot a rebadged car ALSO be platofrm sharing at the same time?
take the GM F-Body, Camaro/Firebird. They share the same platform as well as being rebadged. Am I missing a nuance here?
Platform sharing started out as rebadging. In the years since, car makers (save for GM) have gotten more sophisticated about it. So, instead of cars being identical except for minor things like trim, they may share the same frame, but have new sheet metal bolted on, different engines and the like. As the Popular Mechanics article I linked to shows, some times the changes made to a shared platform between different makes and models are such that it’s very difficult to spot the commonalities.
So, to sum up, rebadging is platform sharing, but platform sharing is not necessarily rebadging.
Rick,
There was an interview with a GM executive around the time on your first example.
GMC didn’t make the perception that GMC trucks were ‘professional grade’ with advertising. Their test marketing proved that many consumers ALREADY BELIEVED their trucks were professional grade relative to Chevrolet’s product. They just advertised that bit of misinformation to the consumers that did not already believe it.
[QUOTE]
The Geo Metro was a Suzuki, and GM owns part of Suzuki, so that’s why that happened. In the case of Toyota and GM or Honda and GM, the reason is so that they can slash development costs. To take a design from the drawing board to production can cost as much as $1 billion, or more, especially if you’re pouring money into developing new technology. Getting a foreign company to help you with those costs benefits everybody and is less likely to get you ensnarled in anti-trust issues than if you picked domestic partner.
[QUOTE]
Still confused here. The Geo Metro was a suzuki…but I remember a bigger Geo model was a rebadged Toyota Corolla (a friend of mine had one). As mentioned above, the Vibe is a rebadged Toyota Matrix.
Why would Toyota agree to manufacture Vibes for Chevy? These are two competing car makers. If I was Toyota, I’d say, “tough luck Chevy…I make a better car than you, and it’s more efficient and sylish than anything you got…I win. Too bad if you can’t get your production costs down.”
I wouldn’t say, “I’ll make some Matrix’s for you to sell with your Chevy logo that you can sell for less (Yes…sometimes the rebadged japanese version is sold for less) so you can compete with me for the same market (demographic…whatever).” Unless maybe they understand that some people will only buy american…even knowing that they’re buying a rebadged japanese car.
I know Chevy probably can’t produce a Matrix/Vibe. But selling them rebadged seems like that would fall under some sort of antitrust law. I mean, what if all cars came from the same manufacturer rebadged?
Didn’t GM and Toyota have a shared plant in California? New United Motor Manufacturing Inc, or something. I definitely recall a 1980s Chevy that was also a Toyota Corolla that was made there.
Now why they had a shared plant, I’m not sure. Maybe it was a joint-venture thing to meet US ownership restrictions, like when GM went into China and built Shanghai GM in partnership with Shanghai Automotive. Possibly this was before the Japanese started building their own plants in the States and Canada?
Right. GM and Toyota have a joint plant in California that they operate.
First, they don’t make them for Chevy, they make them for Pontiac. Second, the reason that they’d do this in conjuction with GM is that Toyota has a pretty stodgy image (that’s why they came out with the Scion brand, BTW), and a Toyota aimed at a youthful market might not sell very well. How best to lower that risk? Find someone else willing to split the costs.
Some people will only buy American, but I doubt that those folks are in the Vibe’s target demographic at all.
The antitrust stuff seems to kick in only when domestics were involved. Another reason to do it, is if it can enable you to more rapidly fill a segment which you’ve got empty at the moment. Honda’s first SUVs were just rebadged Isuzus. SUVs were selling well, and Honda couldn’t get one out fast enough to take advantage of the demand, so they called Isuzu (a GM company, BTW) and struck a deal. It was at about this time that GM and Honda teamed up to design the VTEC engine, so that may have been part of the deal as well.
Here it is: NUMMI. Interestingly, the Wikipedia article says that only the Vibe is produced there. The Matrix is produced at the Toyota plant in Cambridge, Ontario.
GM has nothing to do with the Honda VTEC system AFAIK. Perhaps you are thinking of the last-generation Saturn VUE, which used a Honda V6 engine and transmission from the Acura MDX and RL. In return, Honda was given an Isuzu(GM subsidiary) designed diesel engine from the Vauxhall/Opel Astra for use in the European market Honda Civic.
The other thing that Toyota got out of the Matrix/Vibe deal was that the version of the car Toyota sold in Japan, called the Toyota Voltz, was a rebadged Pontiac Vibe (as in, the sheetmetal and styling was from the Pontiac, not the Toyota). I think the overall point here is that the major automakers are probably on friendlier terms with each other than we would think, and if there was a way for everyone to make money, they would do it. Certainly, while GM might take a cut out of the Vibe’s profits for the use of their showrooms and such, I imagine the majority of the profit, no matter which version is sold, still goes back to Toyota.
Ahh.
“All champagne is sparkling wine, yet not all sparkling wine is Champagne.”
Got it now.
Nope. Honda’s had a plant in the States since 1980 and they didn’t have any partners when they built it.
Nope. Both companies offer (or did) a VTEC engine. At least, I think that it’s what it’s called, I might be misremembering the name, it’s been ages since I read about it. At any rate, both GM and Honda shared development costs and R&D to build the engine.
Last I heard, the largest foreign shareholder in any Japanese car company was an American car company. The screaming that domestic car makers do is pure BS. It was an American who pioneered the pursuit of quality (W. Edwards Demming) and taught it to the Japanese (who were willing to listen), and the American car companies all own stakes in their Japanese rivals (exact amounts have varied over the years). The dirty secret in Detroit is not how bad some of the car makers are doing, but that they’ve been able to get away with suckering the American tax payer to keep them afloat, while they didn’t bother to adapt to changing conditions like foreign car makers have.
I have never heard of a GM car having a VTEC engine. I’m pretty sure that was a Honda-only project. Prove me wrong and fight my ignorance.