OK, so Chevrolet trucks and GMC trucks are EXACTLY THE FRICKIN’ same except for some minor cosmetic changes (as far as I can tell). Why? Why even have GMC trucks at all? I imagine it must cost a fair amount to produce a different front end for the same truck, not to mention competing advertising campaigns. Come to think of it, there’s a lot of cars that are just slightly changed and rebadged.
GMC Safari = Chevy Astro
GMC Sonoma = Chevy S-10
Ford Windstar = Mercury Villager
Ford Tempo = Mercury Topaz
Ford Mustang = Mercury Capri
GMC Jimmy = Chevy Blazer
I’m sure there’s tons more. What’s the point of them doing this?
Near as I can tell, it’s just a bizarre leftover from an era in the late 1950’s when American vehicles ruled American roads. Of course, the Big Three’s market share has shrunken drastically since then, but the same corporate culture exists.
It’s worth noting that General Motors was quite the consortium of “different manufacturers” in it’s day. Supposedly, those different manufacturers appealed to different market segments. In Ford’s case, I suspect we saw a bit of fashionable immitation to be honest. But since then, it’s just become a corporate culture and little more in my opinion.
Certainly, the bloated design process can’t continue.
That’s not the only reason. Multiple model lines with nearly-identical vehicles can allow you to pull a nifty marketing trick called price discrimination. Here’s how it works. Any given product is worth different amounts to different people. Say my car costs me $10k to build. There are some people who would be willing to pay $20k for it. There are others who wouldn’t buy it unless it only cost $15k. If I set the price at $20k, I get maximum profits from the former buyers, but I lose all the latter potential customers. But if I set the price at $15k, while I pick up the latter customers, I lose out on a bunch of potential profit from the former customers. Ideally, then, you would charge customers who place greater value on your product more. Except that you can’t do that. So you make two basically identical vehicles, but you place them in different model lines and use marketing to build different images of those lines (i.e., Buicks are luxurious, Pontiacs are sporty, Chevies are practical). Then you tweak the trim packages to match the images, and set the price for the Buick higher and the price for the Chevy lower. This allows you to get at a broader portion of the market without spending the money on multiple vehicle designs, and also lets you milk extra $$$ from people with cash to burn who’ve been convinced by glossy ads that Buicks are fancier.
I don’t think it’s a dying phenomena at all. Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti are all examples of the Japanese copying this technique from the Big 3. Slap a trim package on a 2-door Accord, call it an Integra, and charge an extra 5 grand for it. Easy money.
It’s better known as “brand management”, and the goal is to save money by making essentially the same vehicle across all lines but make them different enough to appeal to the entire spectrum.
For instance, in the GM line Chevrolet is the bottom of the barrel, the basic car. Pontiac is the “Excitement Division” and is a bit more “sporty” than Chevrolet. Buick is the near luxury-level and is focused on more affordable luxury vehicles. Oldsmobile died because it ended up competing with Buick for the same segment, although in the GM world it was the mid-level brand. Cadillac is the top of the line luxury brand. GMC is intended to be the top truck line, with more amenities than Chevrolet and more options.
Accordingly, each base vehicle as you go through the lines is more than the corresponding base vehicle of the other brands, and the idea was to upsell, like the guy who bought a Chevrolet would step into a Pontiac when he got more money, and then the other brands when he got older. Unfortunately for Ford and GM, people had more brand loyalty than they had hoped so it failed to work the way they had planned, and in fact eviscerated the individual identities of the companies, making them one big homogenized mess (case in point: the Cadillac Cimmaron). Now they do platform sharing (i.e. the chassis and some switches), but they are once again becoming largely independent of each other, although GM still has the goal of upselling in mind.
Brand management is a curse. Every time it is tried it nearly kills the company. GM, Ford and Chrysler all almost died because of it. The Olds and Plymouth divisions did die, and Mercury is on its knees, still trying to recover.
I note that Gorsnak spoke of the Japanese companies. They started brand management and were quite successful with it, but that was because an Acura Legend was barely recognizable as an Accord and Lexus was a quantum leap over a Camry (Infiniti is only now starting to be really successful). 20 years later they have diverged to the point where here in America most people don’t even know that Honda makes Acuras, because it’s no longer just a rebadge with wood trim. They are virtually independent companies that share chassis and virtually nothing else.
I’ve heard the Suburban/Tahoe phenomenon referred to as “badge-engineering,” as opposed to “platform engineering,” which really makes a difference.
I also don’t think the Integra was ever based off the Accord platform. I know the last generation was based off the Civic platform (along with the mini-ute CRV). Not sure about this new RSX generation, but I do know the TSX is based off the European Accord platform.
I can’t think of any Japanese cars in America that do the badge-engineering type deal anymore. The Honda Passport/Nissan Pathfinder was the last one I could think of, and even then it was more of a licensing of a design thing than a “re-badged our own cars under different names” thing.
Recently, when given promotional literature for the cars I have to choose from for my company car, Chrysler dropped the subterfuge altogether, and had one glossy sheet for both the Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Stratus, basically saying “yeah, it’s the same car. Same features and same price. But which body style do you prefer?”
I always thought of Pontiac as the “globbed-on plastic division” (mid-Seventies onward), and Buick and Oldsmobile as the “septuagenarian” and “octogenarian” divisions respectively.
Try telling that to the marketing people; they still talk big about “brand management”, and when they do it always skeeves me out, as if they think people are too stupid to understand what they’re doing. (Unfortunately, they appear to be at least partially correct in this assessment.) Now the aerospace/defense contractors are trying to market their “brands.” ::rolleyes:: Like we didn’t have enough dead weight on the top rungs to begin with.
The Big Three aren’t the only ones engaged in brand management, though. As has been pointed out, the Japanese don’t really do the “retrim, rebadge, and up the price by 30%”, but the Volkswagon Auto Group (consisting of Volkswagon, Audi, SEAT, Škoda, Bentley/Rolls Royce, Bugatti, and Lamborghini) is effectively “leveragin” brand management, producing cars based upon the same chassis and similar drivetrains but branded and priced differently for different markets. The Porsche Cayanne/Volkswagon Tourag is also a clear example of brand management, though in this case it’s per agreement between to independent if closely allied companies.
Thanks, Gorsnak, that is the most lucid explanation (regarding your entire post) of the situation I have ever heard. Now that I’ve learned something today I think I’ll take a nap.
Also: At one time, dealers might not stock all the brands of a particular company - so that a GMC dealer might not be a Chevrolet dealer. For example, a dealership near my home is “Alexandria Pontiac Buick GMC” - they offer vehicles under those three nameplates, but not under the Chevrolet or Cadillac names. Offering the same vehicles under both nameplates, then, would maximize the number of dealers able to sell the vehicle.
I tend to think that this will be going away. Young buyers of cars are more informed; I once had a very frustrated salesman that was upset that I knew the Kelly Blue Book value of a vehicle. More recently, I contacted a dealer by e-mail and went in with all of my prices in hand; they took around $2,000 off the price of the vehicle without even asking for sticker price, which was close to my target price. The bargaining lasted maybe 10 minutes.
For small purchases, I can see this kind of thing working – people aren’t going to research a $5 bottle of Tide vs a $3 offbrand, generally speaking – but for a major purchase like a car, you can bet that more and more consumers are going in to dealers with information far beyond that of the last generation.
Really? Acura definitely has one model that’s virtually identical in appearance to the Honda Civic. Like, I can’t tell them apart without looking at whether it’s an H or and A inside the little badge.
Honda Civic Acura EL
Basically, the molded front bumper is different, and the Acura has stylish wheels. Else, it seems to be 100% Civic to me: a textbook case of Cimarron Syndrome.
Also, I’m not sure, but looking at photos online, the Acura TSX and Honda Accord look like they’d be easily mistaken for each other, down to the shape of the taillights and the front grill – things that are commonly changed to make the same car look different.
Colour me dubious on the “Acuras aren’t rebadged Hondas” hypothesis.
The Honda Passport was an Isuzu Rodeo and they sold a Honda Oddessy as an Isuzu Oasis, IIRC.
Isuzu currently sells the I class pickup (a Chevy S-10) and the Ascender (Chevy Trailblazer).
The trend is in using the same platform for multiple vehicles that look very different on the outside but share mechanicals, like the VW Golf and New Beetle.
Kelly nothing. I went into my last car purchase armed with the black book value. I managed to haggle them down at least a couple thousand to only about $100 over what I thought the black book value should be. And that was starting from several hundred below black book.
I don’t think the Acura EL is sold in the US, it may be a Canada only thing. Dealership arrangements may be different in Canada and they felt they needed a lower pricepoint or something.
Actually badge engineering by the Big 2 isn’t quite what it used to be. The biggest offender is Ford-Mercury, in fact (if you ignore Daimler-Chrysler as not being an American brand anymore :)).
The big thing done these days is “common platform management” whereby using the same platform and flexible automation, you get vehicles with a completely different character. GM is very diverse across its product lines. Using common platforms you’ll see that products have great, great diversity across their entire product line. Trucks and SUV’s are the last vestige of the old “badge engineering” commonly done at GM. These days, the vast majority of their lineup is unique across their marques.
Ford, on the other hand, has a lot more similarities between their Ford and Mercury vehicles. On the other hand, there’s no illusion that these are supposed to be completely different vehicles; everyone knows that Mercurys are just upper-scale Fords. Additionally, they’re inexpensive cars that are supposed to draw customers to the Lincoln line when they’re a little more affluent. Mercury’s big problem lately has been the lack of an entry-level car. The Milan will probably change that (I have a sort of inside scoop; the Milan is an awesome car that completely turns the tables on what American-car-bashers think of American cars).
What’s more is people tend to forget Ford’s other interests. Ford believes in and practices common platform management, too, and this is where the diversity of sharing platforms can astound you. This ain’t your dad’s badge engineering!
The Japanese most certainly did not start that phenomenon. Chrysler used it in the 70’s & 80’s - long before there was an Acura product line. The Horizon and the Omni were all but identical - including interior trim. Same thing for the Reliant and the Aries. If want to expand a little bit so that the skins and interior trim are substantially different, but the mechanical - including the attachment points for the body skins - are identical, Chrysler was doing this in the 60’s & 70’s. Take a look at the Dodge Challenger & the Plymouth Barracuda. You could bolt the front end of one of 'em right on the other, no metal work necessary.
