Excellent Show !

lets be real I dont know if the new Buicks will sell, but as a 30 something I do like them. I would go look at one if I was in the market. As for GMC, its just a dressed up chevy, but with a big mark up and makes big bucks for GM..I thought that was what GM needs to do..

“And Scion DID fail, and miserably so. Not only did its sales never even approached the goals, the ones who boiught its unremarkable products were NOT the young people Toyota wished for, but many elderly and middle aged as well.”

It’s hard to see how Scion could be considered to have “failed.” Toyota sells more cars with Scion than they would with it, and it didn’t cost much to create Scion. They are sold at existing Toyota dealers, rather than at a bunch newly, and expensively created dealers like Saturn. More sales are more sales, whether to people in their 20’s or 60’s.

Ever hear of a Chrysler Intrepid? Or a Chrysler Neon? For some reason Chrysler felt that Dodge wasn’t a car brand in Canada. I laughed at the “introduction” of the Dodge SX 2.0 (aka Chrysler Neon). The first gen Avenger was sold as a Dodge but then the second gen Dodges’ were not available at all. (although maybe that wasn’t a bad thing

Can anybody explain what their thinking was? Dodge cars are available again in Canada now as of around 2002-3ish.

The Canadian market is different, I will give you that but different enough that a whole brand shouldn’t exist?

Boilerplate my behind. And trust me, I FULLY understand the situation. But you are all over the place. Are you talking about successfully developing and implementing a marketing strategy or are you talking about tax breaks or overcapacity or what?

My comments were centered on the discussion if Chrysler could successfully market their vehicles in the US using a dual strategy in the same showroom.

I think they can. LOTS of things are done that way. Let’s take a look at Sears itself. They sell MANY different brands of appliances, all under the same roof. They have even split the Kenmore brand into regular Kenmore and Kenmore Elite. Same idea, albeit a on a different scale. It all comes down to product and making folks want to buy it.

All of the Japanese luxury brands have been feeling the pinch, has have all the upscale brands. The last sheet I saw had Lexus down 37% for the year, Acura down 33.6% and Infinity down 33.4%. These figures are VERY similar to the overall GM car sales decreases for 2009. Even BMW and Mercedes are down 25% or thereabouts.

In response to your Q, the banking industry is the lifeblood of all industries, who would fail without banks. It was thus able to blackmail both the previous and this administration to bail it out at huge expense to the taxpayer. That does not mean that we should repeat the mistake and bail out everybody else just to be fair to them. We are out of $ anyway and the US dollar is in free fall, as the liars in DC keep saying that they support a “Strong dollar” policy.

What will then happen to the Challenger, Viper, and Charger? Are they to become Chryslers? It makes no sense to drop Dodge as it is the “sporty” segment of ChryCo. Ram having its own nameplate I understand, but killing off Dodge itself, is rather foolish.

Why a salary limit on bailed out car bulders, but not on bailed out banks???

Could you live with that?