Camaro and Firebird competed some against each other, but they also competed against the Mustang. Putting the cars under two nameplates and giving them slight variations in theme and tune does get a few more customers, and the expensive stuff is shared, relatively inexpensive items differentiate the two. So there is some good reasoning behind sharing a body with maybe one other division. Ford does the same with the Ford Taurus/Mercury Sable (don't think they call the Merc Sable anymore though). The Merc is just a little plusher than a Taurus. In my mind the whole of GM has been mis-managed, along with (but to a lesser extent) Ford and Chrysler. Some of the top execs need to go for that! They have way too many execs, and their "golden parachute" contracts are ludicrous. They all need to declare bankruptcy so the contracts can be re-negotiated to something more reasonable, but I suspect that's EXACTLY why the execs don't want to go that route -- THEIR ludicrous contracts would be up doe renegotiation! They don't care about the company, mostly themselves. But that's just my opinion, and not based on any researched facts. -------- Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:34:14 -0700 From: Victor the Cleaner <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxx> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 05:25:18PM -0500, Matt Haas wrote: > Pontiac (and Saturn to a certain extent) is pretty much suffering the > same fate Olds did. There wasn't enough product differentiation for > people to spend more on them than another comparable GM (or other > manufacturer) car. In Olds's case, they mostly competed against Buick > and Buick had more sales so Olds was given the ax. Also, introducing > something like the Aztek and how they botched the GTO re-introduction > builds a pretty good case for how mis-managed they were. Y'think? I mean, what did the Firebird and Camaro ever compete against besides each other? -- Frank Swygert Publisher, "American Motors Cars" Magazine (AMC) For all AMC enthusiasts http://farna.home.att.net/AMC.html (free download available!) _______________________________________________ Amc-list mailing list Amc-list@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://splatter.wps.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/amc-list