10 Cars That [really,really] Damaged GM's Reputation (With Video)

GM's current precarious situation didn't come about overnight. There are arguments to be made that various government regulations led to the disaster and that management can't escape much of the blame, and there are plenty who contend it was a series of disastrous union labor contracts that have put the company at risk. But there's one thing everyone agrees on: Over the past few decades GM put some truly terrible products out on the market. Unreliable, uninteresting and flat ugly, these were cars that simply destroyed GM's reputation....

Legend has it that when Chevrolet Division Manager John DeLorean went to the GM Proving Grounds to get his first look at a prototype of the new 1971 Chevrolet Vega, the front of the car literally fell off onto the ground. But that bad omen didn't keep DeLorean from putting the Vega on the market.

Responding to increased import sales, the Vega showed up at the same time as Ford's similarly ill-fated Pinto. Both were relatively conventional cars by Detroit standards, with their four-cylinder engines in front sending power back to a solid rear axle. In fact, the only innovative thing on the Vega was the all-aluminum block around which its 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine was constructed.

Unfortunately, the art of building aluminum engine blocks was in its infancy back in 1971 and the unlined cylinder walls of Vega engines were scoring almost instantly. That led to lots of oil burned and early death for this engine. Throw in haphazard build quality and sheetmetal that you could practically hear rusting away, and the Vega truly rates as one of GM's great debacles.

But the Vega was actually a sales success. Chevy sold nearly 268,000 during the 1971 model year, over 390,000 during 1972, almost 396,000 during 1973, and over 450,000 during 1974 (sales finally collapsed during the 1975 model year). After all, its mini-Camaro looks were handsome and in an era of fuel shortages it was pretty stingy on gas. Plus, back then there were millions of buyers who insisted on buying only American products. But ultimately that meant there were just that many more people disappointed by the Vega. By the mid-1980s, Vegas were being junked so aggressively that some salvage yards in Southern California had signs up saying they wouldn't accept any more. When even the junkyard won't take a car, that's trouble

It's hard to imagine the hoopla that surrounded the introduction of the all-new 1980 Buick Skylark, Chevrolet Citation, Oldsmobile Omega and Pontiac Phoenix in April of 1979. These four awkwardly proportioned "X-Body" front-drivers directly replaced GM's rear-drive compacts (of which the Chevy Nova was the most prominent) and promised a revolution in how the corporation designed and built cars. Chevy alone sold an incredible 811,540 Citations during that prolonged 1980 model year based on that promise. Unfortunately, the reality was that these four- and six-cylinder cars probably suffered more recalls and endemic problems than any other GM vehicle program.

The problem wasn't so much the basic engineering of the X-Body cars as it was that no one apparently spent any time doing the detailed engineering that determines a car's success. So customers complained of disintegrating transmissions, suspension systems that seemed to wobble on their own mounts, and brakes that would make the whole car shudder every time they were applied. There were so many niggling faults and a seemingly endless series of recalls that sales of the car almost tanked by its third year. Still, through 1985, a few million escaped to the public, souring hundreds of thousands on GM.

The Chevrolet Chevette was already outdated when it appeared in 1976. Based on GM's "T" platform, it was a primitive, front-engine, rear-drive subcompact in a small-car world that was busy being revolutionized by front-drive cars such as the Honda Civic and Accord, Volkswagen Rabbit and Ford Fiesta. It was underpowered too, originally being offered with a 1.4-liter Four making 53 hp or a 1.6-liter version of the same engine rated at 70 hp.

Chevrolet saved itself a lot of development time and money by picking up the Chevette design from GM Brazil. The Georgia-built small car was a solid sales success too, selling almost 450,000 units in 1980 alone. But it was always a car that sold strictly on price, with no real virtues of its own. And it was a huge help to Chevrolet in sneaking in under the federally mandated CAFE standards. But it also meant that for 11 years GM didn't bother developing an advanced small car specifically for the American market.

In fact, when it finally came time to replace the Chevette in 1987, what Chevrolet did was create the "Geo" sub-brand and put redecorated Isuzus and Suzukis onto the Chevette's bottom rung on the model ladder. In truth, Chevrolet has never had a homegrown vehicle in this subcompact segment since the Chevette died, and that could be one of the company's greatest missteps of all.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of a smaller, more athletic Cadillac. But it was a terrible idea to rebadge the Chevrolet Cavalier and attempt to pawn it off as a true Cadillac.

The compact J-Car program was already well under development at GM by the time Cadillac decided it wanted a version of its own. With little time on its hands and no desire to spend much money, what they came up with was a Cavalier with a different grille, a slightly modified interior and some hydraulic dampers between the body and front subframe. Otherwise, the 1982 Cimarron was powered by the same 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine as the Cavalier, backed by either a four-speed manual or three-speed automatic transmission.

Cadillac tried to sell the Cimarron as a domestic alternative to cars like the BMW 3 Series—that was just pathetic. Not surprisingly, practically no one fell for it and the Cimarron never sold well. But to many people, this proved that GM at the time had little regard for the storied and significant Cadillac brand.

Saturn was GM's attempt at a do-over. Starting with a fresh plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., and a fresh labor agreement in that location with the UAW, the idea was that GM would create a fresh dealer network that would sell fresh new products in a refreshingly straightforward manner. It didn't quite work out that way.

Actually GM did a rather good job of setting up the plant, dealers and "no haggle" sales schemes - Saturn buyers really did seem to enjoy shopping at and buying from Saturn dealers.

But Saturn's cars were thoroughly mediocre. Built around a steel space-frame with plastic body panels bolted on, there were gaps between the panels big enough to stick a hand through. Yes, the plastic panels were resistant to collision damage, but they discolored and faded quickly, and as they aged, they cracked. Beyond that, the first Saturns had four-cylinder engines that sounded like threshing machines but didn't make a lot of power. These cars were nothing special in either handling or looks, and they were neither particularly space- nor fuel-efficient. At least they weren't unreliable. But Saturn's cars were simply no match for competition from Honda, Toyota, Mazda and a half-dozen others.

So GM, which got so much right when launching Saturn in 1990, blew the opportunity to build a new, loyal customer base by not getting the product right.

When Pontiac introduced the Aztek crossover vehicle for 2001, it was actually getting a jump on a new market. Unfortunately, however, the Aztek was just about the ugliest thing anyone could remember being unleashed on America's roads since the 1958 Edsel. No, that's not fair — the Edsel was way better looking than the Aztek.

Pontiac had shown the Aztek in concept form back in 1999 and, generally speaking, the reviews were excellent. But while engineering the concept vehicle as a production machine, GM took an incredible wrong turn: the corporation decided to base the new Aztek on the existing platform of its front-drive minivans. And because the minivans had certain dimensions that would be expensive to change, the Aztek wound up with some of the most awkward dimensions imaginable. For instance, the minivans' tall firewall and resulting high cowl worked fine on those plain boxes, but left the Aztek appearing tall, narrow and oddly fragile.

Compounding the mistake of was the Aztek's horrid shape, and the whole thing was covered in awful, gray plastic cladding. Hideous.

In its defense, the Aztek was roomy and versatile and had solid, easygoing road manners. But that was nowhere near enough to compete with the Japanese crossovers.

From the late 1970s and into the early '80s, Oldsmobile sold the most popular car in America: the Cutlass. Olds was on a sales roll; it seemed nothing would be able to stop the division. Then came the Oldsmobile diesels, and stopping is exactly what they did best.

Instead of designing a new series of diesel engines from scratch, GM decided to base its new diesel V8 architecture on the existing gasoline Oldsmobile 5.7-liter V8's. Of course the modifications were extensive in order to handle the 22.5:1 compression ratio of diesel operation—much stouter iron block, new cylinder heads, reinforced bottom end—but it was still a series of modifications rather than a clean-sheet design. Soon after the 5.7-liter diesel V8 debuted in Oldsmobile full-size 88 and 98 models (during 1978), the engines started tearing themselves apart.

That extreme fragility was despite the fact that the 5.7-liter diesel option cost between $800 and $1000 extra per car and only made a puny 120 hp and a stingy 220 lb-ft of peak torque at 1600 rpm. In short, these engines were awful. But the 4.3-liter version of the diesel V8 was even worse—rated at only 90 hp, it was somehow even more fragile.

The diesel V8s (and a short-lived diesel V6) were eventually offered throughout most of the Oldsmobile line and spread to the other vehicle divisions as well. And when the engines inevitably blew up, the cars they were in would either head to an early death in a junkyard or have a more reasonable powerplant swapped in.

There was nothing wrong with the theory behind GM's attempt to turn Cadillac's throttle-body injected 6.0-liter V-8 into an economy engine during the 1981 model year. The technology was called "Modulated Displacement" back then, and the idea was that as engine load decreased, fewer cylinders in the engine would actually be fired to produce power. In other words, at full throttle, the "V-8-6-4" was a V8, as it reached speed it became a V6 and when cruising it was a V4. That was the theory; in reality, most of the time these engines were just broken. Conceptually it's almost identical to what GM is selling today as Active Fuel Management on some V8s.

The old Modulated Displacement system worked by altering the rocker-arm fulcrum so that intake and exhaust valves on particular cylinders were held shut by their springs. Unfortunately the solenoids and primitive electronics that were supposed to make this work rarely worked themselves. And even when the V-8-6-4 was running on all eight cylinders it was only making a laughable 140 hp.

Even though GM abandoned the V-8-6-4 in everything except limousines after just one year, the damage was done. Here was one more half-developed, cynically marketed technology that GM just couldn't make work.

Going strictly on functionality, the Hummer H2 is a capable machine. It's very good off-road, it rides reasonably well on-road, it's plenty powerful enough, can tow a lot, and will hold a few people and a lot of their stuff. And since it's based on the same platform as GM's full-size SUVs, the corporation makes a lot of profit on every one it sells. Function, however, isn't the H2's problem.

The problem with the H2 is that it's proudly politically incorrect in an era when the forces of political correctness are winning. The H2 gets crummy fuel mileage, its looks come straight out of the military at a time while the military is fighting an unpopular war, and it's freaking huge. Some people may actually like peeving off their neighbors by being rebellious in their vehicle choice, but an antisocial image is tougher for a large corporation to pull off.

GM was introducing the H2 (and establishing Hummer dealerships) at just about the same time that Toyota was taking the green-tech high ground with vehicles like the Prius and other hybrids. The H2 came to embody GM's presumed environmental callousness and the environmentalist fringe was vandalizing both Hummer dealerships and random civilian-owned vehicles. But worst of all for GM, when gas crested past $3 a gallon, the H2's sales cratered and they haven't recovered.

Even today, the two-seat GM EV1 remains one of the best-engineered, best-working pure electric vehicles ever released to the public. With clever engineering throughout its aluminum structure, an incredibly aerodynamic body and a whole bunch of lead-acid batteries, the first-generation EV1 was able to go maybe 75 miles if driven with extreme care. The second-generation EV1 with nickel-metal-hydride batteries upped that range to about 150 miles.

The problem with the EV1 was that it was almost impossible to drive in traffic with anything approaching the ideal technique the car needed to stretch its range. So its real world range was often down around 40 miles and driving it was often a white-knuckle thrill ride as the driver tried to stretch out every last electron to make it to a charging station.

GM built the EV1 to satisfy a mandate from the state of California that 2 percent of a manufacturer's fleet sold there be zero-emissions vehicles (that number would rise to 10 percent by 2003). However, the EV1 and electric vehicles built by other manufacturers finally convinced the California Air Resources Board that the zero-emissions mandates weren't achievable by then-current technology. This led to the cancellation of the mandate.

So GM canceled the EV1, and when the leases on the 1117 it had produced ran out,GM took them back and crushed them. To the committed environmentalists who had leased one, that was completely unacceptable. And suddenly the world was full of conspiracy theories about why GM "killed" the electric car (see the movie clip below). If the Hummer H2 makes GM seem callous toward the environment, the way GM handled the EV1 makes the company seem downright hostile. It's been a public relations nightmare.

However, the experience GM gained by producing the EV1 may pay off in the long run as many lessons learned with that car are being ported over to the new 2011 Chevrolet Volt.

I think the X-Car killed GM. It debuted during the Carter Recession, when people needed inexpensive, reliable transportation more than they had in the previous few decades, and when GM served up that kind of disrespect to its customers at that particular moment, many of them jumped ship for the Asian brands and never went back.

I’ve owned only one GM product — an 80s Opel Kadett. Now that was a great little car, too bad they never sold it here. The closest they got was a late 80s Pontiac LeMans, a cheap, Daewoo-built copy of the Kadett.

I’m not a car expert. But I have little sympathy for the car companies or unions.

Perhaps its due to the dealers lies, poor quality, union abuses or EXTREME poor management some of those companies have had for decades.

While in the military I had one dealer lie about the year on a used car. Bought stuff for a tuneup and nothing fit. Come to find out it was 2 years older than they said. I never imagined a dealer would lie about the year a car was made. I had to go the DA before the dealer would refund my money.

I loved the Olds Vista Cruiser Wagon my family had in the late 70s, so much that I bought it from my father when I graduated, and drove it until 1990, when I replaced it with a Plymouth Voyager van.

Now I drive two Toyota Priuses.

“IMO anything GM puts out hurts their reputation.” I would have to disagree with you on one product - The Corvette. Only because of the amount of care and PRIDE that goes into the entire process of that car makes it a good one that is full of modern technology - of course at a premium price.

PREMIUM PRICE??????

The Corvette is the finest American made WORLD CLASS CAR available at ANY PRICE - - - - but NOT AT A PREMIUM PRICE.

Joe the Plumber can afford a Corvette - - - in fact should be given one.

No other vehicle can run with a Corvette at less than three to 10 times the price and value.

GM be damned.

and yet you would gut all manufacturing from out nation, making us even more vulnerable...

Think of it this way. If the company that foists this crap of a car on a free market, do you really want this same company making crappy tanks for our men?

My wife had a chevy chevette hatchback that worked pretty well.

At some point it developed a problem where, if you were going up a hill, the engine power would suddenly drop. I’d have to downshift and slow down to make it up.

Eventually, they figured out it was a problem with some fuel pump. But before they did, I went through a couple of repair people who insisted that this was just the way Chevettes were, and that I was crazy thinking I could ever go up a hill in 4th gear.

Unfortunately, the art of building aluminum engine blocks was in its infancy back in 1971 ...

BS. The Buick Skylark and Old's Starfire of the early sixties had all aluminum 215 c.i. V8s. Some came with turbochargers.

Those motors had cooling problems because owners couldn't get it through their thick heads that you shouldn't fill the radiator from the garden hose. (water jackets would corrode and the motor'd overheat)

When GM discontinued the motor, it sold the tooling to Rover and is the basis of the V8's Rover still uses.

The unions let the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) use the National Labor College to put on Winter SOldier 2.1.

The IVAW was set up by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Since the VVAW is so dispised by other veterans, they have to hide like coockroaches under a rock called Veterans For Peace (VFP).

You'll find that the VFP/VVAW pukes most responsible for helping the kids trash this generation of military are in fact bastards that trashed their genetration of military via the Jane Fonda funded original Winter Soldier back in 1970.

Many of the bad things that happened to the Vietnam Vets are due to the Winter Soldier smear by the VVAW.

And when those bastards set up a puppet group to smear this generation and the unions play the role of Jane Fonda, SCREW THEM!

Dealers can and do cause problems for the manufacturers. A good dealer is the key to satisfaction.

My son bought a Camaro from a “friend.” It had one problem, it would overheat when the weather warmed up. It would sit and idle all day, but when it was moving, it would overheat. The local Chevy dealer did not have a clue. Their only response was to replace the water pump. Instead, I took it to an independent mechanic who knew immediately what was wrong. The “air dam” directly under the radiator was broken off. That was relaced with a part from a junkyard. Overheating was solved. When I bought my first car in 1970 it was a 1966 LTD, after about a month it would stall, again the dealer did not have a clue or possibly the will to work on it. A neighbor suggested I replace the fuel filter; I did and kept that car until 1977.

I recall driving a new ‘73 or ‘74 Vega up the 57 Freeway in Orange Co. CA. The car was owned by my employer. The Vega was tooling down the road nicely. Then all of a sudden, white smoke began billowing out from beneath the hood and I had to pull off the road.

I later read that cooling system failures were a big problem with the Vegas, as they didn’t design the cooling systems with a large enough capacity to handle the engine thermal properties.

No other vehicle can run with a Corvette at less than three to 10 times the price and value.

A Z06 can just beat a Lotus Exige S240, but the Z06 costs about $10,000 more. The Z06 has over twice the horsepower (achieved with almost four times the displacement), but also about 50% more weight.

Bought a Monza with a Vega engine off of a lot in '79. It lasted 3 weeks before the aluminum block overheated, expanded, the cast iron head didn't, and it started pumping coolant thru the cylinders at 70 MPH. Junked it.

Haven't owned a Detroit car since.

I would agree on ALL except the Hummer. The people I know who own Hummers love them. And they love them because they are SO politically uncorrect. The Hummer has a great underground following.

I agree with you. The worse thing he could say about them is they are not PC. What a stupid reason to say a vehicle is bad. Lots of people love them and they fill a need of some people. I actually owned a vega and it was quite good, contrary to most people who had them mine ran like a top, was good on gas and I put 108,000 on mine before I traded it in on a Chevy Nova, a really great car BTW.

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10 Cars That Damaged GM's Reputation (With Video)