Video: The best and worst GM cars:
Let's talk about egregious badge engineering. That is, slapping different badges on the exact same car and shipping them out to dealers as if somehow the Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, GMC, Geo, Asuna, Saturn or Saab 9-7X were somehow different. Yet, the most egregious example is easy to identify: the Cadillac Cimarron. It was quite obviously a Chevrolet Cavalier with a Cadillac grille, vinyl roof, spiffier wheels and"nicer" interior. That was not sufficient.
In 1977-81, I worked my way through college in a Chevy dealership service department, a front-row view of GM at its nadir. The cars had so many issues, big and small. The worst job in the shop was the poor squeak-and-rattle guy, tasked with chasing down maddening build problems on cars that just weren't put together well. And owners back then were up against a dealership and warranty process that were just this side of hostile.
The Corvette was not intentionally “cheap” or inherently “bad” like the Vega or Chevette — it was, as it is today, Chevy’s halo car, which in a way made its problems stand out more. The St. Louis Corvette plant had a reputation as a literal sweat shop with serious quality issues. We'd roll arriving new Vettes off the transport truck and straight into the shop for days or even weeks to fix their straight-from-the-factory problems.
The car looked cool, though. Still does. Maybe T-tops leaked, but I thought they were cool. And 180 horsepower's only 310 less than a modern Stringray. Today, the other Chevys of that era have all rusted into oblivion, but fiberglass and the fact GM sold a lot of them mean that many C3s survive. They are even appreciating in value. And after 40 years, surely the kinks have been worked out, right?First things first: the EV1 was not a bad car by any means.
, buyers were angry and any goodwill the automaker had gained with environmentalists and tree huggers was buzz-sawed to dust. And now, besides sitting dusty in a museum here and there, the EV1 no longer exists at all. —The H1 was sweet. It was basically a more approachable Humvee for the masses. The H2 was just big and ugly and slow and inefficient and ... basically, just the punchable face of the car world. I can't say I'm super excited about the Hummer revival.
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