"General Motors has a new – and all-too-rare – hit. But far from solving the embattled carmaker’s problems, the popularity of the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro muscle car highlights the dilemma confronting the Detroit manufacturers over their vehicle development plans.
GM has so far taken 18,000 firm orders for the Camaro, enough to justify adding a Saturday shift over the summer at the Oshawa, Ontario, plant where the car is built.
Most of GM’s other North American assembly lines are due to extend their normal summer shutdown in a drive to bring down swollen inventories. GM has made a nod to fuel efficiency by building a six-cylinder version that achieves a creditable 29 miles per gallon.
Even so, the Camaro does not exactly fit the *eco-friendly image that politicians in Washington – who now have effective control of the company – are pushing GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler to adopt.
A cornerstone of Chrysler’s court-supervised restructuring is an alliance with Fiat that will bring a stable of small, European-style, cars into North American showrooms.
Gary Dilts, senior vice-president at JD Power, a consultancy, defends GM by observing that “it’s a big marketplace and [GM] has to cover it”.
But Mr Dilts, a former Chrysler executive, also criticises the car industry’s long incubation period for new models, typically 4-5 years. Once the process is underway, carmakers have little leeway to take account of changing consumer preferences.
After receiving the go-ahead for a $500m investment in a new model, Mr Dilts asks: “Who in the company is going to stand up and say, is this the right direction?”
JD Power is currently working with carmakers, including GM, to find more flexible product-development processes.
The prototype Camaro was the star of the Detroit auto show when it was first shown in January 2006. In its previous incarnation, the Camaro was for 35 years one of America’s best-known sports cars. But GM pulled the plug in 2002 after sales fell off sharply.
David Champion, director of Consumer Reports’ testing centre, predicts “terrific demand” for the new model. “It’s a good, comfortable car to drive if you’re not too tall and you don’t care too much about the fit and finish,” Mr Champion says.
Whatever the new Camaro’s image, Terry Rhadigan, a GM spokesman, predicts that it will drive a lot of traffic into Chevrolet dealerships. GM will be quite happy if people who pop in to admire a Camaro end up leaving with a Malibu sedan or – starting in early 2011 – a Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid."
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