I'm kind of upset at at the U.S auto industry because they waited so long to get with the times that when they started making a decent amount of good vehicles/vehicles they should have been making for years. The problem is they make cool cars when people do not want to spend money how they used to, and most people can't spend money like they used to. I mean GM has pretty good full size crossovers in the Acadia,Enclave,Outlook,and Traverse quadruplets. I rented a GMC Acadia in the spring of 2007 for that 7 hr trip from Potsdam to NYC, and its a nice car. It seats about 7 comfortably, seats fold down nicely, leather was better than what was in my dads trailblazer EXT; seemed to lug around the same amount of stuff as the EXT while the interior was miles ahead of the trailblazer. The jeep handled nice and the v6 was smooth, plus had some balls (275hp and 251ft-lbs), handled the mountain roads with no problem, never felt nervous in the twisties, wasn't a task to drive; in fact, the jeep was extremely easy to drive and the ride was nice. No complaints, when I returned the car to Alamo, I turned to my dad and said, "So when are we going to trade in the trailblazer?"
But GM is so stubborn that they continued to water down their offerings, what is the point in having basically the same car in different sheet metal sold under 4 different companies? Two- OK, three- they are pushing it, but four is a bit much. They needed to make their brands each have their own identity, Pontiac sporty mostly RWD, NO PRETEND SPORTS CARS(sorry g5 and g3), Chevy the "grass roots" we have everything brand, Buick for old people(lol), the enclave is hot though, Cadillac for Luxury, Saturn for the "youth". The youth didn't really need a 7 passenger so the outlook wasn't necessary (especially when the clones were priced very closely). GMC, in my opinion didn't even need to exist. Pretty much everything you could get in GMC, you could get at Chevy so why not just have Chevy. Or, if they decided the needed to keep GMC around, just get rid of all the trucks from Chevy. When one tries to do everything, they do nothing well. Especially when they expect "brand engineering" to sell cars. We have the internet; the public can do research for themselves and don't have to completely rely on salesmen who more than often don't know more than the average consumer about cars (one salesman told me that he had a grand prix GTP supercharged and never put premium in it, when I said gas prices are kind of high I don't want a car I need to put premium in). We have the SPEED channel, Spiketv, and CarandDriver that share information with us.
GM really frustrates me, especially when their foreign divisions have cars that the American public would love at home (Ford is guilty too, Ford Falcon XR8 and the focus RS comes to mind). Then they take so long to get with the trends, when Nissan released the 350z, Ford brought the mustang back, Chrysler had the Charger/300/Magnum, Mazda had the rx8. Then, here GM comes late to the sports car party with a holden Monaro with fake hood scoops and called it a GTO, the "revived" GTO was a hot car but it wasn't a GTO. At least change the body so it pays some homage to the classic GTO's. Then they come out with the G8 when gas prices were crazy, and everyone that wanted a large V8 4-door sedan that was decently priced or American, bought a 300C or Charger R/T. Now they are planning to kill the G8 plus GM is in the process of killing Pontiac; damn could they at least wait for me to graduate from college and get a good job so I can afford to get a brand new G8 aka poor mans M5.
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