GM puts brake on rear-drive vehicles
Published April 10, 2007

General Motors has put a hold on future rear-wheel-drive vehicles.

"We've pushed the pause button. It's no longer full speed ahead," Vice Chairman Bob Lutz revealed in an interview.

Two of the most important RWD cars in the works are the Chevy Camaro sports coupe due back late in 2008 and the full-size, RWD replacement for the Chevy Impala sedan for 2009. Both are expected to be huge sellers and contribute major profits to a GM till burdened with IOUs the last few years.

"It's too late to stop Camaro, but anything after that is questionable or on the bubble," said Lutz, noting that also means Camaro derivatives -- along with a big Impala sedan, "if we call it Impala."

The RWD cars, you see, would be larger and heavier than front-wheel-drive cars or are high-performance models.

So it comes down to the matter of fuel economy. Or as Lutz says: "We don't know how to get 30 percent better mileage from" RWD cars.

That 30 percent bogey arises from a proposal by the Bush administration to raise corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards by 4 percent a year so cars would have to average 34 m.p.g. by 2017, up from 27.5 m.p.g. today. On top of that, the Supreme Court ruled last week that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate carbon dioxide expelled by cars, a gas that contributes to global warming. The EPA doesn't do so now.

"We'll decide on our rear-drive cars when the government decides on CO(-2) levels and CAFE regulations," Lutz said, adding that limiting CO(-2) would increase mileage, too.

"Carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of burning gas and directly proportional to the amount of fuel burned. If we legislate CO(-2) from cars, why not legislate we take one less breath per minute since humans release capricious amounts of CO(-2) each time they exhale?" offered a testy Lutz.

Lutz also points out that higher mileage will come at a price, with the proposal to raise CAFE certain to increase costs by as much as $5,000, which will be added to a car's sticker, an amount most consumers won't be willing to pay. There are no hard numbers for how much CAFE compliance adds to the sticker now.

"Rather than buy new, people would hang onto their old cars. We could eat the $5,000, but that would put us out of business."

Besides, those who see cars as more than just an appliance are eager for the new RWD offerings.

Among other cars affected are a high-performance midsize Pontiac, a replacement for the full-size Buick Lucerne sedan, a compact smaller than the current CTS at Cadillac and possible 300-horsepower versions of the Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky roadsters.

"This is very disappointing," noted Erich Merkle, director of forecasting for IRN Inc., in Grand Rapids, Mich. Most of the cars coming are necessary to GM's turnaround as showroom magnets.

"What the public buys makes CAFE work, not what the industry builds," Merkle added. "To improve mileage you change demand, not supply, by raising gas prices through taxes. But no politician is going to do that so they throw the responsibility on the back of the industry."

Lutz also objects to the talk that carmakers can easily raise mileage with a very low investment.

"Academics assure us that for $200 we can get 30 percent better mileage. If anyone can figure out how to do that for $200 -- or even for $1,000 -- I want them in my office today. Show me how to do it and we'll adopt it," he said. "If I could increase mileage by 30 percent for $200, why wouldn't I? What's my motivation not to when a gas-electric hybrid gets 27 percent better mileage and I hope someday to get the cost down to $9,000?"

Others insist that carmakers simply have to sell more small cars, such as the trio of 1-liter concepts that promise 40 m.p.g.-plus that GM unveiled at the New York Auto Show.

"Small-car mileage only counts toward CAFE if you build them here, and you can't build small cars here at a profit," Lutz said, explaining that foreign-made cars would count toward the automaker's import fleet, and its domestic fleet is where GM needs help.

 

F the Bush administration! I guess that means we'll be saying goodbye to trucks, high performance cars, and SUVs? What a dumb regulation. F the environment and gas prices too. I don't give a damn about either.

 

Not a big shock. The big suppen push for RWD was kinda of a shock to me. They can get better mileage, they just need to rethink all this before putting models into production. This is not Bush. The auto industry across the board starting in 2008 will have a whole new life of standards to live up to. Some are groing to be good. What you see on fuel economy will be closer than they currently are (granted the HHR is very accurate). Even the beloved Prius will shock some potential new owners when they see it does not get 60mpg as previous years stated (and current owners already know). GM can get better mileage out of vehicles, FWD or RWD, they just need to do it. It's sad that my brothers 03 Monte can get 32-34 on the highway, constantly, and most other cars smaller can not. If they can get 25mpg out of a 300HP+ RWD (400+ if you count in the Corvette) car, they why not out of some of the other lineups. They need to just look close at what they are wanting to do and not make another huge mistake like the recent (Holden Monero) GTO. The new Silverado should have never hit the streets with the current 4speed. It should have the new 6speed. They can't say it's not ready when it's already in the "upper" class trucks.

Plus once you pass a certain GVWR, mileage does not fall into the same catagory (ie some full size trucks). So you wo'nt see trucks fall off, too much.

 

mistake?

 

Yes, great car, over priced, huge mark ups. The main reason for it's failure in the US. Once they dropped the 6.0 in it, it was better, but too little, too late. Hope they learned their lesson on that.

 

im not trying to put you on the spot, i usually find it interesting what others say/know about the gto.

first i've heard about a huge markup on them. especially as the reason for failure.(again not saying its true or false.)

 

So Capt how do you really fell about this?

Just giving you a hard time Capt.

 

I think its BS that the government can regulate what kind of vehicles companies can manufacture and I can buy. If I want to drive a a gas guzzling pollution mobile it should be my choice to make and manufacturers should be allowed to make them.

 

The Tragedy of CAFE
Posted 4/13/2007 12:38:21 PM by Angus MacKenzie
Filed under: Editorial, The Big Picture


I want a rear drive Impala. Actually, I want a rear drive Impala SS with 500hp, a six speed manual, monster Z06 brakes, Magnaride suspension, and sticky Pirelli P-Zeros on 20 inch alloys. Black on black, please. But I don't think I'm going to get one.

GM product guru Bob Lutz says all Zeta-based rear drive cars - apart from the Camaro - on hold, or a slowed development path, until the federal government decides exactly what the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) numbers should be. The Bush administration wants CAFE to rise by four per cent a year to 34mpg by 2017.

That's quite a tough target, and all automakers - not just GM - will have to change their model mixes dramatically to comply. So, the 2010 Impala is on the bubble, along with any other Zeta-based Chevy, Buick or Pontiac GM might have in the works. It's almost certainly the same situation crosstown in Dearborn where Alan Mullaly's beleaguered Ford team only recently decided to develop a global rear drive platform of its own.

GM has rightly concluded it may not make sense to spend billions on vehicles it won't be able to sell. Rear drive itself is not the issue when it comes to fuel efficiency - vehicle mass and powertrain choices are much more important - but the Zeta architecture was never designed as an ultra-light, ultra-efficient platform. A Zeta-based Impala will be a bigger, heavier car than the current model. It will burn more gas. And to make the rear drive Impala program profitable, you can bet GM needs a reasonable number of the cars it sells to be high margin V8s and performance models, not fuel-sipping V-6s. You see the problem.

Increased imports of existing, highly fuel efficient GM subcompacts from Europe and Asia to offset the impact of the Zeta-based vehicles won't help. Although automakers are allowed such offsets, CAFE rules blindly refuse to acknowledge the fact that all automakers are global enterprises that build different types of vehicles in different places around the world. CAFE treats each manufacturer's imported and US-built model lines as two separate fleets, and requires each fleet to meet the standard.

Shifting production of subcompacts to the US isn't as simple as it sounds, either - smaller cars have lower profit margins, and US plants, with their high legacy costs, are probably the last place on earth you'd want to build them. And that's before you get to the cost of retooling all the plants currently set up to build big cars and trucks.

For years CAFE has mandated automakers build fuel-efficient cars that US consumers - used to cheap gas - had no reason to buy. Instead they simply bought millions of gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs - allowed under CAFE loopholes - and used them as car substitutes. You need only look around any shopping mall car park at all the pristine F150s and Silverados that have never done a day's work in their lives, at all the lumbering SUVs that have never been driven off the pavement, to see the availability of cheap gas has made CAFE a meaningless acronym to most Americans.

Compare and contrast America's vehicle parc with Europe's. It's true small cars are popular in Europe because a lot of European cities are tightly packed. But higher gas prices - you'll pay $6 to $8 a gallon over there these days - are a much more significant factor in the design of European cars. There are a lot of Camry/Accord/Fusion/Aura sized vehicles made in Europe. There are a lot of expensive luxury cars and biggish SUVs made there, too. Plenty have powerful six and eight cylinder gas engines. But many more are powered by highly fuel efficient diesels.

US auto manufacturing (and this includes foreign owned companies like Toyota, which has just spent more than $1 billion on a new factory in San Antonio, Texas, to build the gas-guzzling Tundra pickup) is by contrast dangerously one-dimensional. We don't do diesels. We don't do small cars. The tragedy of CAFE is the flaws in the system allowed this to happen.

In truth, the US industry would have been a lot better off had the federal government simply put a tax on gas after the original oil shocks over 30 years ago to keep prices high. Driven by higher gas prices American consumers would have naturally demanded more fuel efficient vehicles, and a US industry responding to such market forces would have focused its development resources on them, and tooled up to produce them.

Some of Detroit's auto execs have long understood this: Chrysler's Bob Eaton told me 15 years ago that his company's analysts had calculated all the improvements achieved in the fuel consumption of the American car and truck fleet under CAFE could have been achieved with a four cent a gallon increase in the price of gas.

Thanks to spineless politicians - and equally spineless Detroit execs content to play a short term game for short term gain - the gas tax horse has long since bolted. And now American auto manufacturing looks like it may have driven up a dead end that's going to cost billions to back out of.

 

I think Mr. Lutz finally figured out that W-body is going to have to carry the day through 2015 because there just isn't enough money to develop the new Zeta sedans for the US market.