The Long, Long Goodbye of General Motors

The 1977 Chevette

In the fall of 1975, I had recently become the auto writer in the Business section of the Los Angeles Times. I must confess I knew very little -- and cared very little -- about cars in those days. I had just ended my fling with a red sports car, a 1969 MGB that died a slow, painful death in 1974. I replaced it with a sensible yellow Chevy Nova. My Spanish-speaking friends later reminded me that "no va" in Spanish means "doesn't go." Appropriate, as a I think back on that car.

The newspaper had assigned me the auto beat because they thought a fresh eye from somebody who wasn't a "car nut" would bring a new perspective to coverage of that industry. Too often in the past, auto writers had been uncritical industry cheerleaders. In the mid-1970s, The Times decided to change that.

Among the first things I had to get used to as a newly minted auto writer were the extravagant junkets that auto companies sponsored to introduce new models. I was of the Watergate generation of reporters who didn't like taking even a free lunch from a news source. So imagine my conflict when I was told to cover the introduction of GM's Chevette, it's third attempt to compete with tiny cars from Europe and Japan. The first attempt was the Corvair. No need to say more about that. The second was the Vega, a genuinely innovative little car with an aluminum block engine and a European design. It failed miserably, however, so GM tried again by modifying a boxy little Chevy it had been building in Brazil for a few years.

To trumpet the arrival of the Chevette, GM invited the nation's auto writers to a junket in the Napa Valley. We stayed at the Silverado Country Club, and the splashy introduction itself took place during a wine-soaked five-course gourmet meal served at the beautiful Sterling Vineyards, overlooking the entire Napa Valley. The next day we drove the little cars on a "concours" through the wine country. I enjoyed the scenery, but I wasn't impressed with the car.

General Motors never quite understood the small car market, particularly in the 1970s. The negative attitude of GM executives toward Volkswagen, Renault, Toyota and Datsun (as Nissan was known then) was palpable: Little cars aren't sexy. They have no power. They're designed for poor people. And, worst of all, GM thought they weren't very profitable. GM's tradition was producing cars "for every purse and purpose," in the words of Alfred P. Sloan Jr., its visionary chief executive in the 1920s. The culture at GM was about moving people from cheaper cars to more expensive cars as they grew older and wealthier. You start in a Chevy and die in a Cadillac, they used to brag. GM's corporate structure and profitability were entirely dependent on that philosophy for more than 70 years.

So, given that attitude, it was no surprise that GM thought the Chevette was a car only for young and/or poor people. And it showed. The stripped-down Chevette Scooter model the company promoted as a "starter car" for the 1976 model year had no backseat as standard equipment. It had no carpet on the floor -- just black mats. It had a flimsy, floor mounted stick shift. It had painted bumpers -- no chrome unless you paid extra. And it had a rear-wheel-drive transmission. Is it any wonder that the Chevette compared badly against the spiffy, front-wheel-drive Volkswagen Rabbit that VW had just introduced to replace the original Beatle? Or that VW was opening an assembly plant in western Pennsylvania to produce the high demand for Rabbits it expected (and got) in the United States? (I remember a GM executive telling me that he thought VW's plant would fail within three years. It didn't.)

Today's bankruptcy filing by GM is the culmination of more than 40 years of myopic thinking at what was once the world's most successful company. GM's culture was so insular, so defensive and so smug that it let the rest of world walk away with its market. While GM was figuring ways to sell more Chevy Impalas and Cadillac Sedan de Villes, Honda was introducing the Civic and Toyota was selling the Corolla. Small cars that didn't feel cheap or poorly built -- and which became the best selling cars in America.

Let's hope that the keelhauling of GM in bankruptcy court will do what the marketplace has been unable to do for 40 years: get its head out of the sand.