Why wouldn't GM put Cadillac Quality in all their cars?

. if you are capable of building a quality luxuary car like Cadillac, why woulldn't you make ALL your cars that same quality?

You mean GM values Chevy Customers less then they value Cadillac Customers? The same thing can be said about Ford and Lincoln?

Is my guess. Probably product differentiation also.

Cost of production is the aggregate cost of all inputs. Prices are set by buyers and sellers.

Therefore General Motors charges a premium for the Cadillac. Whether or not they receive that price is up to the buyer.

They charge a premium because people are willing to pay that much (i.e. buyers and sellers). If people weren't willing it would be unprofitable and they simply wouldn't produce it.

That was a bad post on my part.

Costs and price are independent of each other.

Price is an equilibrium point met by buyers and sellers.

Costs are the how much it takes a producer to make a good or service. AND, if the price is above the cost, he'll probably produce the good or service.

I think I'm not speaking economist.

;-)

and then charge EXTRA for the rich folks who WANT all the bells & whistles..

Just build an economical to operate car, a safe car, and let people CHOOSE the extras they are willing to pay extra for..

The secret to fighting air pollution, gas consumption, and the non-selling of cars, is to make the BASIC vehicle AFFORDABLE to the masses, so they WANT to dump their older, gas-hog cars, and buy a new one..

Getting people locked into a 72 month, $300 a month car payment is a deal breaker for many people these days..especially when many families need TWO cars..

Building a car like a Cadillac costs more than building, for instance, an Aveo. Pay less for an Aveo and you get less. Pay more for a Caddy and you get more.

better mileage than toyota and honda. over all quality better than toyota and honda.

ford 500(?) -safest car assembled made in te usa. 40+% reduction in warranty work. former "car of the year".

chrysler-most efficient and productive automotive workforce in the usa

Not that I don't believe you, but I'd like to have them to use later if I need them.

Ask my pal who had an engine blow at 30K on his new Caddie.

That would piss me off though.

...and it was also under warranty for the two blown head gaskets, the motor mount problems and for problems with the box that held the battery ~~ amongst other things. But...it was out of warranty when the radiator came apart.

To put it midly, the car was a major POS.

My Honda CRV is the same year (2001) as was the Caddie disaster from Detroit. My friend got rid of the Caddie ~~ for the obvious reasons ~~ and he got a whole $5K for it. At the same time, my Honda CRV was worth $15,000... and it had cost less than half of what the Caddie cost new.

And Detroit wonders WHY it is going down the tubes? GMAFB ~~ they build shit that does NOT hold its re-sale value and which is totally undependable.

My husband's Beemer is a 2001 and it's a piece of shit, too.

It does not mean "features" or "performance".

Great car, Cadillac quality, ... until the car hit around 40,000 miles. Then little by little, things started going out. By the time we got rid of it, the computer that controlled the air shocks had gone out and the extended warranty we had ran out. We did get a bit better than blue book value when we traded it. I definitely believe (at least for this era of Cadillacs) that there was some very obvious planned obsolescence. Which kinda figures if you consider who buys new Cadillacs and the fact that they trade them every year to 18 months. That's probably also why, at least back then, you could pick up a $55,000 Cadillac for half price 18 months later.

And back then, the engine design caused it to leak oil because of the design... I forget the specifics on it now. But my mechanic explained it to me back then why it would leak.

And, there is absolutely NO after market for parts on a Cadillac. About the ONLY thing I know of that you don't need to get from the dealer is a battery.

The biggest single biggest cost is setting up the production line and this is roughly the same whether the car is a Cadillac or a Yugo. Variation kick in do to different costs in different countries (Thus Cadillacs factories in the US cost more then Yugo factories cost in the former Yugoslavia), but once you get away from that factor the remaining costs difference are quite low (Labor is about the same, no matter what car is being made, they is less material used in smaller cars, but the material cost are minor compared to the cost to form that material into a car part).

Prior to the 1960s, GM had a policy of making sure the better parts went into its better cars, but then the cost of such items dropped and GM found people were willing to spend more for them even in Chevrolets, thus by the late 1960s Chevrolets had the same suspension, frame and body as a Cadillac (and often came out of the same Assembly line). You could get higher end options on the Cadillac, but as for rideability the two cars have had the same ride quality since the 1960s (If you compare large size Chevrolets with large size Cadillacs as opposed to Chevrolets Vegas vs Cadillacs).

The prime reason US small cars were so bad was the big three profits came from the sale of Compact, Mid-Size and Large Cars NOT the Subcompacts. In fact the Big Three really only entered the sub-compact market do to the gas crisis of the 1960s AND to meet their Corporate Fleet Average. In affect the Sub-compacts were subsidized by the profits off the larger cars and later SUVs. Given the low profit on sub-compacts and the fact it was the most price sensitive section of the market, the big three put the minimal amount of expense into that market, including minimal design, care and priority when it came to the latest machines to improve the quality cars.

Now the Japanese were very good at sub-Compact cars, for that was the main car in use in Japan. Japan would produce them for a few years in Japan, find out all the bugs, and then export them to the US. This meant the Japanese cars of the 1970s had less problems then the American Sub-Compacts of the same time period (Including the addition of galvanized steel in areas where cars tended to rust out, something Detroit would NOT start to do till the early 1980s). Once entrenched in the Sub-Compact market the Japanese then started to bring in their larger cars, also first produced and driven in Japan and then to the US. These were what we in the US call Compact Cars and the Japanese started to dominate that market. The US still dominated the Mid-size and Large car markets, even as the SUV craze hit the US in the 1990s. The Japanese never really entered the large car market, through some of its compacts started to move into the mid-size market in the 1990s (and again with cars driven in Japan for a few years before the cars were offered in the US). Now the SUV craze the Japanese were caught flat footed, in the 1990s the Japanese finally had to US drop it restriction on importation of trucks (The US had restrictions in imports of trucks for decades, do to a concern such trucks may be needed for national Defense), just as the SUV boom started. The Japanese were slow to get into the market, but once their realized their larger pickups (Small to American eyes) could be made into very comfortable SUVs, the Japanese went into that market WITHOUT selling the cars in Japan first (No market for such large cars in Japan, through the small trucks the SUVs were based on were common in Japan).

I go into the above to point out that while US sub-compacts were inferior to Japanese Sub-compacts and why), once you move into mid-size cars, large Cars and SUVs the Japanese quality advantage quickly dropped (Compact cars was the main area of contention when in came to cars between the big three and the Japanese, but the big three liked the higher profits on their other cars so slowly conceded the compact car market to Japan, through would come up with a decent design when needed, see the Chevrolet Cobalt and Ford Focus for example. Since the 1980s American Made Compact cars have slowly improved, with each new version better then its predecessor, but in a market dominated by the Japanese. Part of this is the history of the Compact in the US (Take a look at a 1960s and 1970s Chevrolet Nova with a 350 or 400 cc engine and realized that was an American compact car, the Nova internal room is less then the Cobalt which is half its size, weight and engine, thus the Nova was a Compact car do to its interior room).

Notice if you are use to looking at compact cars from Japan, how can you even think that the Nova was a Compact car? Once Americans came to view compact cars like the rest of the world, the US firms had to meet those expectations and at a price people would be willing to pay. Furthermore the big three profit centers were its mid-size and large cars, cars that with the end of the Nova and its V-8 engines no longer had much in common with the Compacts being made by the big three. At the same time the Japanese could use the engines from their sub-compacts in their compacts. It was a better overall fit and the Big Three found it self in a dilemma, it could NOT use its profitable cars engines in the compacts of the 1980s and 1990s and thus could NOT cuts its cost of producing such cars by having them share components with the more profitable cars, but at the same time had to sell them to meet the corporate fuel average requirement. High Cost and low profit meant efforts to control costs became more important then quality of the cars being produced. Now Given the competition from Japan the quality could NOT go down to far (and actually increased) the big three were always in a losing position (one caused by their own lobbying, the big three prefer Corporate Fleet average to improve US fuel economy as opposed to the solution that worked in Europe, Japan and over the last few years in the US, high gasoline prices).

Just comments, that the quality difference is more a factor of WHAT GM was making a profit on AND what the Japanese were making a profit on as oppose to any real cost difference in producing a Sub-compact, Compact, Mid-Size or Large Car. The big difference in quality is NOT the price of the car being sold, but the price the maker is willing to put into the car. In the 1970s the Japanese were willing to put more into a small car then the big three were. In more recent years, with CAD becoming the preferred way to design cars replacing the old wooden models that the engineers would work up, the cost to design any car has dropped, thus the Cobalt the Cruze being much better design then the Cavalier the Cobalt replaced. Compact cars are no longer the forgotten step child of Big Three design and except for a long history of neglect which the American cars must over come, equal to anything the Japanese put out today IN THE SAME CLASS OF CAR.

Right, give me a break. And as soon as I saw that you feel Japanese make superior cars, I realized just another pretender.

One of the old jokes about Detroit was they put $40,000 worth of parts in a $20,000 car. It is the FACTORY and the set up to produce a particular car that is the vast majority of the cost of producing any particular model. The same for making four Cylinder and V-8 engines, the iron in a four is less then the iron in a V-8, but the real cost difference is setting up the factory to produce one or the other. In the 1970s GM decided that its cars in the 1960s were to large and needed to become smaller, but there was a problem, the engines were to big for smaller cars, so GM adopted a policy of striking its big car FIRST (Setting up the situation where its Large Cars, as measured from the outside, was smaller then their mid-size, then the mid-size was smaller then the compacts). The reason for this was simple, GM had to re-tool its engine factories to produce the V-6 needed in the newer Mid-size and Compact and GM could not NOT make the switch till it stop producing 400cc and larger V-8s (The 350 V-8 survive till today, and for trucks a 454 is still produced, but these are the exceptions today, there were the rule in the 1960s).

Anyway, it took GM over ten years to convert its whole fleet from 1960 land Yachts to the much smaller models of the 1980s (Ford did a similar reduction but it was less uniform, given Ford's greater investment overseas). Some models stayed in production for the entire 1970s (the Nova for Example). The reason for this was simple, GM had massive investments in V8 production and to convert that production to V6 production took time and money. Gm did it first to the cars they made the best (and the most profit) the large cars and then worked down. The Nova took so long to be replaced do to the fact that whatever replaced it would NOT have the ability to take a V8, and it was in the market (Compact cars) becoming more and more dominated by Japanese imports.

As to my comments about the Japanese cars being superior, notice I concentrated on those markets where that is considered true even today, sub-compacts and Compact size cars. In the Mid-Size and large car markets, America cars are viewed as superior, more do to their much bigger engines then anything else. SUVs are the same, the American tend to dominate that market and produce superior cars IN THOSE MARKETS. The problem is most Americans start out buying compact or smaller cars and thus exposed to Japanese cars which dominate those markets. The big three gave up on those markets do to the low profit margins compared to larger cars. Now that people are looking at smaller cars the big three are in trouble, but all I was doing in my post was analyzing the problem of the big three, how the big three, form a marketing and manufacturing point of view, come to be in the mess their are in. You can NOT solve a problem till you see it exists, and the problem for the Big Three has been that over the last 30 years what is profitable today has NOT been profitable over the last 30 years.

Let's see some documentation otherwise I call bullshit, you are clueless. And let's take 2008 not the damn 70's. Another clown living in the past.

You want to play Professor, show me your degree.

These are cars we're talking about here, not go carts. And by the way, there hasn't been a 350 for quite some time. The LS1, which was produced until a few years ago was 346 cubic inches (not centimeters. Quick lesson, 61 cubic inches per liter, 1000 CCs per liter). The 454 has also been out of commission for quite some time. Its replacement is the Vortec 8100 which is actually a larger displacement engine at 496 cubic inches, yet it gets better fuel economy.

edit for typo.

There are far more assembly steps required to assemble my Audi A8 than,
say, a Trabant, a Yugo, or a 2CV. That means that, all things considered,
my car spends more time on (a variety of) assembly lines. And even if we
grant you that n minutes of labor and n feet of assembly line capital
equipment costs the same no matter what the car, that still means that
the A8 is going to cost more to assemble than the Trabant.

Tesha

Why isn't every Toyota a Lexus or every Honda an Acura? Every Mini Cooper a BMW.

record at Nuremberg Ring recently. that was for fastest V8 production sedan with a lap time of 7:59.32. too bad it is a gas guzzler

At the ring.

The cities of Nurburg where the famous Nurburgring Nordschleife road course is nearby, and Nuremberg, where the Nazis once had their rallies, aren't the same place. Nurburg is in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate and Nuremberg (or Nurnberg) is in the southeastern state of Bavaria.


Add umlauts where necessary.

In February 2005 I bought a Olds Aurora that was manufactured in late 2001. $37K new, and I got it for $11,500. Basically a Caddy platform, with the same Northstar 32-valve V8 and a total overload of luxury features. The only things it didn't have were OnStar and the CD changer. It had 63K on it when I bought it. Still tight as a snare drum, everything worked perfectly and the only maintenance it needed until it was repossessed in August 2007 were oil changes. Man I miss that car - fast, sporting, comfortable, and it got nearly 30 mpg on the highway and 20+ around town. Not bad for a largeish sports sedan.

That was the best car I've ever owned. When I got out of grad school in 1988 I bought a new Trans Am. Piece of shit, quality wise. The entire electrical system was a mess and almost all of it had to be replaced within the first four months I owned it. So it is fair to say that GM quality improved a LOT between my Trans Am and my Aurora.