'Green' Delusions

On why Saturn failed. [Link]

Back in February, he said he didn't know why GM's Saturn brand had flopped:

“We spent a huge bundle of money in giving Saturn an absolutely no-excuses product lineup, top to bottom. They had a better and fresher lineup than any GM division, and the sales just never materialized ...[snip] we don’t have the time or the resources to take 10 years to figure it out and possibly turn it around."

I could have saved him the 10 years, as could about 85% of the readers of Car and Driver, because it's obvious why Saturn flopped: The company had built a popular brand as a sort of feel-good anti-car--vaguely tractor-like, noisy, but made of semi-indestructible plastic by dedicated Tennessee workers and--unique in nearly all of GM--actually reliable. GM threw all this away and filled Saturn showrooms with cars designed to appeal to totally different buyers: rebadged mainstream Opels. They were OK, but creepily overstyled and not so reliable. End of explanation.

On why the Prius made Toyota ascendant.

Lutz can't possibly be enough of a moron to believe that the Prius and its "halo effect" are a primary reason for Toyota's ascendancy. Toyota has been ascendant for at least three decades, and GM declining, for a simple reason: Toyota built cars that worked ("bulletproof," as they say) at a time when GM built cars that didn't work. That's what was "drawing people to Toyota lots" a generation before the Prius was conceived. Even today, when GM suffers "under the perception that they [are] saddled with cars of inferior quality," you only have to look at the Consumer Reports reliability ratings to see that the reason GM is saddled with this perception is that the perception is accurate. (The Cadillac CTS that Lutz boasts about, for example, may be a great performer. But it's still so unreliable that Consumer Reports can't recommend it. The beautiful Pontiac Solstice, which Lutz championed, has a true crap record. The Prius, meanwhile, is spectacularly reliable.)

For those three decades of Japanese market surge, much of the talk of Detroit executives has been an attempt to dance around the central issue of reliability and 'build quality,' and the inability of Detroit to provide it. For most of Lutz's career, he played down the importance of Japanese reliability by talking up the "romance" of the Euro-style sports cars and American muscle cars he (rightly) liked. Now he plays down the importance of Japanese reliability by talking up the "halo effect" that a cutting-edge "green" car can create with bicoastal elites (whom he doesn't like) and the media.

None so blind as those who will not see.