Friday, October 31, 2008 |
20:45 - No, dig up, stupid!
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/31/rumormill-caravan-suburban-would-move-to-lamdba-p
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Yeah, that's the solution to the domestic auto industry's badge-engineered-blandness-related woes:
But the craziness doesn't end there. GM Inside News also reports an even more surprising vehicle could get moved to the crossover platform: the Dodge Caravan, assuming of course that the General follows through on talks to purchase Chrysler from Cerberus. You may recall that GM abandoned the minivan market earlier this year in favor of its Lambda-based crossovers.
The Lambda platform must be extremely modular if it can be stretched enough to accommodate the size of the Suburban along with the people- and cargo-carrying capacity of a Dodge minivan. Also on the rumormill menu is a possible Chevrolet version of the minivan.
Yeah. More badge-engineering. Merge away a storied automaker, kill off most of the worthwhile and unique offerings, and then bring out more clones with different noses.
Because it totally makes sense that if a customer won't buy a particular car you happen to build, it's only because they don't like the badge and grille design. Just provide a variety of those and you're home free.
I'm inclined to think that if this is what the best and brightest can come up with as a way forward, maybe we don't deserve to have a domestic auto industry anyway. Yeesh.
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