If Buick’s Verano is right, I want to be wrong

Mickey Kaus Columnist
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Testable Hypothesis:  The New GM just announced the pricing for its new “compact luxury” sedan, the Buick Verano. Let me put this clearly: If the Verano is a hit* in the U.S. (as opposed to China), then virtually 100% of my instincts about the auto industry, and the viability of bailed-out GM, are wrong. All the traditional indicia of impending failure are there.  There’s the brand tradition–small Buicks have flopped before. (Remember the Skyhawk? )…  There’s the styling–a Tammy-Faye-Bakkerish small car with all the pancake makeup of a big car. Jaguar tried to do that with its “X-type,” which looked like a shrunken-head version of a normal Jaguar. It was a global, company-busting dud.** … There’s the transparent accounting dept. origin of this model: Basically GM had a decent compact car, the Daewoo-derived Cruze. Why not add a bunch of soundproofing, call it  a “luxury quiet” Buick and charge $2,000 more? … There are the delusional target competitors–“Buick cites the Acura TSX and Lexus IS 250 as the primary targets for the Verano.”  Right. Why not say Bentley? … But the best tell, in my experience, is the intricately crafted marketing BS that accompanies press accounts of so many Detroit launches. In this case, according to Automobile magazine, mighty GM is going after “disaffected Jetta owners”–former VW compact car buyers who are upset that the new Jetta has moved downmarket. Never mind that it moved downmarket because there weren’t enough buyers upmarket.  I probably have more Twitter followers than there are Jetta owners disaffected by VWs decision.***

You can’t really blame GM’s current management team if the Verano goes all Skyhawk on them. Like most GM products currently on offer, this is a car that was already in the pipeline when the Obama administration bailed GM out. With the crucial Cruze now launched, GM is now slogging through a product desert. (The other big coming product is the smaller, BMW-fighting Cadillac ATS, which also has the stench of flopsweat about it, though for other reasons.)  But of course Obama’s aides knew all about the impending product drought when they struck their UAW-friendly bargain to “save” the company at taxpayer expense. …

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* — By “hit” I mean a sales success without profit-destroying discounting.

**– Bad example, maybe: If it’s as popular as Baker was, GM will be very happy.

***–There are plenty of disaffected Jetta owners, but they’re disaffected by mechanical glitches in earlier versions, not by its move downmarket.

Mickey Kaus