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Filed under: Car Buying , Marketing/Advertising , Buick , Cadillac , Chevrolet , GM , GMC , HUMMER , Saab , Saturn It is no secret that the automotive industry is hurting for sales to close out 2008. Over the past few months incentives have been thrown out left and right to draw in more buyers. The deals have not done enough to bring folks into the showroom, though. With all the media talk of bleeding Detroit, consumers know that the domestic manufacturers have been holding out on their best offers. Perhaps the memory of 2005's employee pricing incentives has kept many waiting on the fence. With 2009 models heading to dealerships as we speak, General Motors is hoping to end the stalemate. It will be testing the waters of employee pricing yet again beginning Wednesday, August 20th and running through September 2nd. The employee discount program will apply across all 8 GM brands. Buick, Pontiac and GMC dealers will mark down 91 percent of their inventory on all 2008 models, along with...
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Filed under: Car Buying , Buick , Cadillac , Chevrolet , GM , GMC , Pontiac , Saturn During a dealer teleconference today, General Motors announced it would be launching a zero-percent financing sale beginning tomorrow, while simultaneously raising the prices of its 2009 vehicles. The "72-hour sale" will run from June 24th through the 30th, and will offer customers 0-percent interest rates for 72 months on most Chevys, Buicks, Pontiacs and GMC vehicles. So far, there's no word on whether the offer will extend to Cadillac and Saturn. GM will also offer $500 in "bonus cash" to buyers who opt to purchase GM products outright rather than leasing them. At the same time, the General is going to be raising the prices of 2009 models by an average of 3.5-percent "across the board," something that was bound to happen, according to Mark LaNeve, GM's vice president of vehicles sales, service and marketing. On the production front, GM will be adding a third shift...
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Filed under: Car Buying , Trends , Hybrids/Alternative , SUVs , Trucks/Pickups , Green , Chevrolet , GM , GMC , Earnings/Financials click above image for a high-res gallery of the Chevy Tahoe 2-mode Hybrid We've been waiting for General Motors to step up to the plate with its own incentives now that Ford has offered employee pricing on its F-Series trucks and Dodge has offered $2.99 fuel to go along with its various incentives for the Ram. It seems that GM has finally anted up and increased the incentives for the Silverado, Avalanche and Sierra trucks, along with the Tahoe, Yukon, Escalade and Suburban. The pickups all get $2,000 in customer cash to go along with an extra $3,000 if you already own a GM product for a total of $5,000 total off the sticker price. Those shopping for an SUV will even get an extra grand. In what may be an even larger sign of the times, for the first time ever GM's hybrid Tahoe and Yukon get $4,000 off, but only if you already own a product from the General...
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Filed under: Car Buying , Buick , Cadillac , Chevrolet , GM , GMC , Pontiac , Saab We don't normally cover every little change an automaker makes to its lineup as the model year clicks over, but General Motors has some significant features its adding for 2009 that shouldn't fall through the cracks. For one, Bluetooth will finally become on nearly all of GM's cars and trucks. For the longest time, only the Cadillac STS was available with Bluetooth phone integration, which ends with MY2009. Second, the six-speed automatic transmission that before was not widely available in the General's half-ton trucks and SUVs has spread like wildfire across the GMT900 lineup and will now be standard or optional in such vehicles as the Avalanche, Silverado and Sierra 1500, Suburban, Yukon and Yukon XL. Curiously, though, it's still not available on the Tahoe. Other items of note include a new 6-speed automatic for the Pontiac G6 to replace its underwhelming 4-speed, the replacement of...
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Filed under: Car Buying , Buick , Chevrolet , GM , GMC , HUMMER , Pontiac , Saab , Earnings/Financials Yesterday we wrote about GM's intent to shrink its 14,118-strong dealer network , with one idea to combine Pontiac, Buick, and GMC dealers into larger, more modern flagship outlets. Turns out that was only part of the plan: according to Automotive News , "General Motors is preparing to make public a plan to encourage the creation of superstores in major metro areas that would carry every GM brand." These superstores, which would be called GM Collections, are being evaluated for major metropolitan markets where the real estate itself is more valuable than the dealer franchise. For dealers interested in such an outlet, GM's idea is to move service and parts centers off-site to make room for all of the brands. Some dealers think that's a turn-off for consumers, others report good results. In LA, this has been standard practice for a while, with some service departments...
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Filed under: Car Buying , Buick , Chevrolet , GM , GMC , Pontiac , Toyota , Earnings/Financials At the end of World War II, GM "put a dealership in every little hamlet" to keep up with the postwar boom. Sixty years later, in 2005, long after that boom had ended and every domestic maker was losing market share, GM had 15,094 dealerships. By 2007 GM had reduced that to 14,118 dealers. But if GM plans to compete financially with its overseas competition, it will need to shrink that number a great deal further. Chevrolet has 4,000 dealerships. Toyota, to sell the same amount of cars, has just 1,244 dealers. Put another way, the typical Toyota dealer moves 1,766 cars per year. The typical Chevrolet dealer moves 554. And the other domestics fare about the same: the usual Ford dealership rolls 556 vehicles off the lot every year, while a Dodge dealer does 374 per year. GM is looking at consolidating Pontiac, Buick, and GMC shops into one. However, state franchise laws don't make...
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Filed under: Car Buying , SUVs , Trucks/Pickups , Dodge , Ford , GMC Using a formula that takes into account what a buyer actually pays for a vehicle, J.D. Power APEAL Survey results and the Consumer Reports Owner Satisfaction Survey, Forbes has come up with the 15 vehicles for which you'll probably pay too. The most overpriced vehicle will cost you $7,158 more than it should. For some reason we couldn't see the 15th and final slide, so all we can tell you is that the 14th most overpriced vehicle will run you $2,447 extra. The number one slot is held by the $37,105 Dodge Ram 2WD Laramie MegaCab, and the penultimate place was occupied by the $27,470 GMC Colorado. The list is dominated by domestic trucks and SUVs -- the only car on the list is the Mercury Grand Marquis (over by $6,480), and the only import is the Nissan Quest SE (over by $3,441). All of them are long in the tooth, on their way out, or about to be replaced. So if you're in the market for any of them, it's buyer...
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Filed under: Car Buying , LA Auto Show , SUVs , Green , Chevrolet , GMC click above image for a high-res gallery of the Chevy Tahoe 2-mode Hybrid Over the past several months, General Motors has been trotting out its new full-size hybrid SUVs at every press preview and auto show telling us all about how great they are. More recently the automaker told us that the official fuel economy ratings from the EPA had come in at an impressive 21 mpg city and 22 mpg highway. The one thing GM has declined to discuss, however, was how much the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid and GMC Yukon Hybrid was going to cost the consumer. Until now that is. The Two-Mode hybrid Chevy Tahoe and GMC Yukon now have their official MSRPs, with the rear-wheel-drive Tahoe hybrid starting at $50,490. At the high end, the all-wheel-drive GMC Yukon tips the price scales at $53,775. So far we don't have an exact standard equipment list for comparison against the regular 5.3L SUVs, but a rough estimate would put one of those in the...
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Filed under: Car Buying , Trucks/Pickups , Marketing/Advertising , Chevrolet , GM , GMC General Motors had a good August, bucking the industry trend with a year over year sales increase. A big part of that success came with zero-percent financing on the...
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Filed under: Car Buying , Maintenance , Etc. , Buick , Cadillac , GM , GMC , Lexus , Pontiac , Saturn The General's chief product guru, Bob Lutz, responded to questions regarding GM's reliability in the company's FastLane Blog's most recent video Q&A...
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Filed under: Car Buying , SUVs , Trucks/Pickups , Chevrolet , GM , GMC , UAW/Unions Vehicle sales are slow throughout the US right now, and a slumping housing market coupled with high gas prices means that trucks and SUVs are being hit extremely hard...
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