I have never owned a GM car and never will. They'll never build a car that will meet my standards. Their cars are built just "good enough." No GM car has ever impressed me with build quality. I was at the LA car show back in the late 80's and saw a brand new white four-door Cadillac Eldorado, their top end status car. Upon opening the driver side door, I could see a shim between the bolt holding the fender to the chasis. It was used to push out the fender away from the chasis to make it flush with the outer door. Opening the passenger side door, I saw EIGHT shims between the fender bolt and chasis to make the fender flush with the door. EIGHT??? Isn't the chasis straight to begin with? What a P.O.S. Who'd settle for this? I surely wouldn't. Remember the diesel craze? Instead of building a diesel engine from the ground up, they converted gasoline engines to diesel. The blocks/cylinder heads couldn't take the 22:1 compression ratios and they were failing miserably. These were the worst engines GM has ever built due to their incredibly high failure rate. They *could* have built a diesel engine the way it should have been built in the first place but no. They took the cheapest route without any regard to reliability. As long as it works.
You wonder how the company stays in business. When import cars that are well built and reliable start going up in price, GM raises the prices of their cars to a similar level of the imports. As the quality and workmanship of the imports improve in relation to the price increase, the Big Three's cars' don't. The prices go up and the quality improves at a snails pace, if at all. Building a quality car is not their number one priority.
My favorite quote:
<I>"Strive for perfection in everything.
Take the best that exists and make it better.
If it doesn't exist, create it.
Accept nothing nearly right or good enough."
-Sir Henry Royce, co-founder of Rolls Royce.</I>
Now if GM could embrace just a little bit of this philosophy.
