balthazar

Why on Earth did Daimler design all these BE mercedes' as giant, fat, pregnant guppies?? The EQE is a huge slug! You have hopeful photochoppers designing things all aggressive and slick, then Daimler drops this sort of rotten egg on the market :

Being it's the same base photograph, seems safe to say it's an artist's guess. A bit over-the-top for me, and I agree on the front end.

Sittin the the mall parking lot, while the wife shops for work pants. Pickups around me: • circa 10-yr old Ford Super Duty King Ranch crew cab/8-ft bed. • current model GMC 2500 crew cab/8-ft bed • current model Ram crew cab/5.5-ft bed. • current GMC 1500 AT4 crew cab/5.5-ft bed • current GMC 1500 Denali crew cab /6.5-ft bed • and me in my ‘21 GMC 1500 crew cab/6.5-ft bed. Pulling out: • current model GMC AT4 crew cab (couldn’t determine bed: doors were open).

This is the band my son is in, Sunrot, he's on drums. Self-taught on both them & guitar. They just got signed, so will have to see where it all goes.

It is. But they're still competitive and still siblings. And one can still be better and play in the same price tiers (again: competition). Why is GMC competing with Chevrolet? Every brand should compete with every other brand, irregardless of the parent company. Imagine if GM executives had said 'We have the GTO, so it's a 'hard no' to the 442, the GS400 and the SS396." Again- it comes right back to you contention; more models, more revenue, more profit, right? Or...... let's have a conversation about cutting MB's SUV line down to a 'more proper' 3 or 4 models.

Just like they think ‘more more more pickup trims’. And it works. GMC is printing money & expanding models and sales of models. That’s everything you’ve randomly thrown up on the chalkboard for ‘success’; more models, cheap models, higher trim models, more volume/revenue/profit. But for some reason -unless it IS just the outmoded 1980s think- “GMC has problems that need fixing. Weird. Illogical.

Lexus; no. Like someone pointed out; it'd be based on a bottom feeder toyoter; that's a poor foundation to build off of, esp when all toyoter is doing is (badly) copying the Big 4 trucks. Cadillac & Lincoln... I think they are playing it right by conceding the lux truck segment to the higher volume in-house brands. There's too much of a 'well-worn path' to Ford to try and divert traffic to Lincoln at this point. It's possible tho, esp if a Lincoln truck had as much attention to detail as the Navigator has shown. I just don't think every brand needs tube in every segment (something I've said many many times here).

Pretty damned poor showing when GMC is hitting nearly 300K, no? Why shouldn't toyoter be selling 1,000,000 tundras?

So what? But you JUST advocated reducing GMC Sierra from 6 trims to 2! At some point don't you have to take a breath, re-read what you write, and decide 'Yeah, maybe that really is massively inconsistent.' ? I dunno; if sales move online / car delivery services, AND someday everything is just electric motor-propelled, what's the point of 40 SUVs of the same size, same motor, same features, etc on the same computer screen?

The 1921 Sloan Model is an interesting case study. At the point the internal discussions were happening on this matter, General Motors had 10 price tiers; 2 Chevrolets, 1 Oakland, 3 Olds', a Scripps-Booth, a Sheridan, Buick & Cadillac. Except for Cadillac, there were overlaps- some slight, some huge... but the issue of GM's 'rough times' circa 1920 was massively complex and not solely centered on price overlap. What commonly gets lost in this topic is how utterly autonomous the Divisions were in this era; it was no more significant that a Chevrolet FB overlapped an Oakland nearly 1:1 than it did if it overlapped -say- Dodge. They were independent companies, and everyone in the same given segment overlapped each other (as they do today). Parent corporation is meaningless here. The Sloan Proposal was 5 new, non-specific, non-overlapping price tiers. Creating a tiered pricing structure was 1% of what GM decided to try out in order to pull the Corp out of the 1920 mud. It really was the biggest reorganization GM ever executed, moreso than the 2008 Bailout. In other words, it's not applicable to today's industry.

This thinking is outmoded. mercedes is volume-based and it's higher cost. Just about all the 'bottom tier' brands (hyundai, honda, kia, etc) have pushed upmarket, Chevy has pushed upmarket, there's no USDM equivalent of a 1980 Chevette anymore. Yeah; relatively lower cost', and it is on many models, but there's no rule it also can't build high-priced models (obviously). Look at your fanboy brand's car line pricing overlap / shared engines/ transmissions... why aren't they clearly separated by a hard bundle of thousands? Because it's not necessary. GMC is at record-breaking volume levels; they sold almost 10% more Sierras during a global pandemic than the year before. They're not going to exceed than for '21 due to the chip shortage / production constraints... but they're selling every single Sierra they can build. 253K in 2020, on pace for 276K for '21 (thru Q2). Again; you're trying to create a problem where there is none, and going thru a 1980's filter to do so. According to the above, fiat's are the most popular leased model, yet there are no fiat's listed in the top 71 higher-value retained vehicles. That would support a vast divergence between a fiat's lease rates and its low resale value.

If you go thru the 'Denali' port, it's not there, but if you go thru the main Sierra port, it shows. This is why online-only shopping is a mistake- websites frequently have errors.

You do understand the difference between “retail” and “fleet”, right? Doesn’t selling a baseline Sierra mirror EXACTLY your proposal to sell a 4-banger baseline Corvette “to sell more”?? Which is it; do you want brands to pursue selling MORE or LESS? That’s incorrect- 6.2L has been a Sierra Denali cornerstone.

Europeans are by & large; automotive xenophobes. They're really not a relevant market outside of themselves. There's a regular cab/long bed commercial/base trim for fleet sales, yes. Almost none are retail-sold. But as soon as you go to a crew cab/4WD, that price rises to $39K with the standard 2.7L Turbo and no options. When I do a 500-mile radius search for a base CC/5.5' 4WD Sierra, 5 come up, sticking between $40.7K and $44.7K. That's a long damn way from "$30K".

It’s going to be far more widespread than just Dodge, when Joe Q Marginaldriver says ‘watch how fast this thing accelerates!!’ in supermarket lots, residential streets, highway off-ramps, etc etc. Really makes me wonder what insurance rates are going to balloon to; might be another ‘muscle car crackdown’ like in the early ‘70s. ?

Futures speculation on the price of oil relies heavily on expected demand, also. If BE's (theoretically and inexplicably-suddenly) jump in market share (breathing freely over here), the demand for fuel goes down. However; one significant driver of oil futures is the very recent disruptions in the oil production market, not just from the hurricane the other day affecting Gulf coast refineries, but the Keystone Pipeline death, rescinding drilling on federal lands (I'm not up-to-speed on this one tho), and general policies against production... then going off, hat-in-hand, begging OPEC to ship more oil. Oct '20 WTI crude was $35/barrel. July 1 '21 : $75/barrel.

SO that's 70% sold in the upper 2 trims levels the Sierra had in 2019. Because -gasp- the SLT is ALSO a luxury trim GMC. Now there's the mid-range Elevation, and the upper-range AT4. I don't see as many SLTs, I suspect the Elevation pulled some sales down, but GMC is moving a LOT of AT4s. I'll bet the numbers are still running between 60-70% for the top two, and if you include the SLT it'll be over 75% solid (Elevations are very popular).

Oh yes it is! lux off-roader!

You are imagining a problem where there is none. I mean, you are saying go from 6 Sierra trims… to 2. Why the hell would GMC do that?? Answer; GMC is still expanding. The AT4 line is going to get a ‘next level’ trim. ‘sgonna be 7 trims!!