balthazar

Tho in the field of percentages, doubling your marketshare is relatively easy when you're in the low single digits, the above still seems like a lofty prediction. I really don't see nissan/toyota bringing anything new to the table... meanwhile both are still far from matching the leaders as far as choices and features are concerned.

It's not the facility... it's the history. Some of the greatest automotive creations known to man have run there.

Ahh- my first time in here. Any rules? No? Good. and

It still reflects extremely poorly on brand image.

No prob, esp. for a fellow Buick man! Looked for a bit more; saw in a GM blog that Milford has "over 100 miles" of road now!

Undoubtedly the number of vehicles constantly varies. Milford Proving Grounds dates back to 1924. In 1955, acreage was about 3,900 and it contained about 44 miles of road. I have not seen anything that suggests acreage has increased since then (I've seen numerous ariel pics thruout it's existance), but total miles of road has definately increased since. This pic is from 1999: Milford Proving Grounds The borders should be obvious: one big vertical rectangle with the NE corner sliced off. The triangular track in the center is a 3.8 mile curcuit, and I believe that's the approximate one-way length of the long straightaway to the far left. There are inclines of 60% and banked turns at 77%. That huge perfect circle was added later-on, tho I can't tell you when; one pic I have has irregular road courses there instead. I would pay cash money to be able to run my '59 there for a day...

Don't forget: the one BIG, HUGE OTHER thing in mitsu's basket is the 25-year cover-up of defects and quality problems and the multiple, subsequent lies about it afterwards. That was the torpedo thru the main bulkhead that led directly to it's sinking.

Nothing specific, no; just an all-around solid package, often with a brutal drivetrain, complemented by sutble trim & emblems. Sounds good to me.

SS package first appeared on the '61 Imp. It only specified trim and other options, but no mandatory powertrain (and no leather); therefore yes- 6-cyl/autos must've been built. I don't know how many '61 SS's total were built, but 142 were 409 cars. '62 also did not specify powertrain equipment, and 99,311 '62 Imps had the SS package. In '67, one of the years the Impala SS was it's own model series, Chevy built 75,600 V-8 SSs and 400 I-6 SSs. Nomad never offered an SS package: Nomad ran '55-58. Later '60s wagons did not offer the SS package either. And I think buickguy's comment meant that there were no different colors for the SS, but in the '60s the bulk of the color palette was the same between Chevy, Pontiac, Olds & Buick and the SS option did not carry specific color(s) either.

I am not awqare of any aftermarket 'tuner' packages for Impalas (such as Yenko, Baldwin-Motion, Nicky, etc). However, Chevrolet themselves offered factory race cars in the early '60s (Z-11) and the SS-427 option in the late '60s, but these really didn't have much of anything in the way of appearance items. The Z-11 looks showrom stock and about all the SS-427 got was a cool hood design and subtle emblems. With the performance-optioned Impala, it wasn't so much about the 'show' as it was about the 'go':

Oh. Michele Maynard. sigh >>"General Motors sold more than a million {Impalas} in 1965. Now the Impala... is selling less than a third of that total. The reason is that G.M. prefers to stick with its decades-old approach of breadth over depth, buckshot over a silver bullet. So rather than placing an all-or-nothing bet on a single car at one division... That idea served G.M. well when it sold more than half of all new cars and trucks back in the 1960's."<< What she and every other mainstream automotive 'journalist' fail to bother to research is that '65's million-plus Impalas was NOT the result of a "silver bullet" approach either. The Impy was not a 700,000-unit better car than the near 300K '65 Catalinas sold, nor the near 300K J'65 etstar/Dynamic 88s sold, nor the over 200K '65 LeSabre/Wildcats sold. There were far more consumers in the entry-level price bracket then than now. Her analysis here is completely invalid. I know: shocking. >>"Like many other G.M. models, {Impala} is sold to rental car companies, government agencies and corporations, markets where Toyota generally does much less business."<< I wouldn't call a circa 12,000-unit difference across the country "much less". I would also want to look at the respective fleet volume trends for these 2 models... >>"The American companies spent so much time focusing on trucks and S.U.V.'s that they neglected their cars..."<< And the japanese companies spent so much time focusing on cars that they neglected their trucks, all the while the truck market was climbing to over 50% of the market. You've never seen that fact in print (other than from me). ellives= >>"I personally don't see value in maintaining all the brands without doing some serious work on establishing differentiation..."<< That's it in a nutshell. Re-empower Division General Managers and re-establish Divisional Engineering Departments. It was critical to successes in the '60s and it can be key to future prosperity.

Big barbeque at my house when the official announcement is released!!

Good point, Ven. Also note that GM's truck plants must have amortized their costs a lo-oong time ago.

If you can find the total volumes, I'll get DM truck numbers (have to add them up).

Everything else being equal; no way in hell will a mere 100-lb difference equate to a 1-2 MPG difference.... unless we're starting with a -say- 1000-lb vehicle.

How about instead of saying "death", "decline", "niche" and "novelty", why not try posting some real, actual "data" so we can all get past the hand-wringing extrapolation of personal opinion. Go get the NADM retail V-8 totals for the last 10 years, make up a tidy chart & post it and try again to make this theory remotely worth debating. I promise I won't argue straight, comprehensive fact.

How ego-centric do you have to get to assume that when one makes a particular decision, it's indicative of a 16-million unit industry shift??

Hard to get more ironic that this: BMW 'borrowed' The Ultimate Driving machine from '60s GTO advertising. Pontiac used split grilles from '35-40, tho most historians regard '59 as the 'first' year, likely because most historians don't ever dig deep enough. Neither will changing the marque's emblem or ditching one of the longest running design cues in the industry.

I know you didn't need that inconsequential fact to tell you that...

Absolutely right. Agreed 100%!

"Thanks for keeping our newest product in the limelight!" ??

Show me a car yet built that will satisfy everyone, absolutely. And unfortunately, the retro move has not spread far enough to unbundle options....

O.C.= Which are many of the reasons other consumers want V-8s.hudson= So is a modern V-8.

Maybe they'll 'pull a BMW" and not change it at all for 20+ years. ;P It's just: First we had the loud & vocal protesting the Charger for not looking enough like a vintage car, now we have more voices (the same ones???) damning the Challenger for being too similiar to vintage. I am certain that a great number of both of these groups are not serious MoPar consumers.

You're joking, right? The Impala, 300 and MC are full-bore mainstream vehicles. The 'SS' and 'C' are option packages on mainstream vehicles, but that does not make them niche in the least. Clearly in those cases the V-8 is the prime motivator, but without a relatively expensive option/equipment/trim package ubitquitously hogtied to the V-8, it's take rate would unquestionably be higher. Traditionally, in the heyday of the V-8, it was bundled with nothing and was always affordable. It's always expensive today.There are 2 sides to this issue. Some are focusing on volume alone, others are focusing on proliferation to determine future viability. 2 different sets of parameters. Of course, without industry-wide V-8 production totals over at least 10 years, no meaningful 'answer' can ever be reached here; it's just opinion head-butting opinion. evok- you seem to think that anyone who doesn't agree with you hasn't read what you posted.....