JWilly48519

Cadillac no longer has anyone that can assure correct grammar and word choices in their written communications?

Leftlane News implied that they, not GM, did the illustration ("Our artist's rendering...", my emphasis).

"Wouldn't want it to look like a minivan" "It would look like a minivan" "That'd make it too much like a minivan" Heh. Fine, those of us who like form=function, high-capacity, remote-sliding-door vehicles get the point. The expression, I think, is "adding insult to injury". The injury being that GM and Ford have dumped our customer segment totally, and Chrysler isn't going to offer AWD, so we have to buy Asian. So I guess the insult doesn't really matter much, right?

They're equally good. Build 'em all...three flavors of the same master car. Obviously they target distinct sub-segments. If those sub-segments' buy desires are so easily discerned and so different...what's the point of the exercise, to figure out which 2/3 of the overall segment won't be served? That would be nuts. Build 'em all and have a flavor for all those customers.

A small turbodiesel in an AWD minivan...gimme gimme gimme.

Very generally, an action is either criminal, if there's a specific law regarding it, or it's not. AFAIK, the perpetrator did not violate any laws regarding the photographs he took and posted unless there was a seal on the hood that was understandable to be intended to prevent opening and yet he cut or broke that seal to open the hood. Regarding the perpetrator having driven the car, that's harder to evaluate, since there was implied permission for the car to be driven in the context of its being loaded, unloaded and otherwise handled. My guess would be no, the perpetrator gets the benefit of the doubt on anything criminal. An action can be non-criminal and yet expose you to civil suit if that action imposes costs or other harm to another party and if there exists a legal relationship creating a responsibility not to cause such harm. I doubt if the perpetrator had a contractural agreement with GM...AFAIK, he was just an employee of the transport company. Thus I'd guess that GM doesn't have a basis for a civil suit against him unless he's convicted of a criminal act. GM however very likely does have a basis for a civil suit against the transport company, depending on the terms and conditions of the contractural agreement between them. The transport company may have a basis for a civil suit against the perpetrator depending on the terms and conditions of his employment, which amounts to a contractural relationship. "Industrial espionage" is just a buzz-phrase, with no specific legal meaning. It's not even applicable here unless the perpetrator in fact intended to profit in some manner from his actions. My understanding is that he was just being an idiot, not a spy. He posted the photos on a public website...clearly no intent to profit there. "Top secret" similarly has no legal meaning. "Consent" is a great legal concept, but it doesn't apply here unless there was a contractural relationship between GM and the perpetrator, and it appears that there wasn't.

He wasn't arrested. He's still an idiot, of course. GM has filed a civil complaint...presumably against Emo, since the idiot didn't have any direct responsibility to GM. http://www.thegmsource.com/index.php?categ...2_articleid=249 Depending on the terms of any employee-confidentiality contract Emo had with the employee, they might get damages from him. I'd be exceedingly surprised if Emo didn't pursue this guy as hard as is legally possible in order to make an example of him, given that Emo might have some big-time civil damages exposure to GM depending on the terms of their contract. At the very least, Emo's commercial viability in the Detroit air freight marketplace is on the line. *** Notwithstanding my post above about lack of criminal action, I wonder if the act of opening the hood could be seen under law as analogous to razor-knifing open a sealed box on a palette in transit. Even if it can't be shown that you actually took anything out of a box you opened, the fact of your having broken the seal on that box amounts to the criminal action of "breaking", as in breaking and entering. The key to this might be if GM had put some kind of security seal on the hood that had to be explicitly cut or broken in order to get it open. If such a seal was used, there could be room for an interpretation of criminal action. All that would be needed would be criminally sufficient evidence of who cut/broke the seal.

Heh. You've got an interesting grasp of the dividing line between civil and contractural obligations (which can get you sued for damages), and criminal violations, i.e. felonies and some classes of serious misdemeanors (which can get you arrested and tossed in jail). If I work for you, and you tell me to keep my mouth shut, and I don't, you can fire me. End of story, no more action possible. If I work for you, and I sign a contractural agreement to keep your secrets in return for consideration with the explicit condition that if I don't keep your secrets I am damaging you, and I proceed to blab about those secrets, you can sue my backside. You may collect damages from a court, and attach my bank account and anything else I've got that can be seized and converted to cash. What you can't do is have the cops throw me in jail. The enforcement of an employer-employee behavior contract is always civil. It's not criminal to be a bad employee. (Fortunately for most of us, at some point in our lives.) For the cops to throw me in jail, I have to have done something criminal, or at least rising to the level of a serious misdemeanor. Taking a car out of the cargo stream and going for a joyride, for instance. Or maybe removing parts from it. I haven't a clue as to whether the individual involved did something like that, but either of those actions could be interpreted as grand theft, given the value of this particular car. I'll be quite surprised if the Romulus police turn out to have arrested and jailed someone for the "crime" of angering GM by taking pictures of high-value air cargo in transit. The city attorney for Romulus would have a hard time figuring out how to defend against the resulting civil suit for false arrest, I'm quite sure. None of the above, of course, is a defense of this particular dude's stupidity. But, if photographic security was *that* important to GM, maybe they could have done a little more on their end as well...given that 90% of the young-adult population carries a camera these days.

Corvette has evolved over the years, and so has Chevrolet. In order for Chevrolet to compete with Toyota head-on, it needs to increasingly focus on mid-market customers. The Corvette would do a lot more good being sold as an independent brand in the same showrooms as Cadillac, at least in East and West Coast showrooms and in ROW markets. A Cadillac-plus-Corvette two-brand lineup looks a lot more like the US perception of BMW or Mercedes, and that's where Cadillac needs to be.

My observation of the first seven pages of this thread is that people who seem to be personally favorably inclined toward minivans in general, and thus might be a potential customer, generally like the DCX products. People who don't like minivans, and therefore almost certainly wouldn't be a potential customer, naturally don't like these specific products. It should be obvious that DCX isn't trying to appeal to folks who don't like minivans anyway. If they can hold their share or gain ground among minivan buyers, and the segment maintains its size, they'll have been pretty successful. If the segments grows (contrary to Mr. Lutz's public expectations), it'll be interesting to see the correlation-studies as to whether the new buyers were attracted by the DCX products. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Of course, I'm pro-minivan.

Same problem. The board loses track of who I am almost every time I change pages. Almost every time I hit Reply, I become a Guest and have to log in, even though it still shows my ID as currently logged in. Sometimes it won't even accept a re-login from the error page, and I have to go back to the home page, log in there, navigate back to the thread I wanted to reply to, and try again. Usually I can reply after re-logging in...it seems almost as if the login only lasts for a short while. No problems on other sites' forums or blogs, though I don't know specifically if any other forums I visit are using IP.Board. IE 6.x, Win WP, all latest OS patches.

I'm ready to buy. Loaded. Checkbook's in the other room. Replacing an AWD Olds Silhouette. I have to have a minivan platform to get the cubage and length behind the second row that I want. The third row will never be up. Only issues are, I have to be able to get AWD, and I hope they intro with at least one excitement color and with some upscale rubber/wheels available. Supposedly this same platform will be built as a VW version for North America only. I wonder if the VW version will offer a small turbodiesel and a ZF transmission.

Heh. You don't perceive the free first year as being nothing more than a marketing technique in regard to the desired subscription revenue? There's nothing wrong with GM making money, of course. My view, though, is that this service, being inexpensive to provide and facing progressively increasing competition with similarly inexpensive service provision costs in addition to competing in regard to route-information with onboard hardware systems that have a much better snazz appeal, should be given away to establish the proper cost structure for a car company: Give away the ancillary services that other people can do as well as you can. Sell the automotive hardware.

OnStar is perceived by some folks as a too-clever-by-half way for GM to add subscription revenue to their car sales. In-car hardware systems deliver visual satisfaction, and impress others. By any sensible marketing analysis, those are important benefits for some customers. By comprison, OnStar comes across to those customers as the system for the hardware-intimidated or generally insecure. I haven't seen GM doing anything to fix that image weakness. The print and radio advertising has no resonance at all with potential customers for whom impressiveness is important. The system doesn't cost much to operate. Granting that many buyers are going to regard it as inherently inferior to a hardware system, some buyers would be positively impressed if you got it free when you bought a GM car. Oops, nope, can't do that. That'd be being pro-active and getting out in front of the competition. There's no short-term profit in adding a low cost feature to a car and not charging a high price for it. Right?

It's not the vehicle for me...not enough space behind the second row, I need a long-WB AWD minivan...but I hope they sell well.

You think it's bad that the segment has evolved demand and supply at the high end? Or are you proposing that segment players need either two entries or a greater price spread between low and high end? Compared to existing 2WD GM minivans, yes. The recent GM minivan AWD package, OTOH, has had excellent road dynamics. The AWD versions were totally different and better driving experiences. Yeah, those damned customers, wanting more capacity. Screw 'em, let's just offer small ones. A woman buying a present GM minivan is buying what she needs, not what she wants...because of stupid gender-biased marketing that either assumes women won't spend beyond function and safety to get identity/excitement features, or can't think of any such features, and has assigned the minivan as the inferior identity/excitement-free "woman's product". When you're offering an identity/excitement-free product and thereby passively encouraging perception-drift of your product image toward comparative undesirability, of course a potential buyer with anything less than a bulletproof ego is going to be insulted when you tell them that their apparent identity and your identity-free product are a good match. But that idiotic situation is not inherently a characteristic of the minivan form factor. The objections to sliding doors are technical...not customer perceptions. A "better" way has to be "better" as perceived by customers. But hey, if testing proves that, fine, bring it on.

The early reviews are pretty negative for the Ford Edge...even though everyone loves the big skylight. One of the most telling negatives, I think, is a growing recognition that the CUV body concept is really just Hatchback Redux, i.e. enough stuff-volume for trips to the grocery store, but not for anything more significant. CUVs are just cars with big trunks. However good a fit that concept may be for many customers, CUVs don't deliver a merger of the cube and length of a light truck with the daily driveability and all-weather road performance of an advanced car. That vehicle needs the minivan form factor. I hope that the next so-called minivan from GM is intentionally developed with a dual personality, marketing-wise. That's a great reason for having multiple divisions. Mommy-mobiles/family vans/people movers are essential, and IMO a strategically crucial market whatever the trends. You shouldn't be able to go wrong selling them. Fifty years ago, motherhood, apple pie and Chevrolets were all essential elements of Americana. You can't go wrong in middle America being in favor of motherhood and family values. You just have to have marketers that understand and identify with the customers. The same platform implementation, though, should be offered as a personal stuff-hauler with a form-follows-function, all-weather marketing message. De-emphasize the third row, the backseat DVD player and the bland colors. Masculinize the detailing. Functionalize the interior. Add options for a big-sky roof, more prominent rubber, and some identity/excitement colors inside and out. Sell it young and tough, with a focus on real world stuff-hauling, and having a vehicle that's ready for whatever you need to do.

Ummm, no. I think that would fall into both the "drives badly" and "ponderous and clumsy" categories. Plus, I'm sure it'd be fun feeding that big V8. I want to buy GM, but I do have limits.

I'm a guy that drives a so-called minivan as my winter car and stuff-mover. It's optimum for my guy-needs. I like the way the AWD versions drive, and I have fairly high expectations...my summer car is a Boxster. I like buying GM. I need to buy a 2007. I hate GM's abandonment of the minivan segment. The Lambda CUVs are too short behind the second row. I'm not interested in moving stacks of drywall or circus animals, but occasionally I do need to move long equipment, or go shopping, or take a prototype and a couple of associates to a customer site. I want the convenience of cubage and length. Pickups drive badly, and don't offer me either a shared-interior cargo space or a good on-road AWD package. They're too high, and waste length...I don't communicate my masculinity by the length of my hood. Suburbans are ponderous and clumsy. CUVs are OK, I guess, for general mobility, but they don't excite me. I'm happy that they exist for their buyers. I need another minivan. Who decided that the minivan concept would be solely identified with soccer moms, anyway? The minivan form factor, functionalized up and re-concepted, should co-exist as a guy vehicle. Minus the irrelevant attempts at making it look like a car, a minivan offers a perfect canvas for designing an anti-design, i.e. high function and rejection of the car look, i.e. the Scion xB but with more functionality and features, for guys with bigger stuff, families, more safety concerns, snow to drive through. In the life of the concept, why didn't anyone pick up on that? It's tough being part of a segment that is considered negligible.