Camino LS6

Thanks Capriceman, your post indirectly addresses some of what I've been thinking about today. Other thoughts welcome.

" Thousand -dollar car aint worth nuthin, thousand-dollar car aint worth $h!, might as well take your thousand dollars - throw it on the ground and set fire to it" - The Bottlerockets

Agreed generally with both of your last two posts, but emphatically with the part I've bolded!

o\ /o :AH-HA_wink:

If you were going to fundamentally change your life and how you live it, what would you do to make that happen? And what would you change your life to? Even better, would you allow someone else to force you to change your life?

It looks like someone buried the starship Voyager. Still, better than a city that looks like it has a permanent hard-on.

Interesting, thanks for posting it PCS.

I am not anti- European whatsoever.

Well LA, I admit that the topic has veered far from it's original intent. I'll just say this one last thing, I can now see that the anti-Holden thing seems to be a European disease. And that it still amazes me to see anyone attempt to discount the ingenuity of our friends in Australia - who can take junk and turn it to gold in my view.

Umm,no. Holden drastically changed the Opel platform and took it places it never dreamed of in a synthesis of American/ Australian drivetrains on a re-engineered and expanded form of the original Opel offering. This creativity allowed them to create an entirely new identity from the Opel crumbs that supported a huge range of variants Opel never even dreamed of, including everything from V6 sedans, to commercial trucks, to crossovers to high performance cars capable of regularly embarassing BMW on the track. In various forms, these were exported to every continent with humans on it. Now even the development of the iconic Camaro is largely in the hands of Holden. An "outpost of Opel" ? I think not. Holden has proven to be more resourceful on a tighter budget than any other portion of the GM world. What they have been able to do with so little is just flat amazing.

As usual, you've missed my point and put my comments into the wrong context. Toyota does not outsell GM in the US market- period. And last I heard, as a brand Chevy still outsells Toyota as a brand although that was not the context I used in my post. As for the "blanding" , I blame Toyota for instituting it and the domestics for emulating it. It was exactly the wrong way to meet the competition from Asia. So, you missed that part of what I've been saying. The domestics willingly drank the poison and built cars that were some mutant attempt at Japanese instead of pushing their own identities forward with the result being cars that never measured up to either standard. I don't excuse them for this.

Ugh! Rear window seal is shot and likely rusted. I hate that aspect of the way glass was done in older cars. I've even considered eliminating the window trim on Project Camino for exactly this reason.

The thing didn't even have a plate, let alone lights or a rear window. These folks were asking for it.

I'll have to dredge up some of the old family B&W pics of cars and scan them for this thread.

Huge Improvement! I can't wait for the "blingy lights" trend to die.

Just speak your mind ,E-man. The counter to the nonsense is not silence. :AH-HA_wink:

Carbs are like that, once the cold weather is out of the picture it will do better. That's why I suggest EFI for your next beater. Leaking roof? What's that all about?

Holden is responsible for global RWD car design and depends upon exports for survival. As such, Holden designs to global needs, not merely Australian tastes. In fact, The Holdens of recent memory have emulated what I would call true American design. The hallmarks of the Holden design language have very American roots with a European seasoning added to great effect. Also, GMNA had a great deal to to with the RWD design process at Holden - including supplying personnel. On Epsilon II the global nature of new GM architectures will be even more pronounced. And that is really the point, GM is using design from around the globe to satisfy markets around the globe.

Face it world, the G8 is just a great car. :AH-HA_wink:

Sheesh! What's with the "dildo school" of design?

Thus my suggestion that you get a granny car beater. If the car is cheap and much younger (at least mileage wise), you can have a reliable beater instead of the two you have which require attention. The best beaters are ones you can largely ignore while you save for (or work on) a car you really like. If those cars were mine, I'd puff up the Mazda as well as I could for small change and dump it. The Cutlass I'd give a good once over to make it a better driver and stick with it. But, I know you don't love the Cutlass , so my advice remains to dump both cars and go cheap with the lowest mile car you can find. I'd use this criteria: - low miles ( like under 70k) - granny owned - undervalued in the market - maintenance history - bulletproof drivetrain - solid body and interior - simple to maintain - inexpensive and common parts - not too highly equipped so reliability is better. - good tires - recent inspection - Fuel injection See. I said nothing about brand, or drive wheels, or engine size. If a car meets all of these parameters, that's the one you need right now. Otherwise you have two cars in need of attention that will suck up your wages and tick you off.

:rotflmao:

In the case of the Commodore that simply isn't true, it was designed with the intention that it would be exported to the US( and elsewhere) from the start. Additonally, Zeta itself was developed to be a global platform from the start with assembly on several continents. The upcoming Camaro is on a variant of Zeta with other NA-market cars to be based on this updated zeta as well. While CAFE has caused GM to scale back or modify the way that Zeta is deployed, the fact remains that it, and other upcoming architectures, are being developed for both production and distribution worldwide. They will be tailored to each market in a fashion never truly employed by GM before. As much as you may love to draw lines between certain components of GM's global presence, GM is finally acting as a global entity. The results of this may be both positive and negative from certain points of view and in the details of product delivered to any given market, but to deny that this is happening is simply incorrect.

"The blame spreads far and wide, but Japan is the source and author of the trend." I disagree. The world's first car to be mass-produced on the cheap, with each model being virtually identical - even down to the colour - thus creating the concept of an appliance in an automobile began with Ford's Model T. And that came from America. Point taken on the Model T, however that stubborn approach was soundly rejected once consumers realized that other choices were available, and even Ford himself had to adapt. What followed was a golden age of diverse design in both form and function which stretched into the early seventies where it met a brick wall of regulation. Enter the Japanese with cheap, economical, cars and the whole industry became lackluster. The domestics attempted to play to the strengths of the likes of Toyota and Honda and abandoned their own set of criteria resulting in several decades of "also rans". They foolishly attempted to "out Japanese" the Japanese. This influence on the industry has disgusted me from that time forward. As I said, the blame spreads far and wide, but the results remain unpleasant. "BS, cars of the past were artful even in the thriftiest models. It's the least common denominator school of thought that's the trouble." The economy of the 1960's is nothing like what we have today - and car demand wasn't anything like as great. Back then, car manufacturers didn't have to spend a fortune conforming to different legislative dictates around the world either. To spend the time and resources necessary to create something truly unique would create a hugely expensive mainstream car. That's why we have luxury and specialist sporting coachbuilders. If "truly unique" is asking too much, how about at least a few notches above "anonymous" for a change? "Nothing blind about it, it's called taste." That's your opinion. Many people around the world don't find modern American cars particularly tasteful or beautiful; when they think of taste and beauty they're likely to lean towards something created by an Italian holding a pen. How European of you, actually the Italian design houses have been in decline for some time ( which I think is a shame). You may be surprised to find that the grand majority of modern American cars disgust me nearly as much as their Japanese competitors. I'm not a blind flag-waver for substandard stuff. That said, entire segments of the market bore me to tears regardless of country of origin. It's the rest of the crop that get me going, and that doesn't include Toyota as they simply don't build that sort of stuff. "As for the industry, I see nothing wrong with wanting to support the products of one's own home country and make no apologies for that." Nothing wrong with that - but if all you do is blame others for your failings then you will ultimately sink. You have to compete to survive. The Japanese excel in promoting their vehicles worldwide, making adaptations in accordance with the markets they sell in. The Americans, on the other hand, throw their products at the world with the expectation that those markets simply fall in line with their own tastes. This practice is slowly changing, thankfully, with Cadillac and Dodge now offering more internationally suited products - but there's a long way to go before they can match the Japanese. Given that the focus of this site is GM, I'll leave the other domestics out of this for the moment. GM designs, builds, and competes globally and has the resources (and now the structure) to meet all of the markets appropriately. In many markets they are doing just that, in others they have more work to do. With the company finally thinking in a more global fashion the opportunites to fit product to each market are staggering. In the process, more creativity is possible if leveraged properly. A heavier concentration on what the product is rather than where GM assembles it, allows a diversity of offerings everywhere around the world. What may be volume in one market can be niche in another with the overall effect being that each market's lineup offers a wider array of choices. So, to say that GM is just throwing one design at the world expecting the world to change is rediculous. Western Europe is certainly not the only barometer of GM's market penetration globally. In contast, I would rate Toyota's global lineup as much less diverse. If anyone has attempted to make other markets conform to their own vision it would be Toyota. Granted, their PR skills are supreme in the industry.