When General Motors Challenged the Japanese

I've always maintained that Detroit prefers to make sport utility vehicles because it knows it can't compete in the regular-car market against the imports.  But once upon a time, General Motors accepted that very challenge to make a car that could do just that.

Forty years ago yesterday, General Motors introduced for the 1982 model year its subcompact J-car, designed to compete globally against other multinational automakers but aimed squarely at the Japanese in GM's home market.  It was sold in Europe as the Opel Ascona and the Vauxhall Cavalier, in Japan as the Isuzu Aska, and in Australia as the Holden Camira.  All five of GM's North American passenger car brands of the time offered versions of the J-car (Cadillac too? yes, and I'll get to that later), but for simplicity I'll concentrate primarily on Chevrolet's version, the Cavalier, because small cars are ideally entry-level vehicles and Chevrolet is GM's entry-level division.

The J-car and the Chevrolet Cavalier version of it in particular was the most ambitious product General Motors offered in the U.S. and Canada since the Chevrolet Corvair two decades earlier.  The Cavalier was only the second Chevrolet to feature front-wheel drive, and three of its available body styles (a two-door sedan, a four-door sedan, and a station wagon) were designed in an unpretentious angular style like the Toyota Corolla of the time, while a three-door hatchback aped the styling of Toyota's then-most recent edition of its Celica 2 + 2 coupe.  Needless to say, GM was pulling out all the stops in appealing to Toyota and Honda customers with as many different styles as possible, aimed at youthful sportiness as well as basic practicality.  The car was designed to provide maximum fuel efficiency - no small thing in May 1981, when gas prices were still high as a result of the Iranian revolution - and it came with a long list of standard features plus an improvement in build quality, which GM hoped would not only make the car a success but also blunt the imports' rising share of the U.S. auto market.

But, umm, it didn't quite work out like that.

The Cavalier and its Pontiac counterpart, which went through several names before Pontiac finally settled on the Sunbird name, as well as its Buick and Oldsmobile equivalents (the Skyhawk and the Firenza, respectively, which came out later), were disadvantaged by the very qualities GM hoped that buyers would appreciate.  The cars' long list of standard features and its fuel-efficient engine made the car overpriced and underpowered.  The cheapest Cavalier sold for just under $7,000 at a time when most Japanese imports sold for $5,000, and the new 1.8-liter four-cylinder Chevrolet engine all J-cars used was rated at only 88 horsepower.  It was easy on gasoline, alright, but it could barely provide enough power to propel a car loaded with so many standard features.  With an optional three-speed automatic transmission instead of the standard four-speed manual transmission, the car had even less pickup.  Acceleration was  recorded at about 0-60 mph in fifteen to twenty seconds.  Considering that the Cavalier hatchback (which was dropped after 1987) was meant to be sporty, that had to be pretty embarrassing.  

What also put the Cavalier and its corporate cousins at a disadvantage was what they didn't have.  It was Volkswagen that pointed out in its advertising that the J-cars lacked features that had become commonly available in its own Rabbit, then made in Pennsylvania.  Such features included fuel injection, a five-speed manual transmission, and - remember, this was 1981 - a high-fuel-economy diesel option.  (Chevrolet offered a diesel engine as an option not in the Cavalier but in the Chevette.) Ironically, Volkswagen of America had re-engineered the American Rabbit to ride and perform like a Chevrolet, so if you bought a 1981 Rabbit, you got a small Chevrolet that was better equipped and more advanced than a real Chevrolet.

Also better quality.  The U.S.-built Rabbit had its problems, but the Cavalier and the other J-cars turned out to be mechanically unreliable in their first year of sale - more so than the Rabbit - while fit and finish were only marginally better than the small cars GM had produced in the '70s.  All of the auto magazines hated the J-car, calling it boring and slow and dismissing it as a car meant for people who read Consumer Reports and saw cars as appliances.  But, Consumer Reports didn't like the car either - ironically, for most of the same reasons the car magazines panned it - and it advised consumers against buying it in its first year.  "Should you buy a J-car?"  Consumer Reports wrote.  "Our advice: Not yet.  Maybe not at all."  After a year's worth of data on its reliability, Consumer Reports' verdict was final - definitely not at all.  

Thus, the J-car was hardly a threat to the Japanese, who had to agree to voluntary temporary limitations on the cars they exported to the U.S. in the early eighties to help Detroit regain its footing but still managed to remain strong in the then-vital compact market.

The Cavalier and its J-car siblings were improved going forward, however.  The engine was enlarged to two liters for 1983, producing more needed power, and fuel injection was included, and there would eventually be options such as a five-speed stick shift and a V-6 engine.  A convertible model was added, and a Cavalier Z-24 sport compact was developed in response to the Volkswagen GTI and the Honda Civic S.  (Pontiac would feature its own sport-compact J-car, the Sunbird GT.)  

Before I go any further, the facts dictate that I should briefly talk about Cadillac's version of the J-car.  Yes, this car was sold as a Cadillac - the Cimarron, Cadillac's first attempt at making a compact luxury sedan that could compete with the BMW 3-series and the Saab 900, as well as pre-Lexus/Infiniti offerings from Toyota (the Cressida) and Datsun/Nissan (the first-generation Maxima).  Cadillac was hoping to aim at younger buyers, a departure for a division whose cars were aimed and older customers who had worked their way up the GM brand chain from entry-level Chevrolets and ultimately moving up through Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick in that order.  The Cimarron, only available as a four-door sedan, had no real performance capabilities, few standard features that distinguished it from other J-cars, and was less desirable than a comparable European sport sedan. And no, I'm not talking about the BMW 3-series.  I'm talking about the Volkswagen Jetta, the Rabbit-based sedan then early in its first generation, which offered BMW performance and handling at a Chevrolet price.  How could a Cimarron compete with high-price European compacts when it even paled in comparison to a low-buck European compact?  

The only people who bought Cimarrons were traditional Cadillac customers who wanted something more fuel-efficient than a Sedan de Ville, not the young urban professionals Cadillac sought out for new customers. Despite attempts to improve it, the Cimarron was never seen as being anything more than a Cavalier with leather seats, and it was dropped after the 1988 model year.  Though Cadillac would prefer that we forget about it, the Cimarron is still an important milestone in Cadillac's history because it taught the division how not to make a compact luxury sport sedan; the knowledge Cadillac gained from this mistake of a car led to the much-heralded CTS.  But learning such a lesson and moving on from it with success was an anomaly for GM, as I will explain. 

Eventually Oldsmobile and Buick would drop their J models, leaving Chevrolet and Pontiac to carry the J on.  And in the mid-eighties, the Cavalier would be among the top-selling nameplates in the U.S. auto market - it was the top seller in 1984 - and would eventually sell 254,426 copies before being redesigned in 1995.  It would continue for another ten years after that before being replaced by the Cobalt (below).

Although a car that was a bestseller and lasted two generations for nearly a quarter of a century can hardly be called a failure, there was the sense that GM had missed a perfect opportunity to pull ahead of the Japanese in the small-car market.  The Cavalier was a decent small car, but GM came up short in making an excellent small car, the sort of car that consumers expected from Toyota and Honda.  You don't get a second chance at a first impression, and the first impression GM left when the J-car was first introduced was that its car couldn't measure up to the competition.  GM more or less admitted that it couldn't produce a superior small car on its own, which led to GM chairman Roger Smith to start the project that eventually yielded Saturn at the beginning of the nineties. By the middle of the 1980s, GM found itself collaborating with Toyota to make a Corolla-based Chevrolet and putting Chevrolet badges on Suzukis and Isuzus, a further admission of the Cavalier's shortcomings.  By the end of the decade, the next generations of these Japan-based Chevrolets were rebranded Geo, the Chevrolet sub-brand that was an admission from GM that not only could it build a small car comparable to a Toyota, it couldn't sell one as a Chevrolet even if it could, the storied American nameplate meaning nothing to American car buyers by the late 1980s.  

Oh yeah, the import share of the U.S. auto market rose from 25 percent in 1980 to 38 percent in 1990.  By 2007, import brands accounted for a majority of new cars sold in America.  You have to ask yourself how things would have turned out if GM had gotten the J-car right from the start.  

Although the Chevrolet name was rehabilitated, rendering the Geo nameplate unnecessary, successive small cars in the division's lineup, the Cobalt and its own successor, the Cruze, never completely lived up to expectations, and, in its home market at least, Chevrolet has leaned more toward sport utility vehicles as a result.  (And Saturn turned out to be yet another failed experiment.)  True, it makes the electric Bolt hatchback, but that's a niche vehicle.  The fact that Chevrolet is pushing vehicles based on light-duty truck platforms with no plans to compete in the compact-sedan market - and apart from the Malibu, it doesn't have a sedan of any size - shows that GM, which went through bankruptcy in 2009, learned the right lesson from the Cavalier experience but drew the wrong conclusion.  Rather than take lessons from its knowledge that it couldn't make a superior small car, GM only went back to making big vehicles and showed indifference to competing with the Japanese.  

GM challenged the Japanese . . . and lost.

And when GM gave up on regular cars and started persuading Americans to buy SUVs, Ford and Chrysler did the same, which meant that all of Detroit gave up.