Nothing like success to breed expensive mistakes. After spending peanuts on the Fox-body aero-bird, Ford grossly overspent on its replacement, and struggled with its profitability. Well, Ford had the RWD Thunderbird, although it pulled off a rather GM-esque boner with the MN12 that arrived in 1989. The one way that the Lumina was decidedly different from the Taurus was in offering a coupe body style. There’s no doubt that many Luminas gave good service to their owners much more so than to its maker. What will the car rental experience be like without a GM W-Body awaiting one at every airport?īefore you leave a comment about how wonderful and reliable Aunt Mildred’s Lumina was, please remember the cardinal rule of GM’s Deadly Sins: it’s not about auntie’s car per se, but about the undeniable facts of the impact that each Deadly Sin had on the slow but steady erosion of GM’s market share, reputation, and contribution to its final demise. In some ways, it almost hertz to see it go. Needless to say, GM found plenty of ways to improve the breed and wring out production efficiencies over its 25 year lifespan.

The 2013 Impala is the last of the line, and its replacement is coming on line as we write this. It’s ironic that the W-Body has ended up being the most enduring of GM’s platforms, given its painful birth. Oh well there were plenty of Tahoes and Suburbans to keep the lights on in “the tubes” for a while longer. If the Taurus is considered the car that “saved” Ford the Lumina and its ilk were the ones that destroyed GM’s critical high-volume mid-sized passenger car business. Meanwhile, Ford was probably making that much (or more) per Taurus, which they were cranking out around the clock at their very cost-efficient Atlanta plant. When asked by Fortune why GM10 was such a catastrophe, Smith replied, “ I don’t know. The old saw that GM lost money on its small cars because it had to build them to meet CAFE targets isn’t nearly encompassing enough. The enormous sunk costs and subsequent pathetic sales meant that GM was losing some $2000 per car on these at the time the Lumina made its belated appearance for 1990. What were they smoking? Soon enough, GM would be fighting for a 21% market share for the whole company, never mind mid-sized cars. The whole GM10 program was quite likely the single biggest boondoggle of the Roger Smith era their development cost a mind-boggling $7 billion ($13 billion adjusted), and the goal was to build these cars in seven plants at 250,000 units per year per plant in other words, a 21% share of the total US market. GM’s W-Body started out as the GM10, which got off to miserable start with the 1988 Buick Regal, Olds Cutlass Supreme and Pontiac Grand Prix coupes. In any case, it didn’t rely on pretense to badge and sell them, even in foreign-car besotted California. It was just “Taurus”, at least until the SHO came along, and its badging was notoriously stealthy.Īctually, Ford was probably more worried about the opposite: that folks would think the Taurus was genuinely too euro for conservative American tastes.

Fool me once…Ĭhevrolet was obviously looking at the Taurus when it designed the Lumina, but if they’d taken a closer look, they might have noticed that Ford totally dispensed with any hokey marketing efforts to make the Taurus seem more “euro”. And selling any Chevy with “Euro” plastered all over it to a Californian in the early nineties would have been a heroic feat indeed, after years of pushing the Eurosport Celebrity. On the West Coast, the only lots where one would see these was at Hertz and Avis Chevy dealers didn’t even bother to stock them. Did they have redeeming qualities? Undoubtedly but I’m hardly the one to ask. It instantly joined its smaller brother Corsica as the very icons of fleet queens, a title its W-Body successors defended right to the present. The Lumina was a desperate effort to play catch-up with Ford’s runaway hit Taurus as well as to parry with the Camry and Accord the result was predictably dim. ( first posted ) Despite its name, the Lumina failed to bring any light to those dark years at GM when it arrived.

93 chev lumina