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" In the fall of 1970, General Motors&amp;#039; Chevrolet Division put the new Vega small car on sale. It was good-looking, conventional in most of the ways that matter and priced keenly against the competition. Compared to Ford&amp;#039;s also then-new, awkwardly proportioned Pinto, it was sleek. And up against the Japanese and German alternatives, it seemed substantial and more comfortable. Its success was both inevitable and a harbinger of all that would come to trouble GM.  Of course, no one car and no one moment set GM on its downward path by itself. But the Vega embodied practically everything bad that was about to consume the corporation and, decades later, send it into bankruptcy. Maybe the Vega introduction isn&amp;#039;t where GM went bad, but it&amp;#039;s hard to come up with a more likely event. Now the Vega is 40 years old. And it&amp;#039;s worth remembering for all the wrong reasons. The GM That Was Back in 1955, Time magazine named Harlow H. Curtice, GM&amp;#039;s 11th President, as its Man of the Year. Back then GM personified American capitalism in a way no other company ever has\u2014bold, confident and even arrogant. Curtice had stared down the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice, almost daring it to try and break up GM as it sold more than half the new cars and trucks in the country. General Motors was the biggest, most successful company in the world. And in 1956, with revenues of $13 billion, it was twice as big as Standard Oil of New Jersey (predecessor of today&amp;#039;s ExxonMobil), which stood at number two.  Naturally, Curtice didn&amp;#039;t run GM alone. The company was just too big for that, and its employment roster alone was bigger than the populations of most small countries. So, the division managers running Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac had near autonomy over their fiefdoms. And these managers were all ambitious, talented men with an eye on the CEO job for themselves. Ford and Chrysler may have seemed like GM&amp;#039;s rivals to the world outside GM, but to GM&amp;#039;s division managers, the real competition was the other division managers. Each division had its own engineering, marketing and production assets and managed its own dealership network. In specification and output there may not have been much difference between an Oldsmobile and a Buick V8, but no Olds division manager in the 1950s and 1960s would ever consider putting a Buick engine into one of his 88s or Starfires. An Olds was an Olds, a Buick was a Buick, a Chevy a Chevy, a Pontiac a Pontiac, and none of them were as grand as Cadillac. Of course this structure was hugely inefficient and wouldn&amp;#039;t last. Today car companies use the same platform and engines for many different brands to minimize overhead. Almost every car has at least a twin, like the Audi A3 and VW GTI or the Ford Taurus SHO and Lincoln MKS. But as GM attempted to modify its structure\u2014starting with the Vega\u2014it went about it in the wrong way.  The Generic Car After a dazzling four-year stint running Pontiac, 44-year-old John Z. DeLorean became Chevrolet&amp;#039;s division manager in early 1969. More flamboyant and boisterous than the typical buttoned-down GM executive, DeLorean was nevertheless a brilliant manager. And like other Chevrolet managers before him, he seemed destined to run all of GM. But what DeLorean found waiting for him at Chevrolet was the Vega. It was a small car developed not by the Chevrolet Division, but by a corporate team assembled by GM&amp;#039;s president Ed Cole during 1968. Rushed through development in only two years, the Vega was delivered to DeLorean and Chevrolet as a fait accompli; a nearly complete vehicle over which Chevrolet itself would have only minimal engineering and design input. It was Chevrolet&amp;#039;s and DeLorean&amp;#039;s job to sell it. According to DeLorean&amp;#039;s 1979 book On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors (a whole chapter of which is titled &amp;quot;The Vega&amp;quot;), &amp;quot;[The Vega] produced a hostile relationship between the corporate staffs, which essentially designed and engineered the car, and Chevrolet Division, which was to sell it. From the first day I stepped into Chevrolet, the Vega was in trouble. General Motors was basing its image and reputation on the car, and there was practically no interest in it in the division. We were to start building the car in about a year, and nobody wanted anything to do with it. Chevy&amp;#039;s engineering staff was only going through the motions of preparing the car for production, but nothing more. Engineers are a very proud group. They take interest and pride in their designs, but this was not their car and they did not want to work on it.&amp;quot; DeLorean and his dispirited staff were particularly unimpressed by the Vega&amp;#039;s new 2.3-liter engine, which used an unlined aluminum block and an iron cylinder head containing a single camshaft. While the block&amp;#039;s aluminum construction was innovative, the rest of the engine was almost old-fashioned. And with an output of only 80 hp in standard form, it meant that the Vega was hardly thrilling to drive. The Vega was the first Chevrolet that was a Chevrolet in name only; the first product of a GM that would build increasingly indistinct and uninspired products. Within five years, some Cadillacs would have Oldsmobile engines and many Oldsmobiles would get Chevy V8s. And by the 1980s, GM&amp;#039;s once-mighty motor divisions were little more than marketing arms for nearly identical, often generic, products.  &amp;amp;gt; The Agony of Success &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;   The Agony of Success In the context of its time, the Vega wasn&amp;#039;t an awful driving car. Built on a 97-inch wheelbase and offered in three basic body styles\u2014a two-door notchback coupe, three-door fastback and &amp;quot;Kammback&amp;quot; wagon\u2014the unibody Vega was in most ways a scaled-down conventional, American, rear-drive car. The suspension was unequal length A-arms in front and a solid axle in back, just like most GM cars. The Vega wasn&amp;#039;t fast, but it was handsome, drove OK and carried the &amp;quot;GM Mark of Excellence.&amp;quot; And the Vega sold in huge numbers. During its first model year, 1971, Chevrolet pushed 277,700 of them through its dealerships. During 1972 out went another 394,592 units, then 395,792 in 1973 and 452,886 for 1974. John DeLorean and the engineers at Chevrolet may have disliked the Vega, but the public was gobbling them up. However, the lack of engineering focus and the drive to keep the price low resulted in a car with notoriously thin sheetmetal only haphazardly covered in anti-rust primer. Soon the Vega was earning a reputation as a rust-prone bucket. It wasn&amp;#039;t uncommon for rusted Vega front fenders to need replacing after only one or two seasons driving in the salted slop of northeastern winters. Even in states like California or Arizona where rust was almost unknown, Vega owners would see corrosion eating away at their cars. The engine also had a barely adequate cooling system that combined with the delicate engine block for horrible results. When the engine got hot, which wasn&amp;#039;t uncommon, the cylinders distorted and the piston rings wore off the exposed silica that was meant to provide a tough wall surface. Then, at best, the cars burned more oil. At worst, the distortion compromised the head gasket, caused the coolant to leak and eventually killed the engine.  Beyond that, labor relations at the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant that built the Vega were notoriously awful. Originally a Chevrolet plant, Lordstown was turned over to the General Motors Assembly Division during 1971, and the number of employees was cut even as line speed was maintained. Morale among Lordstown UAW workers sank, and some resorted to sabotaging cars on the line or simply doing lousy work. Ultimately there was a wildcat strike during 1972 that shut down Lordstown for nearly a month. Since the Vega sold so strongly (almost 2 million were built before it left production after 1977), the result was that literally hundreds of thousands of buyers were having awful experiences with the car. Some were merely disappointed. Many were incensed. And a lot of them felt betrayed by General Motors, Chevrolet and the American auto industry as a whole. Surely, those customers were then far more willing to consider the Japanese alternatives that were starting to arrive.  While GM could have learned a valuable lesson about quality with the Vega and recommitted itself to building better cars, that isn&amp;#039;t what seemed to happen. Instead, GM didn&amp;#039;t respond quick enough, and looking back, one wonders if a healthy dose of corporate arrogance was to blame. With a few exceptions, the following decades brought a series of mediocre and poorly engineered cars. It half-engineered a series of hideous diesel engines. In the early 1980s, the corporation came up with unloved automobiles like the front-drive X-Cars and put the Cadillac name on a Chevy Cavalier to produce the Cimarron. The list goes on and on.  A Car to Hate By the end of the 1970s, the once-ubiquitous Vega was already disappearing from America&amp;#039;s roads. With such a crummy reputation for reliability, the Vega&amp;#039;s resale values soon dropped down near zero. Legend has it some salvage yard even put up &amp;quot;No Vegas&amp;quot; signs to announce that they weren&amp;#039;t even bothering pulling usable parts off the cars before crushing them. Today a running Vega is a far less likely sight on America&amp;#039;s roads than, say, a &amp;#039;55 Bel Air or &amp;#039;69 Camaro or even the scandal-plagued Corvair. Save for a bare few running with V8s on drag strips and a handful of limited-edition, twin-cam Cosworth models, the Vegas are practically all gone.  While they don&amp;#039;t deserve to be missed, the lessons of the Vega should be remembered. And judging by today&amp;#039;s GM, certainly at least some of the Vega&amp;#039;s story has not been forgotten. GM&amp;#039;s quality has steadily improved, especially its powertrains. Those divisional fiefdoms are gone, and the company now looks to its global divisions for platforms that can be shared across markets. Surely, these changes took too long to occur, but it&amp;#039;s safe to say that those who worked on the Vega would hardly recognize the company today. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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