There's a good article on curbside.com comparing this car to that year's Honda Accord: "GM’s mega-mid-sized cars of the seventies were the perfect embodiment of
why cars like the Accord started (to) take the country by storm. The
Colonnades were longer, wider and heavier than full-sized Chevys not
that many years earlier. Their arrival in 1973 on the eve of the energy
crisis didn’t help, but it’s not completely fair to say that GM didn’t
have any idea which way the wind was blowing. Small cars were already
booming, and GM launched its own Vega just two years earlier." "The real shocker was space utilization. These two-ton coupes had little
if any advantage over the tiny Accord, save for width. The rear seat was
a veritable cave, lacking visibility, light or adequate leg room."
As the author above notes, GM wasn't just building gas-guzzling behemoths. It was trying, in a half-hearted way, to join the smaller car revolution. Two problems. One, the company didn't really want to build compact cars and those they offered to public were just terrible (the Vega, the Chevette). This of course led the next generation of American buyers to be even more open to imported makes. Two, yeah, GM was also getting ready to join the movement to lighter, more space-efficient front-wheel drive cars. But that of course led to the infamous 1980 Chevy Citation, another terrible car that, like so many of GM's products from the 80s, eventually led buyers by the millions to abandon the brand.
Note the above car is for sale. I'll cover this particular used car lot in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment