I’ve already written about GM’s most fatal mistake, now for their greatest triumph just 3 years earlier. GM managed to pull off the impossible: they radically transformed their bread-and-butter car and did it flawlessly. It changed the auto industry dramatically and marked the end of ever bigger automobiles.
Now for some context. Anybody who’s been to school knows that Henry Ford revolutionized the auto industry with the Model T. Through mass production, he brought car ownership to the masses. But what they don’t tell you is how quickly Ford lost its dominance. By the middle of the 1920s, General Motors had curbstomped them in the sales charts. While Henry stuck religiously to austerity in his Model T and refused to redesign it or add convenience features such as electric starters and refused to diversify into higher priced fields, GM was selling aspiration. They established what became known as the “Sloan Ladder” after long time chairman Alfred Sloan, buyers would start at Chevrolet, then move up through Oakland (later Pontiac) then Oldsmobile, Buick, and hopefully make it to Cadillac.
For a long time, car companies sold one basic model in dozens of different body styles and trim levels. There were a few oddities such as the Corvette and Thunderbird, but in general if you said you owned a Chevy, other people knew what you were talking about, they’d never say “which one?”
In the 60s, things got confusing. First compacts came on to the scene, then intermediates, then in 1970, Subcompacts. But still, people considered full sized cars to be “standard”.
And the most standard of them all was the Chevrolet. It was America’s best seller year after year, with few exceptions (Ford overtook them because of too much chrome in 1957 and a massive strike in 1971). And with its stablemates from Pontiac, Olds, Buick, and Cadillac, it was the linchpin of GM’s total dominance.
In 1971, GM’s full sized cars got redesigned. And like most redesigns for the past 50 years, they got bigger, or in Detroit parlance, longer, lower, and wider. With 5 mile per hour bumpers in 1973, they swole up to a massive 222 inches in length and 121.5 inches in wheelbase. The engines also had to be big. For Chevrolet’s Caprice, they only had V8s in 5.7, 6.6, and a whopping 7.4 liters of displacement. Needless to say, these cars were not very thrifty with gas, you’d be lucky to get 15 mpg on the highway.
In 1973, OPEC quadrupled oil prices, which, when combined with Nixon administration price controls, meant shortages of gas at the pump. Sales of big cars plunged.
GM had already been planning to shrink its big cars as even before OPEC did its thing there were worries about an energy crisis due to a refinery shortage on the east coast. And in 1975, when congress imposed Corporate Average Fuel Economy laws requiring carmakers increase fleetwide fuel economy to 27.5 mpg by 1985, the downsizing became essentially mandatory.
The problem of making a car smaller on the outside while making it slightly larger on the inside was not as difficult as you’d think. The cars of the day were laughably wasteful with space. The superlong hoods were purely for styling purposes, even the biggest engines of the day could not fill the space under the hood. To accomodate the low rooflines, the seats had to be reclined and put low on the floor, which took up legroom. The popular “fuselage” shape which pushed out the middle of the doors provided lots of unusable shoulder and hip room. So simply by putting function over form, GM’s engineers were able to do the downsizing job easily.
The real problem was perception. For years, car companies had bragged about their models providing “more road hugging weight”. It was BS, but as anyone in politics knows, it’s very hard to get people to stop believing lies. There was also the problem that these new full sized cars would be roughly the same size as the cheaper intermediates with which they shared space at dealerships.
This all was extremely out of step for General Motors. They had long been considered the most conservative of the big 3, and the times when they went radical did not end well (e.g. Corvair and Vega). And now they were dramatically changing one of their most important products, 2 whole years before the competition followed suit. That makes the 1977 Chevrolet one of those revolutionary cars that transformed the auto industry.
When the new cars were unveiled for the 1977 model year, the advertising put most emphasis on the increased interior space. This commercial doesn’t even explicitly mention exterior size, it simply notes that it’s more fuel efficient and euphemistically says that it’s “more manageable in city traffic”.
The new cars were positively tiny compared to the year before, they were 10 inches shorter, 4 inches narrower, and, on average, 800 pounds lighter. This new car, that was shorter, narrower and taller, marked the end of “longer, lower, wider”. And because of that weight loss, they needed smaller engines. The 5.7 liter V8 went from being the smallest engine offered in the Caprice to being the largest one, and for the first time ever, you could get a Caprice with a 6 cylinder engine, quelle horreur!
Despite attempts from Ford to advertise their “true fullsized” models, the downsizing was a success. Sales of the Big Chevies rose from 423,000 in 1976 to 661,000 in 1977, this allowed it to retake the crown as America’s best seller that had been stolen the year earlier by the Oldsmobile Cutlass.
In 1978, GM kept the ball rolling with smaller intermediates and had a similar amount of success.
In 1979, GM’s big front drive coupes, the Cadillac Eldorado and Oldsmobile Toronado, were given the downsizing treatment and they were joined on this platform by the Buick Riviera
But then, of course, GM screwed it all up with their new shrunken compacts, which were a reliability nightmare.
So that’s the story of GM managing to do everything right in radically revamping one of their core products and being rewarded handsomely. It’s just too bad they dropped the ball so quickly.