Quote:
Originally Posted by xuimod
Really? It takes years to react to the market? .
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Yes, it does. Let's take an extreme example, the Pontiac Aztec. GM needed to sell over 60,000 of them a year (by their numbers) for it to be profitable (which by the way means recovering all development/production/sales costs). It never sold more than about 27,000 units a year yet they still sold it for 6 model years.
I'm pretty sure they knew right away it was a dud but hope springs eternal but marketing plans die even harder when there is this much money at stake.
Sales numbers from Wikipedia, the source of all Internet truth (or truthish)
Calendar yearTotal American sales
2000 11,201
2001 27,322
2002 27,793
2003 27,354
2004 20,588
2005 5,020
2006 347
2007 69
As a postscript, I suppose this really means they only built the car through 2004. I would imagine the 05-07 sales were inventory clearance. Also, if I remember correctly they did some sort of change to the front to try and "soften" it.