More on the end of dinosaurs

Jack Grant explains why General Motors is about to go the way of the brontosaurus. Hint; it doesn't have anything to do with union wages.

On a slightly different note, upon my return to the US, I’m driving a rental car courtesy of my company until I can buy or lease a new car. The rental car company was out of mid-sized models, so I had the dubious pleasure of being “upgraded” to a Buick LeSabre. The last time I drove one of those models was around 24 years ago, and sadly, the current model compares very poorly.

In France, I had a VW Golf, far from a luxury sedan, more like a roller-skate that had a reasonable suspension and decent diesel engine. However, even that low-end vehicle had dual climate control, where all you have to do is set the temperature and it takes care of fan settings, which vents to use, and how to heat the air coming in, and since it was dual the passenger and the driver could have different temperature settings. The supposed “full-sized luxury car” I am currently driving that is a product of General Motors does NOT have this option, instead it has the same controls that the LeSabre I drove 23 years ago had, manual control of the incoming air mix, manual control of the fans, absolutely no automatic features whatsoever, nor independent settings for the driver and passenger.

Excuse me? A Volkswagon Golf has better features???

The GM car also has about the same level of connection to the road as I would expect in driving a hovercraft.

So much for the “driving experience” that I enjoyed with the BMW I gave up when I moved to France.

In other words, it is a complete POS vehicle when compared to current models, especially when it cannot even compare to the driving experience I had in the same model almost a quarter of a century ago.

No wonder the American car manufacturers are in such dire straights; they deserve to be with this kind of product.