Back in the 1980s, General Motors launched a brand to be the home of its captive imports. If you wanted to buy a Japanese car with an American brand name, Geo was likely your pick. Despite this premise, Geo had surprisingly awesome cars in its lineup, from the go-anywhere Tracker to the slick Storm. Geo was a weirdo, being a GM brand that didn’t sell GM cars, and much of its history is fading into obscurity. One of the coolest cars Geo sold was this, the Prizm GSi. This rare hatchback is deeply underrated, and the twist was that it wasn’t even a GM car underneath, but a Toyota. How rare is this car? Just 830 were ever sold over just two years.
This suggestion came in hot into my inbox from reader Ray L, who misses my classic Holy Grails series. Well, Ray, you found a car so cool that I have to revive Holy Grails to tell all of you about it! Car enthusiasts usually know what a Geo Prizm is. The final Prizms, which were initially badged as Geos before having Chevrolet badges slapped on them, were little more than rebadged Corollas. If you’re picturing a Prizm right now, you’re almost certainly picturing a sedan. That’s not surprising since the latter two generations of the Prizm were available only as sedans. However, the Prizm’s short-lived first-generation had a hatchback, and it was so rare that I could forgive you for not even knowing that it existed.
The General Motors of the 1980s struggled to maintain forward momentum. In 1984, GM’s brands held onto a grasp of 44.6 percent of the car market. But as CNN reported, GM’s grip was loosening. By 1987, GM’s brands lost their footing and began reaching for a lifeline as market share sank to 36.6 percent. Oldsmobile took the greatest beating, seeing its sales slide from 1.1 million units to 714,394 units.
GM’s dramatic loss in popularity was its own doing. In 1992, CNN explained that, during the tail end of the period that we now know of as the Malaise Era, General Motors made a bet on the future. Unlike its competition at Ford and Chrysler, GM was flush with cash and thought it would get a leg ahead by launching new cars for the new era. GM figured that future buyers would want downsized, lightweight, front-wheel-drive, and fuel-efficient cars. After all, America had only just been pulling out of the tumultuous 1970s and its gas crunches.
Unfortunately, GM’s gamble didn’t pay off. As CNN noted, gas prices got cheap again, and American car buyers wanted big and fast cars again, which GM had just spent the early 1980s moving away from.
Then came the GM-10 program, CNN reported, which started development in 1982. GM-10 was intended to replace the Chevrolet Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and Buick Century with a coupe, a sedan, and a wagon for each brand. Each of those cars would be similar underneath. GM’s plan for domination included seven plants to produce 250,000 cars a year each. Together, GM was setting itself up to produce a full 21 percent of America’s total car production. If GM pulled it off, it would build more cars per year than all of Ford’s brands combined. While the GM-10 cars were awesome and have even been the subject of Holy Grails, the problem was reportedly seen as too ambitious and didn’t fully meet GM’s expectations.
But this wasn’t GM’s only trick in its hat. It would later come out with Geo, the spunky brand with weird GM-branded cars that didn’t come from GM. One of those cars was the Prizm GSi, a sort of forgotten spicy hatch.
The Birth Of Geo
My retrospective on GM’s wild ride in the 1980s also noted the company’s fondness for slapping its badges on captive imports:
During the 1980s, General Motors also had a knack for rebadging imported vehicles. The Chevy Chevette-based Pontiac T-1000 died and made way for the 1988 Pontiac LeMans. This was a car designed by Opel in Europe, sold as the Kadett, and built in South Korea by Daewoo, where it was badged as the LeMans. The Chevy Sprint was another weird captive import. Chevy abandoned the development of the M-body, selling it to Suzuki in exchange for a five percent stake. Over in Japan, the car would be known as the Suzuki Cultus and in 1984, it came back to America as the Chevrolet Sprint. And don’t forget about the 1986 Chevrolet Nova, a vehicle built under the famous New United Motor Manufacturing Inc (NUMMI) partnership with Toyota. The Nova, despite the historic name, was really a Toyota Sprinter at heart.
However, GM ran into a rather amusing issue when it tried to sell Japanese cars as American cars. In 1988, the New York Times reported that the Toyota-based Nova was not selling well. The whole idea behind selling a Toyota badged as a Chevy Nova was to draw young buyers away from imports to Chevy.
However, this plan backfired. As the New York Times writes, not only did Chevrolet’s marketers feel that the Nova was outdated when it went on sale, but it being branded as a Chevy had an unintended consequence. Those target buyers who were looking for an import saw the Nova as an American car even though it was actually a Toyota, so they didn’t buy it.
GM’s solution was clever. The Chevy Nova was slated to die in 1988, and its replacement was to be called the Geo Prizm. Geo was created as a subsidiary of Chevrolet to house GM’s captive imports. Now, someone wanting to buy an import would see this neat global brand called Geo and hopefully not associate it with Chevrolet. On the surface, this was a hilarious plan. General Motors wanted to stop you from buying a Toyota by selling you a Toyota.
When Geo launched in 1989, the fresh and hip lineup consisted of the Metro, the Prizm, the Spectrum, and the Tracker. The Spectrum was an Isuzu I-Mark, the Metro was a variation of the Suzuki Cultus, and the Tracker was developed in a joint venture between General Motors of Canada and Suzuki.9
Then, we arrive at the 1989 Prizm, the successor of the weirdo Nova.
A Different Kind Of E90
The Prizm sits in an interesting spot in Toyota history. It’s based on the Toyota Sprinter, which itself is based on the sixth-generation of the Toyota Corolla, known as the E90. Here’s what Toyota says about the Corolla E90:
The sixth-generation Corolla released in May 1987 was designed under the theme, “a global high-quality sedan beyond its class,” raising the perceived status of the car. In Japan, the 5-door liftback model was discontinued. The van and wagon (which had skipped the changeover to the fifth generation) were renovated based on the sixth-generation Corolla sedan, and were released three months after the sedan. The van only came in a 4-door body.
The available engines included 1.3-liter 75 PS (2E), 1.5-liter 83 PS (5A-F), and 1.6-liter DOHC (4A-GEU) gasoline engines, and a 1.8-liter diesel unit. The top-end G Touring wagon featured the same MacPherson strut and coil spring rear suspension system employed in the sedan. In May 1989, the main 1.5-liter engine was upgraded to an EFI version.
In October 1989, the first 4-wheel-drive (4WD) model was added to the Corolla sedan. It reflected the fact that 4WD was becoming essential for snowy regions and not a feature for those who enjoyed off-road driving as a hobby. From that time on, many other versions of the Corolla began to offer a 4WD option. In 1990, the Corolla series sold 308,000 units in Japan, establishing record annual new car sales by brand. The record stood for many years, until it was broken by the Prius in 2010.
What Toyota doesn’t note up there is that Corolla E90 was available in a variety of fun styles, including a three-door hatch, a two-door coupe, and the Sprinter Carib wagon, which had a solid rear axle and four-wheel-drive. The hottest Corolla of the bunch was the GT-Z, which sported a 1.6-liter 4A-GZE 16-valve supercharged four-cylinder punching 170 HP through the front wheels.
There was also the Corolla FX16 GT-S hatchback, which sported a 1.6-liter 4A-GE four that made a peppy 108 HP. Sadly, you couldn’t get the coolest Corollas in America, but you can import them from Japan today.
Historically, the Sprinter had been the sporty variant of the Corolla, with Toyota noting similar dimensions as a Corolla, but with lower, sleeker body types. Originally, when Sprinter sales launched in 1968, the Sprinter wasn’t sold in Corolla showrooms, but in Toyota Auto sales. At launch, Toyota saw its greatest target being the Datsun Sunny Coupé.
The Sprinter entered its sixth generation in 1987, and Toyota notes that these cars were mechanically similar to the Corolla. The Geo Prizm is just the Sprinter wearing a Geo badge. It launched in 1989 for the 1990 model year, and Geo kept it simple with three trim levels. The base Prizm featured a 1.6-liter 4A-FE good for 102 HP and 101 lb-ft of torque, had black bumpers, and was available with color-coordinated carpet. That’s not me talking, but the brochure!
Other standard features included a headlight on chime, a remote-operated driver mirror, and a low fuel level warning light. The standard features didn’t even include a tach for the manual transmission. Options were vast and even included an AM/FM radio.
If you wanted a bit more luxury in your Prizm, you moved up to the LSi, where you got body color bumpers, aero wheel covers, a “soft feel” steering wheel, a split-folding rear seat, upgraded interior fabrics, and a rear wiper on the hatchback. This model’s engine was the same as the base Prizm.
The Prizm itself wasn’t all that impressive. It was, after all, pretty much just a Corolla. Shoot, the base model even had a three-speed auto as its lowest automatic option. However, the Geo got something the Toyota version didn’t in America, and that was a five-door hatchback. If you wanted a Corolla with a wraparound greenhouse, your only choice was to go to your Geo dealer, not your Toyota dealer.
It’s A Car
Still, the Prizm itself isn’t very special. Period reviewers weren’t exactly singing the Prizm’s praises. The legendary John Davis of MotorWeek got to drive a Prizm LSi hatch and had plenty to complain about.
The hits started immediately when Davis complimented the hatchback’s unconventional greenhouse, but knocked it for its conservative front end, which gave the car an “unbalanced” look. This was because the Geo Prizm version of the Sprinter Cielo had the same front end as the sedan. But Davis did say that the great visibility from the expanse of windows was a welcome sight. Check out the video:
Unfortunately, Davis noted, while the hatchback looks like it has a bigger roof, the taper of the roof into the hatch cuts headroom, so the hatchback has less rear seat headroom than the regular sedan. At the very least, Davis said, the hatchback has a lot of cargo room.
The 102 HP engine proved to be peppy in MotorWeek‘s hands, hitting 60 mph in 9.4 seconds and dispatching the quarter mile in 17 seconds at 81 mph. That’s not bad at all for a car from the late 1980s with a base model engine! Sadly, the negatives started coming back immediately with Davis noting a “mushy” clutch and a “vague” five-speed manual shift feel. Worse, Davis said, is that the transmission’s ratios didn’t match the engine’s willingness to rev, so you had to constantly shift gears to keep moving with alacrity.
On the track, MotorWeek said that the Prizm was “quite a handful” with a lot of front plow and with a rear end that breaks loose, forcing you to saw at the wheel. MotorWeek noted that having more steering feel would improve the drive. Brakes didn’t sound much better, as the car averaged 146 feet to stop from 60 feet, with the driver experiencing a soft pedal and lock-ups along the way. But to its credit, the Prizm stopped consistently with good stability.
MotorWeek began talking about pluses again with the Prizm’s quiet, comfortable, well-equipped interior, and mostly cushy seats. Despite the negatives, Davis finished his review declaring that the Prizm LSi is “the best and most versatile economy model that Chevrolet dealers have ever offered.”
The Grail
Alright, so what’s so “Holy Grail” about this car, then? The hatchback was available in every trim level, so that part wasn’t particularly special. What is worthy of being called a Grail was the Prizm’s short-lived hot hatch, the 1990 to 1991 Geo Prizm GSi hatch.
The GSi pumped up the tempo with a 4A-GE 16-valve “Red Top” twin-cam 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine with 130 HP on deck. Other goodies included a tach and a sport version of the Prizm’s independent suspension with front and rear stabilizer bars. This is backed up with P185/60HR-14 Eagle GT tires and four-wheel disc brakes. Buyers had a choice of a five-speed manual or a four-speed auto with a “power” setting for more spicy shift behavior.
Buying the hot GSi also gave you mild body upgrades, including alloy wheels and trim-specific bumpers and fascia with red trim. Options included an air-conditioner, a Delco cassette deck, and a sunroof.
I could not easily find a period review, but here’s Ethan Tufts of Hello Road, who used to own one:
Annoyingly, I could also not find any published performance figures, but I would expect the Prizm GSi to be a touch hotter and tighter than the standard model. Heck, not even the GSi in Geo’s brochure depicts a hatchback! This car is so rare that the example in our topshot is an LSi, not the GSi.
The hot version of the Prizm hatch was a rare beast. PrizmGSi.com, which claims to have gotten its information from the General Motors Heritage Center, says that in 1990, 3,565 Prizm GSi were built, of which only 593 hatchbacks. The numbers got smaller in 1991, when 2,250 GSis left the line, but only 237 GSis were hatchbacks. That means only 830 of these cars were ever built. That’s a tiny figure when you realize that the NUMMI plant cranked out as many regular Geo Prizms and E90 Toyota Corollas as it could. These are a drop in the bucket for a platform that sold 4.5 million copies over its entire run.
However, this is one of those Holy Grails where rarity doesn’t really mean value. The GSi hatchback wasn’t exactly a limited-edition model, it just found few buyers. In 1990, a base model Geo Prizm was $9,660, and you had to add $300 to that if you wanted it in hatch flavor. Another $440 on top of that got you into the LSi and if you checked every single option box, you’d be coughing up $13,561 for a Prizm LSi hatchback.
A 1990 Geo Prizm GSi hatch set you back $12,620 before you added any features. In other words, these were economy cars when they were new. As such, so many of them were driven hard and got tons of miles on them as they executed their duties as economy cars. I found zero examples currently for sale and the one Ethan sold above? It went for a whopping $1,925.
If you find one of these, don’t be surprised to see it on a sorry state. Also don’t be surprised to pay basically nothing for it. Cars like the Prizm GSi hatchback are fading into history, and that’s sad. Sure, it was never a legend like the JDM cars Americans love to import nowadays, but it was seriously cool. The Prizm GSi might have been one of GM’s most underrated cars of the early 1990s.
Imagine if GM had pumped all the money they spent on these projects into just making their own small cars better, or supporting Saturn more…
Theory has it that they did it to learn how Toyota built cars. Kind of a mole project. It probably would have worked out better if they bothered to take notes.
I remember visiting the Ingersol On. GM/Suzuki JV in the late nineties and still seeing visiting GM production engineers staring puzzled on the factory floor. The GM culture of the day, that I witnessed many times at the Oshawa plant was to assume every worker was an idiot trying to slack off and had to be obsessively monitored, Instead of, say, keeping an eye on the quality control and vehicle design. In Ingersol, it seemed the workers new the GM management didn’t get it and appeared to take that responsibility for themselves. The Suzuki trained bosses encouraged that pride.
It’s not a full performance review, but automobile-catalog.com has this for specifications:
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/1990/477155/geo_prizm_gsi_hatchback.html#gsc.tab=0
“In 1988, the New York Times reported that the Toyota-based Nova was not selling well.”
It can be said the same for Toyota Cavalier in Japan.
My high school had the hatch as a driver’s ed car, complete with instructor’s emergency brake on the passenger side. I recall it being a bit more peppy than the instructor cared for with 15 year olds behind the wheel.
Imagine swapping a 2ZZ into one of these beasts.
Imagine trying to make it fit. And getting it to connect to the wheels.
Drop that into an AE86 instead, then the output will be pointed the correct direction.
Well, the 4AGE-20v is a drop in for AE92, for the most part and makes these a rocket. I have one in my AE82 Nova and it is quite quick. 165hp in ~2000 pounds is a good mix.
The 2ZZ makes things way more complicated, but anything is possible with a welder.
4agze (supercharged) was a popular swap here in Australia.
I had a friend in high school that had one of these. Her dad had bought it new because he wanted a “fun” commuter car to go from Duvall to Bremerton, so when his daughter got her license he handed the keys to her and bought himself a 318 convertible to make the trip. She ended up rolling it down a bluff on the island when she tried to take a twisty bit too fast. Nobody got hurt thankfully but there was nothing left of the prism.
On a funny, vaguely related, note back when the prism got rebadged as a chevy I drove one for a good minute. The best memory I had of it was cramming three Polynesians and two chunky Canucks in it for a 0-60 test on an Arizona back road. 33 seconds because my 250lbs behind was the smallest one in that poor tortured car. Normally it kept up with trafffic just fine, it just didn’t really like having more than 1600 lbs of human stuffed into its beigeness.
There’s one of these in its Toyota form that lives in my street, it’s very clean for its age. I always liked that design.
The Prizm GSi (and the Nova Twin Cam that came before it) were the only 4-door Corollas sold in the US market with the 4A-GE.
GM10 was the W body cars released for 1988. Having owned both an early W body and the competing Taurus/Sable – I’ll take the Taurus/Sable every time.
I read the headline, saw the picture and immediately thought, well yeah, of course it is: it’s a Toyota Corolla Seca! That’s what they were in Australia, though they had a better front end IMO than the Geo version. 12-year-old me liked them a lot. I’ve subsequently seen a ton of the Corolla sedans here in the US as Geos (mostly all beat to hell), but didn’t realize this hatch was so unique. This was a fun read!
I wonder what the manual/auto mix was for the GSi. Seems like if you wanted (or were willing to make do with) only two pedals you were better off walking across the showroom to a Cavalier RS V6 wagon.
Fantastic piece, but no coda about how GM also tried to go the other way and briefly convinced Toyota to (try to) sell rebadged Cavaliers in Japan?
I have two very distinct memories from the Spectrum my parents. The first is the A/C button because you had to turn it off to accelerate, so it got a lot of use. The second is that 16 year me was curious if you could take off in 5th gear. You can, but the associated smells informed me really quickly to not do that again. Growing up in rural IL did have its upsides 🙂
The Spectrum was an entirely different car, being co-designed and entirely built by Isuzu in Japan.
Well yeah, obviously the article was about a different car, but Mercedes mentioned them (and pointed out they were made by Isuzu) and brought back some fond memories. Just thought I’d share.
As an aside, Hasegawa makes a model kit of the 4 door sedan version of the Isuzu Gemini the Spectrum was based on.
Ha! Now that is something I’m going to have to google 🙂
Huh. I had no idea these were rare, though I guess it makes sense since the only one I can recall having seen was rotting away in the neighborhood next to mine on the west side of Houston back in the late 90s. It was across the street from a friend’s house, and my friend always called it “the mullet car” because he said the styling was a boring economy car up front and a party out back. He hated it so much he tried to catch the car on fire with fireworks every 4th of July…
I owned two Prizms, one blue and one blue-green (medium teal, I suppose). Standard sedan version, non-sport. Decent cars. A way to get a used Corolla, for a decent few bucks less than one badged as a Corolla.
I don’t think this generation could be had in teal at all, but it was the hero color for one trim level or the other for the entire generation that followed. The base one, I think, I remember seeing a lot of them with some really nice and (for the time) big for a base model 5-spoke steelies (they were probably 14″ when 13″ was the norm).
Yes the one I had that had the same sheet metal as the red sedan above, with the kind-of almost spoiler built in, was a nice blue. The blue-green one was after that, and I think was more rounded in general.
I did not even know these were rare, just thought it was a prism gsi. Dad (retired GM) did some work with NUMMI and brought one of these home for a weekend as a company car. As a kid I thought it was cool as heck, apparently they still are! Great article and good memories!
I miss GM having cool joint ventures, seems like that’s a bygone era…
Five door hatchbacks are the best configuration after wagons. Sporty profile with four regular doors and a practical hatch. I remember Mazda had them on the 626 and Acura with the first gen Integra. They were quite popular around the 80s.
My Mercury Tracer was a 5 door hatch.
Datsun/Nissan offered one with the 310 and 510 (later the Stanza)
Toyota Camry had a 5 door model.
Then of course there was Saab 99/900 and 9000
Ford Escort
Dodge Colt/Mitsubishi Mirage
Fiat Strada
Chevy Chevette/Pontiac 1000
Chevy Citation and Pontiac Phoenix
And many, many others in non-US markets.
That Prism GSI hatch looks an awful lot like a 91-96 Escort GT.
It’s a shame Ford never offered a 5-door Escort GT. It might not have found many more buyers but it would’ve found some, since it was A Ford and not a sideline foisted on the dealer.
IIRC, you could get the GT’s 1.8 in the Escort LXi – not quite a GT, but slightly more verve than the more basic Escorts (and I’m not gonna lie a small peppy sedan with maximum greenhouse is appealing).
I drove a 91 Escort GT in Lemons and that thing was absolutely bullet proof. We had the temp needle pegged twice and we just added water and she was all good. I’ve been looking for one as a DD for years with no luck.
I’m a little confused as my first car was a Geo Prism LSi (not the GSi). It was an awesome car despite it being so rusty even DT would have put it out to pasture. Seriously, Geos did not fare well in the northeast. This was back in 2004, even then these cars were becoming rare.
But I swear to God mine was a 1989. However all your research is legit, these appear to have been introduced for the 1990 model year…
Have I been living a lie in my 1989 Geo Prism LSi???
’90 model year could be built in ’89. My ’90 Legacy was built 11/89.
True, but I could have sworn it was registered as a 1989. Like, I thought it was a 1989 model. But it seems that’s not possible so I stand corrected.
This is a great historical column. I was just at the point of buying my first new car around here. I looked at GEO which without the internet was a GM cheap crap car line. Of course Toyota was the best built car in the market. If I had known it was a Toyota I would have bought it. Being a Marketing major from one of the top public business universities of the time we were taught the sale is the goal. If you owned Coke and Pepsi don’t make Coke and Pepsi compete against each other you are stealing sales from your self. It’s like when McDonald’s adds cheap Hot Dogs to the menu, customers are not coming to McDonald’s for a hot dog but once there may chose two hot dogs for a buck over a $3.00 Whopper, pre COVID prices. All you did was lower your sales. Trying to force a GM sale over a Toyota sale for the same car and profit is stupid. But hey GM also decided ruining Isuzu instead of learning from them when they owned 20% was a great idea.
I saw one two winters ago, here in DC. It was in remarkably good shape.
Another interesting variant in this line was the 1988 Chevy Nova Twin-Cam, based on the AE82 Corolla (the Prizm was the AE92). This was the only year the NUMMI Nova got the spicy engine, plus a sport suspension and four-wheel disc brakes. Black was the only color. 3,300 were sold but I expect them to be exceedingly rare now.
Erm… what’s going on with the seatbelts?
Passive restraint requirement. Automakers were allowed to do automatic seatbelts instead of airbags. These had “motorized mouse” movable buckles that ran on a track starting halfway up the A pillar and over to their usual spot on the B pillar when you turned the ignition on, and you had to fasten the lap belt manually.
Another version that was on most GM cars had a regular inertia-reel seat belt but attached to the trailing edge of the front door rather than the B-pillar so you could leave it fastened and it would open and close with the door. Nobody ever did this – they’d use it like a regular seatbelt or not at all.
Wow. I’m now officially old. Mouse belts were the worst.
I preferred them to early small women-killing airbags and ugly steering wheels that couldn’t legally be replaced.
To be fair, only the Camry and Cressida got motorized belts. All other Toyota built products sold in the US that didn’t have airbags, including the Prizm, got door mounted belts presumably due to cost reasons.
One of the originally stated goals of the NUMMI deal was that Toyota was supposed to help GM learn to build high quality small cars. It didn’t really work.
Have you driven a GM product from the early 80’s? The 90’s GM cars were way better, now that’s not really saying much.
So more modern cars are better than the same car from earlier. Well manufacturers building better cars instead of worse cars seems a good idea then.
That was probably just an excuse to get government money. GM clearly wanted to demonstrate it could build high-quality small cars all on its ownsome without taking classes from Toyota. And they did, with billions of dollars and the Saturn brand. With that monkey off their back, they quickly lost their appetite for this not-so-profitable task and immediately went back to building really crappy small cars.
No used money to buy a percentage of the competition and force them to suck instead of improving GM. MGMT and unions combined to ruin American cars and thought they could force Americans to buy crap on a flag. It didn’t work
I often wondered at the time if these should not have been Saturns instead. BTW I am a fan of the original Saturn series, very competitive at the time.
Geo was a different mission, though it’s anything but obvious in retrospect and they both started selling around the same time. Geo was for the wide sales and distribution of myriad foreign market subsidiary models (and some Toyotas because of the NUMMI plant) rebadged for the US. It made sense on paper as those cars were engineered for markets where small cars were highly contested space, so they were well ahead of the small car crap GM reluctantly produced domestically while not potentially hurting the reputation of long-established brands like their other entry-level junk. The smaller makes got GM’s distribution and support (IIRC, they were sold though Chevy dealers, which made it easy to fold it into Chevy later). Unfortunately, the models were mostly also-rans or could be bought from the actual parent company in the case of Toyota and GM’s reputation was already hit to hard, so they never achieved what they hoped for with Geo.
Saturn was a domestic-engineered, foreign-make fighter that was conceived to be a clean-slate kind of thing. Roger Smith realized how mismanaged GM had been for decades and how damaged the brands were in the smaller car market (which he didn’t necessarily help, but that’s another story) and how they drew resources from higher-margin cars from established brands while also hurting reputations, so the idea was a whole new company without baggage that could concentrate on the lower end market alone, separate from the rest of GM as much as possible, stressed by introducing a different way of selling cars and a focus on customer service (what a concept!). Later CEOs seemed to not know what to do with the brand after and, in the midst of continually falling market share, plant closures, and layoffs, they had little options than to play their traditional poor game of damage control with the brand by limping it along with newer generations on shared platforms (if they were going to do this, they should have shared platforms developed by Saturn, but whatever), making it largely redundant and, eventually, dead. They could have devoted more resources and done right by Saturn, but they probably would have preferred to shutter it even sooner as it was their predecessor’s brainchild and they had to answer to shareholders that looked at GM’s poor financial performance and wonder why they spent so much on a brand making low margin cars on their own platform that competed with their other brands on shared platforms and that wasn’t as successful as hoped (though the cars were generally well regarded by buyers). Probably took so long to kill it because of the costs of shuttering, I don’t imagine many CEOs want killing a brand on their record, and the sunk cost fallacy as Saturn had cost so much to bring to life in the first place. Anyway, if Saturn had been the success imagined, they might have killed Geo off as Saturn ran with the market share. In the end, Saturn kind of became a new Geo in that they used some foreign-market developed platforms, though those were global platforms shared with other brands, as well.
Because the MGMT and unions thought America is perfect. Ever see that Michael Keaton car movie? That is funny and accurate except for the learning and success at the end.
Gung Ho. Sadly accurate. BTW, Nummi is now the Tesla Fremont plant. My understanding is old Fremont was the WORST GM plant (that is saying something). Our Corolla is a Nummi car.
Yup. Toyota taught GM everything, but they learned nothing.
If the Geo lineup didn’t have those awful seatbelts in 1989 I might have wound up with one.
Enter Mercury Tracer, neé Ford Laser.