General Motors' Mark Reuss is the company's EVP of Global Product Development and also covers the organization's Purchasing and Supply Chain department. To say he's a big deal is an understatement.
Reuss recently sat down with AutoBlog in an interview that goes over the latest emerging themes for one of the world's largest automakers. It's not the most insightful interview, however, it does bring up several interesting points along the way.
One of them I pulled out for you, below.
Reuss notes that GM "can't miss." In other words, it cannot ship a product that's a dud. We've been screaming this from the rafters for a while now and in the past 12 months we've been wondering where is the company's grand slam, high volume product. According to Reuss, he thinks that the all-new Malibu we saw at the 2015 New York Auto Show will stanch the bleeding.
The problem with that thinking is that we spent a bit of time in it. If the interior is any indication, it's a big snoozer for General Motors. And, for people to get inside that interior, they have to get beyond its newly styled face.
I have to admit, at first I really liked it in the company-released studio shots. But in person it's a bit tougher to stomach. I do like the side profile and rear end, but is it a high volume winner? I am not so sure.
That said, I wanted to see what the Spies had to say about this: if GM is saying it CANNOT "miss" has the company already failed based on that metric alone?
**Read the FULL interview by clicking "Read Article" below!
New York Auto Show
On fixing the Malibu:
"We can't miss. We can't have those kinds of misses [like the previous generation] on our cars and crossovers and trucks. We can't do that. If we do that, we give a reason for someone to go buy something else. It's that simple...
..."We need that car here to transform Chevrolet desperately because it's the heart of the market. And when you think of Chevrolet, people will come back and think about what we did with the [new] Malibu and the Cruze... It's hugely important to us."
The 2015 New York Auto Show Photo Galleries are sponsored by Lexus.
New York Auto Show
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