The number of books written about GM’s implosion would fill several libraries. But if we had to choose the single point when everything went horribly wrong, it would be in 1980.
First some background
The 70s were not a good time for the car business. Detroit was reeling from the energy crisis and a seemingly endless stream of new smog and safety regulations from Washington. Among car enthusiasts, this period is known as the “malaise era”.
GM however was in a relatively good position despite a few screw-ups like the subcompact Vega with its habit of blowing up engine blocks. The personal luxury coupe segment that they essentially invented with the 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix and 1970 Chevrolet Monte Carlo turned into a massive cash cow. It took the competitors a long time to respond. First in 1975 came the Chrysler Cordoba (soft corinthian leather and all) and then the 1977 Ford Thunderbird (which was just a case of moving an iconic nameplate on a restyled Ford LTD II). Oldsmobile was able to overtake Plymouth for the number 3 spot among US brands behind just Ford and Chevrolet. The reason? The wild success of the intermediate Cutlass, particularly the Supreme Coupe. In fact, in 1976, the Cutlass managed to overtake the once unbeatable full sized Chevrolet as America’s best seller.
Their other big success was their radical decision to shrink their full sized cars for the 1977 model year. After decades of preaching “longer, lower, wider”, GM was bringing out new cars that were shorter, taller, and narrower than the ones they replaced. After years of advertising that their cars as having “more road hugging weight”, these new models were a whopping 800 pounds lighter than before. This move was essentially mandatory thanks to the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, but it was still bold. They were so small that they were barely larger than the intermediates with which they shared showroom space. But Americans liked these new more fuel efficient big cars and bought huge numbers of them. It would take 2 years for Ford and Chrysler to respond.
In 1978, GM repeated the downsizing process with their intermediates with a similar amount of success. It was now the turn for the compacts
GM’s X-body compacts sold well enough (contrary to popular belief, they sold very well in spanish speaking countries) and provided decent basic transportation for many, but they were out of step in this new fuel conscious world, they had exterior dimensions similar to the large cars of the 1950s! GM knew it had to shrink the x-bodies, and this downsizing would be different from the others in 2 crucial respects:
1. While the Full sized and intermediate models were much bigger than almost any import offerings, the shrunken compacts would be facing a blizzard of competitors from Japan
2. The new cars would be switching from rear to front wheel drive.
This brings us to the car pictured in the title.
GM had intended for the new compacts to be released for 1978 alongside the new shrunken intermediates, but the schedule was pushed back by production issues. GM’s re-engineering of its entire lineup was not cheap, and the shareholders were becoming impatient. Therefore, management made the fateful decision to rush this extremely important new model into production.
The new x-bodies, the Chevrolet Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Oldsmobile Omega, and Buick Skylark, were put on sale in April 1979 for an extended 1980 model year, but we’re going to focus on the Citation, which was by far the volume seller, advertised as the “First Chevy of Its Kind”. The car magazines raved about it, they loved the space efficient transverse engine front drive layout. Motor Trend named the Citation their car of the year. Buyers, heeding this, flocked to the showrooms in droves. 811,000 Citations were sold in 1980, making it the best selling car that year. For a brief moment, it looked like GM had got it right again and was headed for another prosperous decade.
But, very quickly, everything went wrong. The car’s troubled development showed. It had the dubious honor for having the most recalls issued by NHTSA at 9. Body arms would fall out, damaging the fuel and brake lines, front springs would come out of their seats, steering racks would come loose, transmission hoses would fail and catch fire, and faulty brake proportion valves caused the rear wheels to lock up. The latter resulted in massive media scandal and a lawsuit from the government. GM won the case in 1987, 2 years after the Citation had gone out of production. Even by the low quality standards of the day, the Citation was a total dumpster fire.
Many owners felt their cars were spending more time in the shop than on the road, and that may have been a good thing, because the Citation was as crappy to drive as it was to own. A couple of Car And Driver writers later admitted that they were duped by GM. They were given press cars that had their torque steer (the tendency for front wheel drive cars to tug their steering wheels in one direction under heavy acceleration) engineered out. They later drove a production model and were surprised by how much torque steer there was. GM chose to spend a lot of money on a brand new compact but didn’t even bother to give it a new 4 cylinder engine. It was stuck with the ancient Pontiac Iron Duke 4 cylinder that produced just 90 horsepower, plus a hell of a lot of noise and vibration. The interiors were a symphony of hard and cheap plastic that disintegrated quickly.
Customers were not at all happy with any of this and this was reflected in the Citation’s sales figures. From the 811,000 in 1980, the drop was precipitous
1981: 413,000
1982: 166,000
1983: 92,000
1984: 97,000
1985: 63,000
It’s an impressive achievement for a car’s sales to drop by over 90% after only 5 years.
It’s no coincidence that the decade that gave us the Citation also gave us this implosion of GM’s market share. They lost 7.5 percentage points between 1983 and 1987. GM had almost consistently had at least 40% of the US market going back to the 1920s, only strikes would bring them below the 40% mark.
The sad part is that all this pain was not necessary. In 1982, GM brought out 2 modern front drive models that made the X-bodies redundant. The midsized A-bodies were only slightly larger and the compact J-bodies were only slightly smaller. These cars were not standouts but they sold consistently well and did little damage to GM’s reputation. If they had chosen to move up the J-cars by 1 year or 2 and made them the successor the X-bodies, things would’ve been very different.
It’s almost certain that many different errors by GM led them to their current sorry state, but when it comes to encapsulating all the problems of that company, nothing did it better than the 1980 Chevrolet Citation.