GM in the '60s was run by engineers and car enthusiasts... now they are run by bean counters and those who must answer to the gov't for the bailout agreements.
Good news is, the cars they have now are by and large FAR better than the garbage they had in the '70s, '80s, '90s, and '00s. They may lack a little polish, but a 100k mile 2010 Malibu doesn't feel like it is going to fly apart at the seems like a 100k mile 1995 Corsica did. And the panel gaps, etc. actually look like there is some attention to making things fit. The downside is, the Corsica's standard pushrod 2.2L 4 cyl, while not very powerful, noisy, and pretty pathetic to drive, could take LOTS of abuse, neglect, and generally wouldn't have any issues running low on oil, using crappy oil, crappy filters, and having some Iffy Lube hack working on it. So it may not have gotten you anywhere in style, it at least got you there. The newer cars have no tolerance for neglect. You run these newer engines low on oil, and they use oil, or use crappy oil, crappy filters, etc.... guess what? You get to buy a new engine. We replace (or at least, come across) these newer GM cars that need engines quite frequently here. Almost weekly sometimes.
In some respects, this is not vastly different than a lot of other makes. But in these parts, GM products were pretty popular for a long time, so we have a lot of experience with them, even though they've slipped a lot in recent years as far as a percentage of our customer base. When I started here in '93, it was probably 1 Toyota product for every 10 GM products, now it is probably 8 to 2 Toyota to GM. Ironic thing is, I would wager the GM products now (if cared for) are better, and the Toyota products now (as compared to 1990s) are worse.
