This is a make or break year for a once mightly colossus known as General Motors.
I trace the beginning of GM’s downturn from a leading automotive innovator to the maker of boring rental cars back to 1976 when a peppy little import called the Honda Accord first arrived in the U.S.
The 1976 Accord had just everything that the GM cars of that era didn’t.
It was attractive in a cute sort of way. It was larger on the inside than it appeared to be from the outside, not the other way around. It had a rear hatch that opened to a collapsible back seat, offering lots of storage space. It handled well, had some oomph and was economical, which was no small thing arriving as it did between the two 1970s oil crises. A practical friend who had owned GM cars forever bought a silver ’76 Accord and was hooked. I drove it and was hooked, too.
GM’s response to the Accord and successive waves of hot selling offerings from Honda and later Toyota and Nissan (nee Datsun) was to continue churning out formulaically unattractive and uneconomical cars of dubious quality. In fact, GM’s only direct response to the first wave of the so-called Japanese Invasion was an abomination called the Chevette.
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