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Been thinking about this for a while; honestly going back to when some fanboy was having an argument in the A90 thread about how great the A80 was. This isn't about "the Caravan came out and nobody wanted wagons anymore" or "the RX300 came out and nobody wanted minivans anymore." I mean more cars that were comprehensively such a leap that it made previously more niche options much harder to compete and/or drove them out completely.
The most obvious example of this is when Mazda dropped a bomb on the market in 1989:
And made the holdovers from the 1970s look pretty hopeless:
And absolutely pantsed a couple manufacturers who thought they could have this market in the bag:
The latter is funny because lol yeah the original Elan is what Mazda outright said they were copying, but the former is funny because Ford decided that they wanted Mazda to build them a sporty convertible basically unrelated (and worse) to the one Mazda was already developing and the automotive press got wind of it so we got wires crossed predictions like this:
The other big example of this is the thing Lotus built in a cave with a box of scraps to keep the lights on while going bankrupt at the same time as their current owner was also going bankrupt:
And made an awful lot of (more rudimentary) cars that had gone into development before then with a business case to carve a unique niche out of the market a lot more suspect than they had been previously.
And then there's the historical one:
Which, because its development as a "sporty Falcon" but not it's appearance was an open secret, the other two manufacturers had competing offerings that they assumed would be considered comparable by the buying public:
But were annihilated so thoroughly that they had to basically scrap them and start from scratch (even though the much sportier second generation Corvair was literally only a few months away when the Mustang launched) and rush more direct competitors to the market.
There's more anecdotal ones too (the original Lexus LS scaring the hell out of Mercedes in the US market and allegedly being directly connected to Mercedes' tanking quality in the 1990s as they tried to cut costs); but there's some more specific examples that I feel aren't widely held that I was thinking about after I made this status update this morning.
What is the market position of these cars? 320-ish horsepower roadsters. Handbuilt with performance and quality a step above what you can expect from your normal Corvette, with no expense spared in their construction techniques (bolted and bonded aluminum extrusions in the Esperante like the Elise, welded and bonded aluminum extrusions in the Series 1 with a carbon fiber body, hand built galvanized steel spaceframe built by the same firm that did so for Lamborghini and Ferrari at the time) so you don't have to deal with the famously noodly C4 even in its ZR-1 guise. That thing dates back to the early 80s! Now, for sure, there's probably not room on the market for all three of them even if they didn't have horrible gestation periods (The Series 1 had an entire book written about how badly its production went). The Mangusta had a ton of corporate infighting and was yanked to another brand just before it went on sale. The Esperante is hard to find any information on, but Motorweek looked at one years before it was actually ready to go on sale so it must not have been too great either.
All of them were planned on coming out in 1997/1998, but ultimately were delayed for years after. But a funny thing happened in that time period. This:
Became this (after it's own extensively protracted development period where it was cancelled and worked on in secret):
I posit that even if they hadn't had their protracted development periods and had come out when they were intended to, this still would have doomed all three. That isn't to say that one needn't be more aspirational than a Corvette, but these were supposed to be selling something that they couldn't do as well as a car that beat them to the market and cost half as much which I'm sure contributed heavily to their failure. Now, far be it from me to defend this:
I've said my piece on how awful this was as a $45,000 interior in 1997, most obviously the atrocious center stack which looks lifted directly out of a Silverado of the time. I bought a C4 in no small part because that interior was the nicer of the two (even in its price chopped 1994 refresh) when I drove both. But, consummate with the context of its development (Corvette engineers were tasked with making a car comprehensively better than its predecessor by every objective measure while also being cheaper to produce, before it was cancelled outright by GM management and they had to develop it in secret with a diverted slush fund for several years as GM flirted with bankruptcy) it's whatever. The 996 went through similar issues for similar reasons (instead of being cancelled it needed to share basically everything with a car that cost 40% less or the entire company was going to go bankrupt) and at least it works as a driver's car and everything connected to the act of driving (the engine, the chassis, the transaxle, the suspension design) was top of the line in 1997.
That's literally a Mustang dashboard. I don't mean "literally" like it's been redefined by Webster to mean "figuratively" because everyone misused it out of hyperbole. That's literally the inner dash (and many parts of the outer dash!) of an SN-95 Mustang down to the vents, steering wheel and the gauge cluster, with different trim on top of it.
Certainly a Mangusta is a better performance car than the famously floppy Fox-derived SN-95 Cobra that it lifted it's dashboard, switchgear, entire drivetrain and engine from (even down to needing the same recall the 1999 Cobra received for Ford lying about how much power it had). But so was the C5 Corvette. And that interior doesn't look 40,000 2000 dollars better than a C5 convertible that had a better engine and drivetrain pushing less weight.
The Panoz, in spite of still obviously being built off of the SN-95 dashboard, has a charming TVR quality to it; and since it's even more Mustang-derived under the skin (the floorpan and parts of the firewall are even carried over and attached to the aluminum chassis) the fact that it looks so different until you really start looking side to side like a Find the Difference book all the more impressive. But, again, is it 35,000 year 2000 dollars better? Especially since the Esperante also lifts the suspension and steering hardware from the Cobra in addition to having the same worse drivetrain and engine and higher weight that the Qvale had.
The market for both of theses suggests no, because these cost about the same or less than if you just bought a used C5 convertible; and barely more than a used New Edge Cobra convertible.
And then we have the worst of them all. In a vacuum, divorced from the expectations of being the official followup to the classic Cobra, this seems the best. Yeah, the quality looks kinda "contemporary Viper" crap, but it's not obviously another car underneath, right? And it shouldn't be, as it was the most expensive of the lot with the highest boasts and the most development money thrown at it. And then you see the V6 Camaro gauge cluster. The Oldsmobile stereo. The blatant assortment of GM switchgear everywhere. It looks completely different, except everything you touch. Your arm even rests on the same center console lifted straight out of the C5 you could have bought instead. And you look around the car, and you see the C4 parts everywhere. The suspension arms attached to those Multimatic pushrod shocks (someone should have told Shelby that Ford says those cost $300,000)? C4, down to having the slots for the leaf springs. The windshield, and maybe even the windshield frame. The brakes. The handbrake lever. The door glass (albeit chopped down). The ZF 6 speed modified to be a transaxle (possibly). And you realize that Shelby is trying to sell you a car for 100,000 1999 dollars that GM was heavily involved with developing until management changes there led to a falling out with him; filled not only with GM parts bin stuff, but GM parts bin stuff older and worse than the parts bin stuff in the C5. Every time you drive it you're driving an early 1990s GM product. A fast one. One that sounds great. A great looking one. But one that's $65,000 better than a Corvette convertible that it's only marginally faster than? They look like great seats (definitely compared to the awful ones in the C5), but eh...
Now you can argue that these are just bad cars. And, yeah, the Qvale was considered kind of crap even by the auto rags at the time, the Panoz was criticized for driving so much like the Mustang, and (again) there's an entire book about how badly the development and production of the Series 1 went. But let's expand on that theory for cars overseas using the one car mentioned earlier, developed contemporaneously with the C5 and under similar circumstances:
Is this actually why TVR died, and why that entire cottage industry of midlevel sports cars in that rough "class" in Europe went with it in the 2000s? What about the Esprit, which was dated but Lotus had just spent a ton of money giving it a new bespoke engine, an exterior refresh and new interior right before the 996 came out? I've gotten a lot of pushback here when I suggested this in the past for TVR's cause of death, but I'm unconvinced that you could keep selling badly assembled cars with questionable engineering (when the Rover V8 was the engine people were nostalgic for in your cars regarding reliability...) and performance claims of dubious veracity when Porsche was pumping out twice as many 996s up and down the product stack as they did 993s (and at the time it was considered a huge leap forward over the outgoing car). I think that's far more why those sorts of companies failed than any ownership changes or management fights. Just because it's on your bedroom wall and in a Gran Turismo game doesn't mean it's any good.
And are there any other major examples of such a thing?
(This thread took me several hours to make so I'm not expanding as much on that last talking point like I did with the other ones)
The most obvious example of this is when Mazda dropped a bomb on the market in 1989:
And made the holdovers from the 1970s look pretty hopeless:
And absolutely pantsed a couple manufacturers who thought they could have this market in the bag:
The latter is funny because lol yeah the original Elan is what Mazda outright said they were copying, but the former is funny because Ford decided that they wanted Mazda to build them a sporty convertible basically unrelated (and worse) to the one Mazda was already developing and the automotive press got wind of it so we got wires crossed predictions like this:
The other big example of this is the thing Lotus built in a cave with a box of scraps to keep the lights on while going bankrupt at the same time as their current owner was also going bankrupt:
And made an awful lot of (more rudimentary) cars that had gone into development before then with a business case to carve a unique niche out of the market a lot more suspect than they had been previously.
And then there's the historical one:
Which, because its development as a "sporty Falcon" but not it's appearance was an open secret, the other two manufacturers had competing offerings that they assumed would be considered comparable by the buying public:
But were annihilated so thoroughly that they had to basically scrap them and start from scratch (even though the much sportier second generation Corvair was literally only a few months away when the Mustang launched) and rush more direct competitors to the market.
There's more anecdotal ones too (the original Lexus LS scaring the hell out of Mercedes in the US market and allegedly being directly connected to Mercedes' tanking quality in the 1990s as they tried to cut costs); but there's some more specific examples that I feel aren't widely held that I was thinking about after I made this status update this morning.
What is the market position of these cars? 320-ish horsepower roadsters. Handbuilt with performance and quality a step above what you can expect from your normal Corvette, with no expense spared in their construction techniques (bolted and bonded aluminum extrusions in the Esperante like the Elise, welded and bonded aluminum extrusions in the Series 1 with a carbon fiber body, hand built galvanized steel spaceframe built by the same firm that did so for Lamborghini and Ferrari at the time) so you don't have to deal with the famously noodly C4 even in its ZR-1 guise. That thing dates back to the early 80s! Now, for sure, there's probably not room on the market for all three of them even if they didn't have horrible gestation periods (The Series 1 had an entire book written about how badly its production went). The Mangusta had a ton of corporate infighting and was yanked to another brand just before it went on sale. The Esperante is hard to find any information on, but Motorweek looked at one years before it was actually ready to go on sale so it must not have been too great either.
All of them were planned on coming out in 1997/1998, but ultimately were delayed for years after. But a funny thing happened in that time period. This:
Became this (after it's own extensively protracted development period where it was cancelled and worked on in secret):
The market for both of theses suggests no, because these cost about the same or less than if you just bought a used C5 convertible; and barely more than a used New Edge Cobra convertible.
Now you can argue that these are just bad cars. And, yeah, the Qvale was considered kind of crap even by the auto rags at the time, the Panoz was criticized for driving so much like the Mustang, and (again) there's an entire book about how badly the development and production of the Series 1 went. But let's expand on that theory for cars overseas using the one car mentioned earlier, developed contemporaneously with the C5 and under similar circumstances:
And are there any other major examples of such a thing?
(This thread took me several hours to make so I'm not expanding as much on that last talking point like I did with the other ones)
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