Originally posted by baco99:
Originally posted by XKontour98:
Originally posted by baco99:
you can still buy Oldsmobiles, by the way.
http://www.oldsmobile.com/olds/home_f/index.html



Yeah, used ones. That website was for 2004



oh no. they are new, 2 year old cars that you can still buy. they made so many leftover fleet vehicles, they are practically giving them away to consumers. a good example of oversupply resutling in reduced margins.



The only "new" Oldsmobiles that have been on the market as new for almost the past 2 years was the Alero, and that's only because GM continued to produce it more than a year after Oldsmobile was shut down just to produce for fleet sales. GM hasn't had any Bravadas, Intrigues, or Auroras on-hand in over a year. The ongoing, stock-piled Aleros were fleet cars only and not generally sold direct to consumer unless some really weird person actually wants one.

It was actually a good idea for GM to do this. Fleets have to buy something, and it cheapens a model to have it inundate the fleets. So producing a car just for fleets that you no longer produce for the average consumer, is a great idea. GM pays its' workers whether they're producing cars or not, so it's better to have them producing cheap rental fleet cars at a break-even on their pay, than sitting at home at a 100% loss. And it satisfies the demand from the fleets and leaves your newer cars for the consumer market.

It's exactly the same thing that Ford is doing with the Taurus this year. In fact, market demand is so good on their newer cars that they recently extended the ongoing production of the Taurus a few more months until at least August of 2006.

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