GM + Lotus. That’ll be a bit of an acquired taste.

Wow, and just when Lotus was on the upswing…so much for that should GM become involved in said affairs. It would be nice if GM would concentrate on getting their affairs in order here in the States. You know…little issues like “quality control,” and the like. At least there is one good thing that might come out of acquiring Lotus—that ass-clown Lutz will never be able to fit into a Elise! And it were to get into one, he’d never be able to get out…there’s a real photo opportunity!

I just don’t see GM laying out that much cash right now. The only way I can figure that this works is that GM needs more capacity in China but can’t open a plant fast enough. Buying Proton will give them a plant pretty quickly in comparison to breaking new ground. Then this makes total sense. I wonder if Lotus will be allowed to continue on as before though.

“GM + Lotus. That’ll be a bit of an acquired taste.”

You mean like the Opel Speedster/Speedster Turbo?

So GM wants Lotus back. Why couldnt lutz fit into an Elise? Isnt he skinny? Quality issues? More of an issue in the 80’s and 90’s than they are today. So quality issues are being addressed.

Interesting. GM+Lotus has produced a few cool cars in the past and owning them outright could produce some very cool results. Think along the lines of a Lotus tuned Solstice or a Lotus tuned Camaro SS, etc. If GM left Proton largely untouched and simply used them as an added plant plus some tuning every once in awhile I think it could possibly work out. I’d like to know though what GM is thinking spending 1.6B dollars at a time when they’re in a financial rut.

Maybe they figure they can make money with out spending some. Im sure they know where they stand right now, and what their able to spend.

Youngsters and just regular idiots…

GM owned Lotus for YEARS before the Malaysians.

“GM owned Lotus for YEARS before the Malaysians.”
.
Yes, and Lotus was **** for years. Bloody idiot.

Loss-making Proton, and loss-making GM. Match made in heaven.
As Jazz said, it does make sense though to acquire non-unionized capacity in the far east, especially as plants in NA continue to close due to falling sales. Perhaps ALL Buicks will be made in Malaysia.

Does this mean more importing and rebadging?

GM needs to fix themselves before acquiring and ruining any more brands, like they did w/ Saab.

when bankruptcy is inevitable, voters should be allowed to make decisions for these monkeys.

You guys crack me up. Your all experts!

I have a feeling this is going to turn into another Daewoo. GM has made great gains with their purchase, and now Daewoo is the second best selling brand in Korea.

GM is gonna ruin lotus with SS badges. NO dont buy it. and GM is gonna go broke anyway so nvm. let someone else buy lotus/proton.

This is a deal made in heaven! For those of us with an unbiased opinion of GM, I would say we see a very positive upside to this for both parties.

For Lotus, it means $$$. The Esprit is currently not offered because there is no $$ at Lotus to develop it. Who here would love to see a modern Esprit? I know I would. Well the only way to do so is to get funded and sales of the Elise and Exige simply won’t cut it. Parent company GM would be more than willing to do so.

Why? Because GM can now compete in the super car market with something else other than a Vette or Caddy.

And for all the anti-rebadging people… I don’t think too many would complain about a Lotus Elise-like vehicle being rebadged as a Chevy Cobalt.

GOOD: a 2nd-gen Elise with GM’s 260HP ECOTEC turbo-4. If they can keep the weight below 2000 lbs, that would be sweet. Also Lotus using GM’s vast catalog of parts in new and innovative ways to increase performance at lower costs.

BAD: a 2nd-gen Elise rebadged from the Saturn Sky alongside a “new” Lotus SUV based on the GM360 platform. I’d call this the “Saturnization” or “Saabification” of Lotus. Analogous to “sodomization”

Hopefully GM will just use Lotus for their engineering expertise and not muck-around too much with their cars.

With all the money and success that GM has been producing lately, it would only seem smart for these two to join in the foray. It’s either suck it up or get the flock outta the way cause the mighty General is coming through.

GMnumberonedumbass… always good for a laugh.

Too many idiot ideas today!

Oooooohhhh boy. Ooooohhh boy.

I don’t give a crap who buys Lotus as long as the money is there and it allows the development of a new Esprit.

“With all the money and success that GM has been producing lately”
Doesn’t matter how much money you’re producing, if you’re spending more money than that. You can make a million dollars a year, but if you’re spending twice that then you’re still broke. So, do we know how much money did GM lose last year? Last numbers I saw were losses of $115 million in the three months up to September 2006 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6239443.stm).
Oh, and how many jobs have GM had to shed? How many plants have they had to close? (Seems like having to reduce production capacity isn’t symptomatic of success, to me at least).

Sorry, I know I shouldn’t feed the troll.

I don’t know about Proton, but being bought up would not be good for Lotus if GM then Saabified it. It would be much better for them to find a white knight (if they need it), like TVR did.

hey now, thats what everyone said when Ford got their hands on Aston Martin… and theyre the best theyve ever been.

“GM is gonna ruin lotus with SS badges.”

The SS badges are hallowed and reserved only for GM’s elite vehicles like the Silverado SS and the TrailBlazer SS. No plastic roadsters with Jap engines could ever earn such a prestige.

I think GM wants the Tesla technology. j/k

Hopefully GM influence can improve Lotus quality and reliability. Although, I fear there is much work to do to bring Lotus up to GM’s strict standards.

And the only reason Saab hasn’t lived up to its stellar reputation is Bob Lutz knows that it is a foreign brand and the capital used to fund that project needs to be diverted to more important brands, more profitable, more successful brands like Pontiac and Buick. If GM is to knock Toyota, Ford, and the rest of the world out of business alltogether, then they need to concentrate on core successful brands, not foreign duds.

GM#1blah - you mean the more broken , unpopular and failing brands like Pontiac and Buick? Come on, every one here knoews that Wagoner all but said that he considered getting rid of one of the aforementioned brands. Plus GM bought saab to add to the bottom line you’re an idiot if you think that not spending money on its development is a good thing.

So, how much does GM pay you to be a buzz promoter? You’re tactics are Marketing 101.

Why do you all feed GMnumberone4ever? Just ignore him/her and they will eventually whither away.

A company like GM having ‘financial issues’ is not that same as many of you 12 year old lame brains trying to decide if you should splurge for the double whopper or not.
Buying into manufacturing capacity/capability and handling technology like lotus can be an outstanding feather in any companies cap. You keep wanting GM to improve their quality etc… well, this seems like it could prove very beneficial to many of its models…
CTS-V with handling by Lotus anyone?
Get beyond the Jr. High antics and think critically for a change.

CTS-V with Lotus like handling would be a step backwards. About as step backwards as using Honda V6’s for the Saturn Vue when there was a perfectly capable 3.5 and 3.9 in the parts bin. Don’t Lotus’s have issues with bodies snapping apart from glue joints releasing? And the 4 cylinder under the hood is a Toyota motor, extremely unreliable, crude and rough. There is nothing that GM can gain from the purchase of Lotus.

Waste of money.

Damn straight GM#1, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Why does anyone even bother with the likes of BMW, Toyota’s, Honda’s etc. their all junk next to my Chevy! Your so insightful, could you write a bible? I want to worship your every word. Really I do! Don’t worry, one day the rest of the world will wake up and realize they mistake they made in not purchasing a GM product.

bb_454 you do realize that by the end of this year that junk toyota you mentioned will have overtaken gm. Im not a fan of chevys but I have liked gm. But their reign in the automobile industry is about to come to an end. lol

MC do you realize that my entire last comment was a joke? Secondly I have been hear about how Toyota is going to overtake GM anytime now for the past 5 years. Thirdly, is it really a big deal if GM loses the number one spot, I don’t want that to happen being that I do love GM, but it isn’t a like anything is going to change if it happens. Fourth I want to know where you got your crystal ball along with everyone else who can predict when GM is going to go out of business or file for bankruptcy. Granted their not in the best of shape, but I don’t think their going under. Oh I do wholeheartly believe that Toyota’s are junk, but that’s my opinion, everyone else on here is more than willing to share theirs.

You’re right meanpants but sometimes blatant stupidity (GMBlah) must be addressed.

bb_454 I think that everyone is afraid that the auto industry is following the trend that was the American TV industry. Like you said- Not sure I really care as I have at home 2 Samsungs and LXi (Sears brand) and a Magnavox. I know the Samsungs are Korean but have no idea on the other 2. Just an analogy.

I wish all the ricer lovers could see what they are doing to America. The auto industry is such a large portion of our economy that the entire thing could collapse if any one of the Big Three went under. Each and every time you purchase a foreign car of any kind, you send tens of thousands of dollars over seas. A wiser person would support the American auto industry and the millions of workers employed in them.

For all the naysayers among us, every one of you that bails on the American auto companies is putting another nail the their coffin. It is in our hands who is the number one auto maker in the world. If we all choose to buy ricers, we have turned our backs on two million American auto workers who depend on us for support. So lets say the Big Three go under in the next ten years. Where do we find jobs for these two million unemployed, able bodied workers?

Make the call. Do we want the the tradition that is American automobiles to continue growing out of Detroit among many other factories nationwide or do we want to export billions of dollars to Japan because we can’t find it within ourselves to support our very own nation?

@ Fatstrat,

Well said.

It would be good for both parties so long as the parent company doesn’t interfere.

lotus helped gm make the the zr1 one of the greatest cars in history, as long as lotus keeps its identity then whats the problem? yeah rebadging lotus to gm models is not a good thing, or rebadgind gm to a lotus is even worse. dont interfere just sit back, fund lotus properly and watch the revenue flood in. but please dont start gluing the corvettes together, and yes please help make the cobalt compete with evo`s and sti`s.

GM’s don’t want Lotus; they want Proton: so they can kill it and eat it. GM is hunting for prey. They’ll rip off the Proton badge and rebadge those suckers with a Chevy or Opel marque. Daewoo all over again, but this time, there’s Lotus for dessert.

bb_454 I dont have a crystal ball but its the truth. I do agree with you in that toyota is overrated junk. I dont wanna see GM lose the top spot either at least not to toyota but at this rate its gonna happen eventually. Every since the fast and the furious emerged into theaters this is how the american automobile industry began to crumble. lol

Hey, I know why they really want to do this. They’ll need Lotus to crank every last HP and Torque out of their Blue Devil V-8 Corvettes, since McLaren already tuned up the Viper’s V-10 to the hilt. It’s only a matter of time now before we’ll see who’s King of the road (my bet is on the Viper).

Well if its the truth, than I guess their isn’t anything else to say. I didn’t know you could claim something to be the truth until you had hard evidence to back it up, not claiming it to be the truth because Toyota said their going to become number one this year. The way I see it, you can’t guarantee that GM will lose the top spot this year until it actually happens. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but Toyota sold around 1.3 million units this year in the US, where GM sold around 4.1 million. Thats quite a large difference, but I don’t know what either company did globally. I think that at the rate things are going Toyota will eventually topple GM, unless some unforeseeable event happens that Toyota just becomes undesirable and people actually look at facts according to GM’s products today not what they were making 20 years ago. I believe I read something around August 2005 that they were predicting that in eight months GM was going to be forced to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy, don’t recall where I read that, point is it hasn’t happened, nor does it look like it going to now. GM lost money this year, but compared with 2005 their in much better shape, I think a large reason they lost as much as they did this year was because of the buyouts? But let the flaming begin, I know its bound to happen on an anti-gm site. lol The Viper? Please! GM doesn’t need the help from Lotus to lay the smack down on that over rated heap! lol

Good call 1c3d0g, Lotus was heavily involved in developing the LT5 that powered the ZR1 Corvette.
As for the rest of this thread, I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard in a long time. Which is funnier: GM#1’s lunatic opinions or the suckers that fall for them? Answer: niether! It’s ‘Jaguar XJ-S’ raving about foreign car purchases! Keep going guys, I still have 3 hours before Jay Leno is on…

Forget about Leno, obviously this is much better!

im sorry, What the hell is a Proton?

its funny how many financial analysts visit this site to shed their professional opinion of GM’s monetary issues. Last I checked, their credit is junk, just like the average american individual, so if they come up with the funds to make this purchase, it’s going to be cold hard cash or stock. And large expenses are ok, so long as they would help in the turning around of the company, which this would figure to do, with a greater production capacity for the vehicles that need to be built to remain competitive. Even though GM is still losing money, it’s become progressively less, which means a profit will be showing itself in the near future.

Actually, it doesn’t quite work that way. “Junk” status has to do with their bond ratings. Consumers purchase bonds, which is essentially purchasing the company’s debt. A bond with a “junk” rating simply means it’s high risk. The value of the bond could rise or fall dramatically leaving the investor bretter off or broke. Now, in terms of scraping up the cash to make a purchase, GM has a hundred ways to do so very easily. Corporations are not exactly rated by TransUnion and Equifax and given a 3 digit number. If they want Proton, they will get Proton.

One quick question on this “Saabification” being mentioned… You mean to tell me, that there was actually a fan of Saab out there before GM bought it? Seriously??? Those atrocious, bubble topped, mechanical nightmares? Someone is really willing to admit they liked Saab prior to the buyout, just to spite GM?? You guys must reaaaallllly hate GM. I think it’s time to see a shrink. The only car mechanically worse than a Fiat or Jaguar back then was Saab. The old Saabs looked like Pontiac Azteks!! seriously, “Saabification” is a good thing.

…

MY Si: as the article explains, Proton is a Malaysian auto maker, but I’ve seen them manufacture bikes as well, and IIRC, and that’s a big IF, I think I’ve read somewhere they have/had links with Spyker, a Dutch exotic car maker. A proton itself is just part of an atom, you have core with neutrons, protons and the free-flowing electrons. Basic science, really.

O Great, Give GM#1 something to brag to his friends at school about. Next I’m going to see an aliance between GM and Lambo. LOL

Silly asians. Even ripped their badge from a Holden.

1c3d0g- thank you. i didnt know who they were. i know who Spyker is. and i know what a “Proton” is. lol

Hehe…just trying to give ya a heads up, that’s all. No bad things intended.

These Protons look like cars for ready to do MPG battles. They’re selling them in the UK. Look:

http://www.proton.co.uk/

You’ve all danced around this in various ways and some have actually made some good points. Not surprising who they were. The polarizing nature of any GM discussion is baffling, but the insanity, and inanity, these discussion produce is entertaining as long as you don’t let the GM hate squad get to you.

Anyway, to my point. GM evidently sold a lot more cars in the US than Toyota last year, but Toyota is narrowing the gap internationally. So obviously Toyota is making key gains elsewhere. China, perhaps? Its the fastest growing car market on the planet. So imagine how convenient it would be for GM to have Proton as a subsidiary on site in Asia to combat Toyota’s market gains in China. Then it all makes sense. And for those concerned about the relationship between GM and Lotus, well, it existed before as 1c3d0g mentioned, and it worked out pretty darn well for all involved.

My two cents.