Originally Posted by
John
In terms of profitability, sports cars are not notoriously known to be such things, and generally are an image product. GM has that in the ZR1, and adding a similarly powered vehicle to the product line is redundant. Sports cars are not going to save GM. Its the Camry buyers, the Accord buyers, Odyssey buyers, that make up the bulk of automotive sales. Thats the war that GM has been losing, the one that matters.
Specialty cars like the z28 are actually very profitable. The Base camaro sells for what about 23k? The SS and Z28 use the same chassis and they use a motor that already is used in multiple other cars. Adding some "leather" maybe some outsourced brakes (brembo's) and revised suspension then selling the thing for what i would assume be around $45k ish (considering the ss can get up there in price) makes good business sense. There's a much larger profit margin although they will sell less units than the base cars. That being said, they do need to offer appealing cars to buyers who are either not interested in performance oriented cars or can't afford them. Once they have that down, some of those cars could benefit from specialty models.