#saehan maepsy

[things-about-cars-in-posts]

STOP IT THOSE ARE THIRD GENERATION OPEL KADETTS >:( IT EVEN SAYS SO ON THE LAST ONE'S PLATE! LOOK! EVEN WIKIPEDIA SAYS-

Hm. I guess the world has a lot of very different views on what this is called.

You can just feel a weird story coming, can't you. And indeed, our story starts in '73, with the other war America is losing.

The United States are having an existential crisis over the discovery that oil is a finite resource, the hours spent lined up in front of starving gas stations have given Americans time to realize cars that use less of it are neat, so their own country's cars are getting positively barbecued by 'imports', i.e. cars made abroad. Some could argue it took 'domestic' brands around a decade to cobble together decent competition, and in that timespan foreigners were left free reign to gather an unprecedented foothold - American brands would never return to their domination of their home market. The local automotive output was so dire they became known as "malaise era" cars: the larger offerings that practically symbolized the country got shrunken in size and neutered in sportiness to cope with the wimpier engines caused by the new emission standards, and, while the foreigners moved ungodly numbers of the fuel efficient small cars they'd been making all along, yankees were pathetically scrambling to figure out what the hell 'small car' meant. And here's a hint: if you're bragging about how large it is you've not got it yet.

Oh, and it gets worse! But to learn just how much, since even those familiar with my engine layouts post may not have a sense of scale for engine size or even know precisely how it's measured, we must make a brief stop at the explanation station! Choo Choo! The combustion chamber, the volume above the piston in which the combustion happens, shrinks and expands as the piston goes up and down its travel (whose length, you'll love this one, is called 'stroke'). The change in volume between the top and bottom of the cylinder's stroke, aka the volume of air the cylinder's movement displaces, is called cylinder displacement. Add up the displacement of every cylinder and that's your engine displacement! See? That was easy!

As this stolen and pefrectionistically tweaked graphic points out, displacement is expressed in two ways: - cc, or cubic centimeters - ci, or cubic inches While in ci even large displacements remain in the hundreds, in cc even small displacements reach the thousands, so what in ci is a 250 engine in cc would be a 4096 engine, which really lacks a ring to it. Usually, then, such an engine would be called a 4.1, being pretty much 4.1L because 1L is 1000cc - how cool is having a measurement system codified by people who actually knew what they were doing? Really guys you should give metric another shot sometime.

And now, an example for scale: I happen to own one of the small cars that was whipping yankee ass the hardest (bar perhaps the Viet Congs' jeeps) - a first generation Volkswagen Golf, that reached their shores as Rabbit. It was sold with four cylinder engines, the wimpiest -that would be mine- a 1.1L, the mightiest a 1.6 - and the spicy sporty version, the GTI, with its splitter and wider fenders and sick ass wheels made out of the P of tire supplier Pirelli...

...that little riot, in its last years, got upgraded to -huzzah- a 1.8!

The Pacer, meanwhile?

Okay, it was also offered with six cylinder engines as small as 3.8L -not even four times the size of mine!- and the V8 was just for those who wanted something faster. Which made me wonder: if the GTI hit 100 km/h (that's 0-60 for you yankees) in 8 seconds, what'll the V8 Pacer's time be? And so I looked it up, got lost in laughter, and desperately looked for other figures because they cannot possibly be talking about the V8, and then realizing that no, the V8 really did 0-60 in fourteen seconds, and laughing for other minutes.

I could bring more examples, but in short, to call the American small car offerings especially inadequate would be charitable. But what if they didn't try to make a decent small car? Wouldn't it be better to just let the foreigners figure it out, and then ship some units over to sell under a brand of their own? Well, that's the idea behind captive imports, the name given to vehicles born through this specific form of badge engineering. And what better foreign manufacturer for General Motors to hit up than Opel, the German vehicular colossus that GM happened to own and already have been importing cars of, selling them through Buick dealers! So essentially, GM needed dear god anything acceptable badly, and decided to bring over what someone else had cooked up and spotted the right business from inside the house. However, the Steamed Hams parallels end here, because they openly sold it as the Opel Kadett it was. While it still was.

But due to that whole crisis thing, the Deutschmark rose in value relative to the American dollar (so, for the economically inept, the same amount of Destumchrak cost more dollars to obtain) such that, while Opel asked for the same Dusthemcrhak for each car, the cost to Buick rose past sustainability. And, to save you the short story about the boss's lover answering the phone, they did what you do when a supplier's nationality causes their product to skyrocket in cost: find a supplier elsewhere. See, normally badge engineered cars can be split between those jointly developed by two manufacturers and ones merely picked up by another manufacturer after the fact. This, instead, was both, since Opel developed it with help from Japanese manufacturer Isuzu, which themselves made and sold it as the Isuzu Bellet Gemini at first and later just Isuzu Gemini. So Buick just started buying units from them instead. However, to denote that the car was the same but different (read: more cheaply built) they cobbled up the name Opel by Isuzu. After a year, someone must've realized that name was ass and demanded it be changed - presumably forgetting to specify to replace it with a non-ass one, since it got changed to Buick Opel.

And no one gave a shit. Because really, no one gave a shit about the car in general, reserving their attention for more established alternatives like the Toyota Corolla or the aforementioned Rabbit. So Buick devised a cunning strategy: the Buick Opel 5 Car Showdown - also known as possibly the hardest I ever laughed at automotive advertising, and pretty much the only reason I actually made this whole post.

Essentially the idea was to evaluate the Buick Opel in various showdowns against compacts people actually gave a shit about and at the end of it score them overall. Thing is, the problem with such a test is that it has to be clearly impartial for its conclusions to be worth anything. "Oh, so was it, like, just so laughably rigged?" No. Exactly the opposite. It was laughably not rigged.

Yeah.

To be fair, there is an area in which it came out on top, and the ad frames this as a result that proves it's a car worth considering just as much as every other. Really, it's hard not to be endeared by the candid honesty of this copy.

Of course, none of this makes it much less hilarious to imagine whoever worked at marketing for Volkswagen grabbing the paper and finding out General Motors had bought a three page ad to tell the world the Rabbit was better than their own car.

Easiest paycheck of their fucking life.

Okay, now that you've seen the ads about how General Motors said my car is better than theirs, you can go. Or, if "GM then renamed the car Isuzu I-Mark" sounds like riveting content to you, hop under the Read More, because hoo boy is there some weird shit.

One place where our poor little car fared better was Australia, where it was sold as the Holden Gemini, since Holden, as I hinted at previously, was the Australian arm of General motors, just like Vauxhall is the British arm of it. Vauxhall has for almost all its life just been a badge they slapped on Opels, and Holden has been that to varying extents, but due to the Australian obsession with a type of car that just doesn't sell elsewhere they've always had some bespoke stuff going for them. The tables turned this time, it would seem, since the Holden Gemini was just a rebadge (albeit of the Isuzu model) and the Vauxhall Chevette was a different model, with a nick of unique styling about it in the form of a different front...

...perhaps more reminiscent of the Chevrolet Chevette sold in North America.

Wait, why's the name in green? Was General Motors selling Americans the same car twice? Well, not quite.

Though built upon the Kadett's platform, this is a somewhat different car. And we could argue about whether it's fair of Wikipedia to cite that under a different name the Kadett was known by. We could, if this was what it was included over. But it wasn't. Because the Brazilian Chevrolet Chevette was the same car. In the first four pictures of the original post you can faintly make out a Chevette badge next to the right headlight. Here's a picture of its restyling and HOLD ON A SECOND

Yeah, these cars were a big cauldron of mess. For another example, since Holden wanted to sell wagons and panel vans, which Isuzu didn't make, those were derived from, respectively, the Opel Kadett wagon and the Vauxhall Chevette panel van, onto which Gemini fronts were grafted.

And that's not even all the places these were made and sold in! South Korean manufacturer Saehan struck a deal with GM to sell these as Seahan Geminis (and exporting them as Saehan Birds), and when they updated it the name changed to Saehan Maepsy, which when Saehan got bought by bigger South Korean manufacturer Daewoo became Daewoo Maepsy, which later got updated again into the Daewoo Maepsy-na (new)...

and GM Argentina made and sold the car as the Opel K-180.

And then in 1992 it got even weirder, when Brazil made a slight update aimed at the Argentinian market and called it GMC Chevette.

You know. GMC. The truck/SUV/van/bus brand that, in its 112 years of existence, has never been stamped on a car before or since the 3 year run of this thing. Imagine finding out that, for three years in some relatively random country, Ferrari sold a pickup. It's starting to feel like someone warned automotive manufacturing the world over of approaching alien invaders that could only be warded off by enough names for the Opel Kadett.

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page foregoes mention of the heroic efforts of Uruguayan operation Grumett - Yah! Here's an estate called Grumett 250M Rural! Yah! Here's an update of it called Grumett Gazelle Estate! a coupe called Grumett Coupe! Yah! Here's an update of it called Grumett Sport Coupe! Yah! We export these as Grumett Condors! Yah! Take that, extraterrestrial plurikadettonomophobes!

This mess of different manufacturers involved meant that all those different names, once the manufacturers worked on updating and replacing the model, ended up on completely different cars!

Here's a 1980 Opel Kadett/Vauxhall Astra...

...here's a 1983 Chevrolet Chevette...

...here's a 1984 Daewoo Maepsy-Na...

...here's a 1984 Opel Kadett...

...here's a 1985 Isuzu/Holden Gemini...

...here's a 1990 Isuzu Gemini...

...and here's a 1992 GMC Chevette.

You somehow get the vibe that Argentina wasn't doing quite as well as Japan.

So, this was the story of a world car and the ways various parts of the world interpreted it. And if you thought it was excruciating to read, try writing the damn thing. Not just in terms of the sheer work of getting any sort of narrative flow going, it was a mess to research - the info could get unclear or even contradicting, "it's more complicated than that" was a common refrain, and there seemed to be a near endless supply of tidbits that- wait, what's that? It's too big for a bird, too fast for a plane... oh no... it's a stereotypically-shaped flying saucer!!!

*the unrealistically humanoid aliens dive towards the helpless crowd around me, but as my eyes light up with the fierce courage of the chosen one, I rush towards the oncoming ship against the wave of people I urge to stand back, and when it seems close enough, I climb atop a conveniently placed statue of a riderless horse and fill my lungs at peak capacity*

IN MALAYSIA IT WAS CALLED OPEL CHEVETTE!

*the ship engulfs in flame, loses control and crumbles gracelessly onto the street and surrounding buildings, causing four debilitating injuries and 37 first degree burns*

Chevy Chevette Coupe