Is it Wrong That Every Time I Watch This New Chevy ChristIs mas Commercial, I Cry Like a Baby?

[donnay]

Is it Wrong That Every Time I Watch This New Chevy Christmas Commercial, I Cry Like a Baby?
https://thelibertydaily.com/is-it-wr...y-like-a-baby/

[buck000]

Interesting factoid: GM sold 27 Impalas in 3Q21...

https://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chev...sales-numbers/

[tod evans]

Best Tube I've seen in a long time!

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to donnay again.

[donnay]

Interesting factoid: GM sold 27 Impalas in 3Q21...

https://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chev...sales-numbers/

I would take a 60's or 70's Impala than the 2021 Impala, any day of the week.

[Anti Globalist]

That was rather touching.

[Anti Federalist]

Interesting factoid: GM sold 27 Impalas in 3Q21...

https://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chev...sales-numbers/

I wonder how many Impalas they would sell if they looked, and ran, and were built like this:



And not like this:



Nobody writes songs about their Toyota Prius.

And nobody will be writing ad copy 50 years from now about them either.

[pcosmar]

from my youth,, elder brothers had a 409.

[Anti Federalist]

Yeah and try singing a song called "My 6.7 Liter".

$#@! a bunch of Jacobinite communist metric system as well.

[Working Poor]

Yea it's pretty sweet....

[Brian4Liberty]

Yeah and try singing a song called "My 6.7 Liter".

$#@! a bunch of Jacobinite communist metric system as well.

How about 6.6?

[acptulsa]

How about 6.6?

You'd think that would translate well, but I don't know.

Beach Boys it ain't.

[fedupinmo]

Interesting factoid: GM sold 27 Impalas in 3Q21...

https://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chev...sales-numbers/

Another interesting factoid... it's easier to get in and out of my Honda Fit than it is to get in and our of an Impala.

[tod evans]

from my youth,, elder brothers had a 409.

[Anti Federalist]

Nobody writes songs about their Toyota Prius.

And nobody will be writing ad copy 50 years from now about them either.

[Anti Federalist]

One of the top rated comments at screwtube on this clip:


Bob Nordlie
16 hours ago

Do you know how many people you have brought to tears with this wonderful story? In 1989 I bought my wife a teal blue 1964 Falcon Futura. She loved that car and drove it every day for 10 years. I finally had to sell it because I could no longer maintain it with my busy schedule as a pastor. My wife died of cancer 6 years ago. This brought back so many memories and emotions! It was a good cry. Thank you. Cars are about so much more than transportation—style, art, excitement, performance, family, friends, memories, emotions… thanks again.

[Anti Federalist]

Holiday Ride

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2021.../holiday-ride/

By eric - December 24, 2021

GM’s new commercial, Holiday Ride, makes you feel something. Which is telling, given the subject of the commercial is not a new GM vehicle.

About which it is hard to feel anything more than one feels for a new vacuum cleaner.

The scene stealer – and tear jerker – is the ’66 Impala SS 427 convertible that an old widower keeps in his barn, collecting dust and holding memories of his youth and his deceased wife. Flashback to scenes of them, both young – the car, new.

It was a long time ago.

And so it is.

The man’s daughter sneaks the derelict Impala out of the barn and has it restored to its former glory, down to the crossed flags/Turbo Jet 427 sticker on the chrome air cleaner.

Yes, they came with those, back then.

It made you feel things.

Unlike LCD touchscreens.

Her dad opens the barn door, discovers the car and – in that moment – it is 1966 again and the car is new and he is young and . . .

Here we are.

A brutal juxtaposition. An aching sense of what’s been lost.

Actually, what’s been taken away from us – by government – and by the homogenization-commodification of everything.

It is just shy of 2022 and is there a single new car in Chevy’s inventory that makes anyone feel anything like one feels looking at that ’66 SS convertible?

Or anything, at all? They’re all just cars now. Nothing to care about. Interchangeable throwaways, like pairs of socks from the same sweatshop in China sold at every store in America.

Is there anything that sounds like it does, when the old man turns the key – remember keys? – and the big block 427 fires to life? Does anyone’s heart beat faster to the appliance whirr of electrification – which is what GM is selling, today?

There are only two cars left in GM’s inventory today – if you don’t count the ’22 Malibu, which is going, soon.

Not that anyone noticed.

The rest of the lot being crossovers, pick-ups and SUVs, all headed for electrification. The majority of them propelled by androgynously interchangeable four cylinder engines paired with no-shifts-for-you automatic transmissions.

The exceptions are the Corvette and the Camaro and the word is the latter will be retired for the sake of electrification before 2025 and the former, while superior in every data point way to the ’66 SS – being much more powerful, far quicker and (of course) so much saaaaaaaaaafer – is nonetheless an alienating insectoid exotic with an exotic price, assuring very few who are young today will cherish memories of owning one, half a century from now.

It was different half a century ago.

In 1966, a brand-new Impala convertible stickered for $3,041 – which, adjusted for the theft of buying power that is innocuously styled “inflation” – amounts to $26,221 today. Which is why the man in the commercial – who appears to be in his 70s, today – could afford a brand-new convertible Impala back in 1966, when he was in his 20s.

That was then.

Today, $26k buys you an appliance. A crossover of some sort, like the 2022 Equinox – powered by a 1.5 liter engine making all of 170 horsepower. Which makes you feel like the way you feel when you walk the aisles of Wal Mart.

How many people in their 20s today can afford a $60,900 to start Corvette – or even a $31,500 new Camaro convertible? Both of which are also – price aside – as practical as swimming with a tuba. That ’66 Impala was a six seater two-door, which is to say both a performance car and a family car – exactly the kind of car a young man with a new wife might buy, knowing they’d likely soon have kids.

It was a type of car that was common back then and nonexistent today – because saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety.

Or rather, because of the busybodies with guns so innocuously styled “the government.”

Once upon a time, government busied itself with protecting our right to buy cars like the one in Holiday Ride. But then it began to busy itself with micromanaging the kinds of cars it would allow us to buy.

For our “safety.”

I hear that word and feel like smashing something – like a new Equinox.

Low-back/three-across bench seats were benched by the same regulatory apparat that “ruled” average Americans be priced out of the market for full-size cars with big V8s, like that old Impala, via fuel efficiency regulations that made them so expensive to buy via baked in/transferred costs – “gas guzzler” fines, imposed on the companies that built them – that only a few affluent people could afford to buy such cars.

And so, they went away.

As did Turbo Jet 427s and four speeds, steering wheels without air bags and brakes without ABS.

Were they less “safe”? Certainly. But they made you feel something.

Not angry. Not depressed.

Not . . . nothing.

We loved our cars, once – because our cars weren’t appliances. They served a purpose, of course. But that was not their only purpose.

We see a glimpse of that world in Holiday Ride – and it does not make us happy about where we are.

It makes us nostalgic for where we were – and for what was.

Like youth, it was a fleeting thing.

The young don’t appreciate youth until they’re old – by which time it is too late to appreciate it. Similarly as regards the cars those of us who were there when they were new once took for granted, as if they’d be there forever. Like a warm summer afternoon, behind the wheel of your brand-new ’66 Impala SS convertible, sweetie by your side.

It’s enough to bring tears to your eyes.

[Anti Federalist]

A Look Back for a Company With no Future

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2022...ith-no-future/

By eric - November 26, 2022



For the second year in a row, GM is selling nostalgia about the cars it used to make and hoping that will translate into sales of the cars it makes now.

Last year, there was “Holiday Ride” – about an old widower and his also-old car, a ’66 Impala SS. This year, it’s “Mrs. Hayes” – about an old widow and her even-older car, a ’57 Chevy Nomad. GM hasn’t made cars like either – stylish, with big V8s under their hoods – in decades. But GM knows people remember those cars, as they don’t the forgettable appliances GM has been making for the past several decades.

Try to imagine “Holiday Ride” or “Mrs. Hayes” with a 1995 Chevy Lumina – or a 2022 Malibu.

GM knows what isn’t selling.

As contrasted with what did, when GM was still making cars people wanted. Mark the italics. Cars that people connected with emotionally. Cars that made them feel happy or excited or . . . something. Cars that were more than just transportation. That often became part of a family, as in the ad.

GM used to make legions of cars like that. People not only remember, they hold onto them. Care for them. Restore them, lovingly and painstakingly.

They drive them to remember how it felt.

Who feels anything about a 2022 Malibu? It’s an appliance – and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s also more than that when it comes to cars. Well, it is something more than that – if you want people to remember them.

And want to sell them.

Look at the initial scene in the “Mrs. Hayes” ad. The ’57 Nomad is the only car in the parking lot that doesn’t look like every other car in the parking lot. All of the others being new GM models, as anodyne and forgettable as the can opener you bought (and threw away) five years ago.

Do you remember it? Miss it?

Chevy’s vice president of marketing, Steve Majoros, says the “Mrs. Hayes” ad is “a little nod to our past and future you know, and we’re a brand with a great future.”

Really?

GM has lost more than two-thirds of the market share it once had, back when it sold cars that made people feel something about them. In 1970 – when GM was at its apotheosis – Chevrolet division had a larger market share by itself than all of GM does today – which is just 16.4 percent as opposed to 22 percent in 1970. Remember, that latter figure is for Chevrolet division only. The former figure – 16.4 percent – is for Chevy plus GMC plus Buick plus Cadillac, which is all that remains of GM, today.

Here’s another number to put things in perspective: 2,166,043 – as in millions of cars sold by Chevrolet in 1970. GM – all of it – sold 578,639 cars in the second quarter of 2022.

That’s a holiday ride, all right.

(There’s an excellent article over at Ad Age about the rise – and fall – of Chevrolet that you can read here.)

Even as recently as 1979, GM’s Pontiac division was selling almost as many Firebirds – that one model – as GM sold of everything it sells, in the second quarter of this year. And people remember those Firebirds. As they remember GTOs and Grand Prix and so many others made by Pontiac, which was once GM’s excitement division. What is there to get excited about, now? The number of air bags GM installs in its cars? The latest “advanced driver assistance” technology? All of these things make you want to forget what GM is selling today.

Olds is gone, too – but it lives in the memories of everyone who feels something for cars. Like Pontiac, Oldsmobile also once sold a lot of cars. In fact, the Olds Cutlass was once the best-selling car on the market. Now Olds sells no cars at all – because Olds doesn’t exist anymore, except in memory. This transformation – wait a minute – occurred because Olds (like Pontiac) stopped selling cars that people wanted. GM tried to sell people appliances, instead. No more excitement. No more personality. No more anything to rouse you to feel something about them. Just a badge, engineered.

And so, people stopped connecting with them. Forgot about them.

Stopped buying them.

You’d think there might be a lesson in that.

“We’re at this incredible period of transformation,” Majoros says – by which he means GM’s doubling-down on the Appliance Ethos by “transforming” every car it makes into an electrical appliance.

And the world’s once-largest car company doesn’t even make cars anymore.

The Malibu being the very last of them, if you don’t count Camaro and Corvette – and Camaro’s on the way out, too. That leaves the automatic-only Corvette, which no longer even looks a Corvette, on top of that. It is a formidable, disposable appliance. It will never conjure the memories aroused by the sight of a ’63 split window coupe. Or, for that matter, by the sight of a ’66 Impala or a ’57 Nomad wagon.

GM is like an old man in a nursing home, looking through a photo album of memories – of better times. The difference being the old man wishes he could go back while GM seems to think it can make people forget about the present by reminding them of what used to be.

[tod evans]

They were certain to include 'diversity' this year...

Pretty car though.

[donnay]

That was another great commercial. [Sniff, sniff]

I wished quantum leaps could happen, because I would seriously leap back to the old days were people had manners and treated one another with respect.