Post #8 & #9:
It's important to emphasize that General Motors' "downsizing" (the term invented for the movement during the seventies) program was initiated in the boardroom and the design/engineering studios several years prior to the first OPEC oil shock of 1973. This is almost unknown to the public, which has been told that GM simply reacted, in knee-jerk fashion, to the gasoline shortages that the oil embargo caused. By the time the products entered the showrooms, first with the aforementioned '75 Seville (which was almost like a sneak preview of the huge changes coming across-the-board) in 1977, with the all-new, and much lighter and smaller, GM full-sized cars, it was easy for an ill-informed (and very often MIS-informed) public to think this was true, and to castigate GM for their "tardiness". Thus, one of the sour seeds of negative feeling toward GM (and the other American automakers) was sown, to bear terrible fruit in later years.
When GM went into their second major phase of product downsizing, with the completely new 1979 X-car platform (Chevy Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Buick Skylark, Oldsmobile Omega) the paradoxical factor of Roger Smith's management philosophy at GM took what had been a rather brilliantly conceived product (the X-cars were fabulously space-efficient, lightweight, comfortable, and safe-handling cars), and through his ruthless and STUPID cost-cutting decrees, reduced what should have been a triumph for General Motors into a massive and embarrassing product fiasco (after the initial sales success of the cars) due to deliberate quality-control and material-quality downgrading, all for the sake of the damned stockholders.
If you're looking for the foundation stones of GM's real fall from grace, look no further than the X-cars and Roger Smith. That man did more damage to General Motors than most people can imagine. The company is still struggling with his incompetency and its legacy.Larry, in principle, I agree with all you said. However, it has to be said that whilst Roger Smith was responsible for enormous harm to the well-being of GM in those years, the problems at the company were already evident before he took over as chairman and CEO in 1981, and continued after his departure. The grave safety issues related to the X-Body- far worse than anything related to the Corvair or Pinto- became widely publicised around this time. The Vega, decline of quality across the board, "Chevymobile" and the diesel engine disaster, all happened before he took over. Smith was not responsible for every horrible misstep taken by GM, but he didn't do anything at all to stop the rot that was already evident.