TrueDelta

The first time I heard that GM was going to split off its European operations, I was shocked. Opel has been part of GM for 90 years. Over the past decade they’ve worked hard to create a globally-integrated organization, and GME has provided the platforms for GM’s compact and midsize cars. How could they so easily get rid of such an integral part of the organization?

At first glance, GM simply needs the cash. But they’re not divesting of their operations in Korea, China, Australia, or Latin America. Only those in Europe.

So, is GM’s poor financial condition simply providing a cover for a divorce that many people on both sides of the Atlantic have been wanting anyway?

It wasn’t too long ago–the 1990s–that Opel’s management was on the verge of mutiny. Was that rift never fully mended? Was all of the talk of a truly global orgnization just that, talk?

It’s not enough that Opel might want to split from GM. It seems that, even after 90 years, Opel has never really identified with the corporate parent. Nothing new here.

What is new: the willingness of Detroit to let Opel go.

One piece of the puzzle: Latin America and especially Asia are growing markets. Europe is not.

Another: it probably costs more to develop a car in Europe than anywhere else in the world, and it certainly costs more to make a car there. European unions are also no fun to deal with.

Then there’s the matter of need. Now that GM has GMDAT in Korea for small cars, and a increasingly capable product development organization in China, do they feel they no longer need (or even want) Opel?

President Obama has proposed an increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) to 35.5 MPG by 2016. CAFE is not mandatory, but manufacturers that fail to achieve the average must pay fairly hefty fines, and they don’t like paying fines.

At first glance, 35.5 MPG seems a very ambitious target. After all, most cars these days have real-world gas mileage in the 20s, and SUVs struggle to get into the high teens. Part of the improvement will have to follow from lower sales of trucks. A shift to smaller cars with smaller engines and additional technology will also contribute. The government will no doubt also provide credits for alt fuel vehicles.

But one thing people often don’t realize is that CAFE figures are based on a 55/45 mix of the EPA’s internal city/highway MPG figures, which since 1985 haven’t been the same as the ones on window stickers. That year, in an attempt to bring the public figures in line with real-world experiences, the EPA adjusted the published city figures downward by 10 percent and the highway figures downward by 22 percent. More recently, in 2008, the formulas for the window sticker numbers were changed to incorporate more real-world variables like A/C use. But the internal, gross figures have continued to be used for CAFE.

What these adjustments mean: an average of 35.5 MPG in the EPA’s internal figures translates to an average around 27 MPG in terms of a 55/45 mix of the city/highway figures on window stickers. The 42MPG figure for cars? (The 35.5 is the overall target for cars and trucks together.) It equates to about 32 MPG in real-world mixed driving.

Still a large increase from current real-world averages. But the implication isn’t that we’ll all soon be driving small cars. Auto makers might even still offer a car like the new V8-powered Camaro, with real-world suburban fuel economy in the high-teens, as long as they sell a a couple compacts that manage results in the high 30s to offset each one.

Doable? Absolutely.

In the past, only successfully completed repairs were included in our analysis of responses to the Car Reliability Survey. This was done to provide the most precise results possible given our often small sample sizes.

Problem was, this excluded the worst problems–those that lead a person to get rid of a car–from the analysis. So, starting with this month’s survey, we’ve added “sold, traded, donated, or junked instead of repairing” to the list of problem outcomes.

I’ve also gone back over responses for the past year and recoded those that fit this new outcome. So this week’s results will include problems that resulted in the disposal of a car, even if these problems were not first repaired.

This change will generally affect only the results for old cars and for the most troublesome new cars.

Entering the second quarter of 2009, we’ve made three changes to the Car Reliability Survey.

First, major preventative maintenance, most notably timing belts and water pumps, now should be reported on the repair survey. This change has been made to equalize results between engines with timing belts and those with timing chains. Those with timing chains generally cost less to maintain, because there’s no set mileage at which timing chains must be changed. With timing belts, there is a set mileage at which they must be changed. This involves hundreds of dollars in labor, so water pumps and other relatively inexpensive items in the same area are changed at the same time. Because of such preventative maintenance, a survey that asks only about repairs would make engines with timing chains appear less reliable.

What we’ve done to equalize results up until now: water pump failures have only been included in the analysis if they occur before 70,000 miles.

Second, we’ll now ask about mods on the “no repair” survey only when a member first responds and then each January after that. Very few members have mods, and this will reduce the time and effort involved for the 95+ percent that don’t have them.

Finally, when we first created the survey we thought it would be easiest to have people round their odometer readings downward, since they’d simply have to read the numbers off their odometer–and simply drop the final three digits. But this isn’t how people are used to rounding, and quite a few probably rounded up when the last three digits were 500+. In general, it’s not a good idea to deviate from common conventions unless there a very good reason for doing so.

There isn’t a very good reason in this case. Only an attempt to simplify the survey, which didn’t actually simplify it. So the survey now simply asks that the reading be rounded to the nearest 1,000. The average readings should increase by about 500 miles as a result–not a significant change.

As noted before in “Comparison tests, what are they good for?,” even the most even-handed comparison tests reflect a specific set of specifically weighted criteria. Then there are those that aren’t even-handed. Car comparison tests don’t come much more tilted than the “Camaro vs. Genesis” comparison test in the June 2009 Car and Driver.

Let’s begin with the cover, which shows the Camaro nosing ahead of the Hyundai on a track and includes three bits of information on each car. The first, base prices: $23,000 for the Chevrolet Camaro, $26,000 for the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. Get into the magazine, and you’ll find that they rejected a Camaro LS because it had awful upholstery and mediocre tires. Upgrade to the LT, like they did, and two-thirds of the Camaro’s price advantage goes away. Adjust for remaining feature differences, and the cars’ prices are generally only a few hundred dollars apart.

Next on the cover, fuel economy: 29 MPG for the Camaro, 26 MPG for the Hyundai. EPA highway figures, of course. The city figures are an identical 17. In C&D’s testing, the Hyundai went slightly farther on a gallon of gas.

The third bit of information, horsepower: 304 for the Camaro, 306 for the Genesis Coupe. Not as potentially misleading as the other two bits. And yet, unsaid on the cover: the Camaro is over 300 pounds heavier, so the Hyundai has a significantly better power-to-weight ratio.

Go to the test and skim the results, and you’ll find that the Camaro does win, as suggested by the cover photo. Look more closely, and you’ll find that the Camaro wins by a single point. Actually check out the details, and you’ll find that, despite the connotations of that cover photo, the Camaro trailed the Genesis Coupe in every single track test. Acceleration, handling, braking–the Genesis Coupe was better, sometimes by a substantial margin. Moving to the subjective scoring, C&D rated the Genesis Coupe more “fun to drive” by a not insignificant two points. C&D notes a few times that the Camaro feels too big because of its size, mass, and small windows, and that it doesn’t invite precise steering inputs.

So how did the Genesis Coupe lose this test? Two factors. The first, ride quality, was affected by the optional Track Package on the car C&D tested. They note that they cycled through three Camaro test vehicles before settling on the one they liked best for the test. Why, then, didn’t they also evaluate the Genesis Coupe without the Track Package? Such a car might have gained more points in ride quality than it lost in handling and braking.

Even the four point spread in ride quality–a huge difference as scoring in these tests tends to go–wasn’t enough to fully erase the Hyundai’s lead in nearly every other category. To give the Camaro a one-point victory, C&D had to resort to the score of last resort: “gotta have it.” And heavily: the Camaro was given a monstrous six-point advantage–22 vs. 16, out of 25–in this 110% subjective category. To put it bluntly, the Camaro won this comparison test because, in C&D’s estimation, people want it more. Chalk one up to the power of a name and an effective PR campaign.

Even if we grant that “gotta have it” belongs in the scoring table at all–and I don’t, since I’d rather a test compare what the cars are like to look at, sit in, and drive and not the model name or the PR–the Hyundai’s 16 is crazy low for a car that offers so much performance for a price in the mid-20s.

The issue includes one other comparison test, between the BMW 328i, Infiniti G37, Audi A4 2.0T, and Acura TL. The TL, the least “gotta have” car in that test, with far more faults than strengths, received a 16. The Infiniti and Audi both received 20s. In the context of these scores, the Genesis Coupe’s 16 doesn’t hold water.

And the Camaro V6’s 22? Yes, there’s a lot of interest in the new Camaro, but generally for the V8. Maybe that’s why they couldn’t go all the way to 25, and so had to dock the Genesis Coupe’s “gotta have it” score to carve out the desired margin?

No disrespect meant to the Camaro. If it handles anything like the Pontiac G8 with which it shares a platform, it’s a fun car, and it looks great. I’ve driven neither car yet myself, and have no predisposition in favor of either. In other words, I’m no fanboy or hater.

My focus here has been strictly on the fairness of the test. And this is the most tilted comparison test I’ve come across in a long time. In the end, “gotta have it” is like the “reviewer’s tilt” score used by gamespot.com when reviewing games. It’s being used to ensure that the car the reviewers want to win actually wins, despite what the other scores happen to be. I’d be much more satisfied with C&D’s result here if they simply renamed “gotta have it” as “reviewer’s tilt,” since this would make the presence of the tilt explicit rather than cloaking it in “gotta have it.”