From O to 100

摘要

DO YOU remember back in old la, when everybody drove a Chevrolet? The opening line of "Beach Baby", a 1974 hit, is one of hundreds of gratuitous plugs that writers of pop songs have given to General Motors' mass-market brand down the decades. Snoop Dogg's "Ridin' in my Chevy" is a recent, less family-friendly example. Chevrolet, which celebrates its centenary on November 3rd, is as woven into the fabric of American culture as Coca-Cola. Not all of its birthdays have been happy, but as it reaches its 100th its prospects are on the up. In the July to September quarter, a record 1.2m cars and pickups with the Chevy "bow-tie" badge on their bonnets were sold worldwide. In 1911, when William Durant, gm's founder, was turfed out by the company's bankers, he joined forces with Louis Chevrolet, a Swiss-born racing driver, to set up a new carmaker (later folded into gm, when Durant briefly regained control). At $24.50, their first car, the Classic Six, looked pricey next to Henry Ford's $490 Model t. So in 1915 Durant met his rival head on with a model called the 490 and costing the same. Then Chevrolet really started motoring. By the 1960s, the era of the fabulous, bullet-shaped Corvette Stingray, Chevrolet accounted for about half of gm's 60% share of America's car market. Then the road got bumpy. In the 1970s Elton John was still "Dreaming of my Chevy and my old blue jeans" but Chevrolet was turning out spluttering rustbuckets like the Vega. Its reputation, along with the quality and design of its cars, went into a long tailspin, ending with a bump in gm's bankruptcy and bail-out in 2009, when Chevy's market share was just 12.7%. It then dawned on gm's bosses, as Durant realised ini9is, that Chevrolet needed to do better at the smaller end of the market-this time against foreign brands, not local rivals.