My parents rented a Cadillac DTS last year for a road trip. They were not impressed.
It had lots of gadgets, but they were poorly made gadgets, with exactly the same lack of quality you'd find in cheap fallapart electronics at wal-mart. It was like the Emerson clock radio that looks all nice from a distance, but up close, it's cheap chrome over plastic, the knobs fall off, and the display goes out. That's how the car was. Brand-new, and the gadgets were already malfunctioning. The switches on things (if you looked beneath the overmolded bezel) were the cheapest possible switches, the flimsiest plastic ones, the ones you'd see for the lowest price from Digi-Key or some other catalog.
Why would you pay $60,000 for that instead of buying a Lexus or Acura instead that's far more solid, thoughtfully built, and with more of a feel of crafted quality...not just chromeplated plastic on everything?
Interior materials and fit and finish should be excellent. We're too good with composites now, and robots can fit things perfectly and inspect with lasers. Doors should close with a solid, quality latch thunk, not a lowgrade-alloy clack from somewhere within. Buttons and controls should feel solid, not like there's a flimsy plastic surface epoxied to the stalk of the cheapest possible contact switch beneath that bends and wobbles uncertainly as you push on it.
And GM has not learned that. So they should go away till someone can re-form a new version that turns quicker than a supertanker, that focuses on quality, not bland repetition of poorly executed ideas and massive union handouts. Let the winners actually win. It's how the market works.
