GM’s W-Body started out as the GM10, which got off to miserable start with the 1988 Buick Regal, Olds Cutlass Supreme and Pontiac Grand Prix coupes. In any case, it didn’t rely on pretense to badge and sell them, even in foreign-car besotted California. It was just “Taurus”, at least until the SHO came along, and its badging was notoriously stealthy.Īctually, Ford was probably more worried about the opposite: that folks would think the Taurus was genuinely too euro for conservative American tastes. Fool me once…Ĭhevrolet was obviously looking at the Taurus when it designed the Lumina, but if they’d taken a closer look, they might have noticed that Ford totally dispensed with any hokey marketing efforts to make the Taurus seem more “euro”. And selling any Chevy with “Euro” plastered all over it to a Californian in the early nineties would have been a heroic feat indeed, after years of pushing the Eurosport Celebrity. On the West Coast, the only lots where one would see these was at Hertz and Avis Chevy dealers didn’t even bother to stock them. Did they have redeeming qualities? Undoubtedly but I’m hardly the one to ask. It instantly joined its smaller brother Corsica as the very icons of fleet queens, a title its W-Body successors defended right to the present. The Lumina was a desperate effort to play catch-up with Ford’s runaway hit Taurus as well as to parry with the Camry and Accord the result was predictably dim. ( first posted ) Despite its name, the Lumina failed to bring any light to those dark years at GM when it arrived.
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