I took a few digs at the forthcoming Chevrolet Malibu on my Facebook yesterday.
First: a few things GM got right.
It’s right to put this on a global platform—in this case, the Opel Insignia‘s. It’s also right to make it a world car of sorts, where it can be sold globally with few changes, to maximize economies of scale.
It’s also right to put in various Chevrolet-like touches. In the above video, you’ll hear the head exterior designer, Dan Gifford, go on about the coupé-like bits that’ll appear on the new Malibu. This only makes sense so that the brand has a certain æsthetic—something which it lacks at the moment as it tries to shift rebadged Daewoos.
However, I’m not too confident about this car, despite the excellent, award-winning platform.
Chevrolet’s message of recent years has been so different in each region that I wonder if some will even get the Camaro connection with the Malibu’s rear-light design.
And this will be, I believe, the first new product from Chevrolet in the Korean market since the failure of the Holden Torana-based 1700 in the 1970s.
In other words, in the east, where GM has already said the Malibu will make its Mali-début, it will replace the Daewoo Tosca, probably the most underwhelming car produced in the last decade, and a favourite of suicidal Seoul taxi drivers.
The reason the Tosca is so ugly is that its designers expected it to be dented by fleet customers, thereby improving its looks.
Daewoo needs to keep some link between Tosca and Chevrolet Malibu. It has to appeal to east Asian tastes, where GM expects to sell a lot of these cars, which means some of the aggression that Gifford talks about will likely be toned down.
If you look at the spy photos or the animation above, it still looks like a big Daewoo to me, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It is an improvement—don’t get me wrong—but I’m still expecting it to make the designers of the 2006 Toyota Camry appear prescient.