Apart from the time-honored incongruity of selling the blistering-fast Corvette, Chevrolet, the General Motors mass-market division, long has owned the role of the nation’s ultimate bread-and-butter auto brand. Nothing wrong with it – somewhere around the world, someone writes a check for a new Chevy every seven seconds – maybe just not necessarily all that aspirational, you know?
Chevy – and GM’s – new (ish) management reckons it’s time the fourth largest brand in the world addresses that aspiration factor. Chevy not only wants you to buy a Chevy, it wants you understand how just how cutting-edge a Chevrolet now is, how extensively transformed is the experience of buying and owning one. So the company is gearing up an all-encompassing initiative to convince you the bowtie brand’s newest models, technology innovations and customer experience can impress every bit as much as Apple, Disney and Tesla.
The convertible version of the 2016 Camaro sports car, one of five all-new car models Chevrolet is... [+]
Sure, the focal point is a fivesome of formidable new models launching this year. But it’s also about backing up Chevy’s otherwise evasively vague tagline of “Find New Roads” with genuine game-changing business behavior.
“Find New Roads is our absolute commitment to lead and not follow,” insists Alan Batey, global Chevrolet brand chief and GM executive vice president and president of North America, at a media program this week that unveiled the 2016 Camaro Convertible and 2016 version of the Cruze compact car, one of Chevrolet’s single most successful models.
“We have reinvented Chevy,” Batey says, promising that going forward, “When Chevy makes a move, it’s going to be exciting.”
Chevrolet’s self-proclaimed reinvention is borne by four pillars that go beyond the promise of fantastic new products to include upgraded facilities, an intensified concentration on customer service and a reach for more transformational marketing.
To get outside perspective on how to improve customer service, Chevy partnered several years ago in a program with Walt Disney Co. (DIS) to train dealers in the Disney customer-service ideal. “It’s not doing one thing 1,000 percent better,” says Batey. “It’s doing 1,000 things one-percent better.”
Chevrolet engineers pored over every aspect of the 2016 Volt plug-in hybrid to improve the... [+]
Dealers have ponied up their own money to support the customer-pleasing cause. Many of the brand’s 3,000 U.S. dealers collectively spent some $3 billion to upgrade their showrooms and other facilities. Yes, General Motors reimbursed some dealers for a portion of their individual investments, but the dealer body bore the bulk of the $3 billion pricetag, a telling show of confidence in the Chevy and GM leadership team’s strategy.
On the product side, Batey says Chevrolet wants to emulate Apple and its penchant for pleasing human-factor performance that puts the customer “right in the middle of everything we do,” so Chevy is rushing to advance connectivity technology across its model range. There’s an impressively large touchscreen and surprising array of standard in-cabin technology features for the all-new 2016 version of its inexpensive Spark subcompact car, while no less than 14 of Chevrolet’s 2016 models will enable the current hot setup for in-vehicle mobile-device connectivity: compatibility with either Apple’s CarPlay or Android Auto, both of which enable sophisticated integration of smartphones with the vehicle’s touchscreen interface and/or voice controls.
Chevrolet is speeding the adoption across its entire model range of cutting-edge but flexible... [+]
Chevrolet, in concert with a wider GM initiative, also is hustling to expand the availability of an embedded 4G LTE cellular connection for every vehicle. Besides enabling fun stuff like an onboard Wi-Fi hotspot to provide an internet connection for as many as seven personal electronic devices, the 4G LTE service is the foundation of an almost unimaginable range of future features for autonomous-driving capability. In a closer timeframe, the Corvette next year will begin using the system to provide “proactive” diagnostic alerts that can, for example, predict the failure of an unseen component such as a battery or fuel pump, alerting the vehicle owner before something randomly fails.
And Chevy also is raising the stakes in propulsion technology in a bid to become the everyman alternative to Tesla. The 2016 Volt, the second generation of Chevy’s groundbreaking but star-crossed plug-in hybrid, was designed to correct missteps with the original Volt’s packaging, performance and refinement. But most critically – not the least to the Volt’s tight and ultra-loyal owner base, many of whom may be primed to pony up for an improved replacement – the redesigned Volt will be able to travel up to 50 miles strictly on battery power, a significant increase over the current Volt’s electric-only driving range of about 38 miles.
With the 2016 Bolt (seen in concept form here) coming next year, Chevy intends to be the first... [+]
Next year, the Volt’s companion, the all-electric Bolt, brings to market what some alternative-energy pundits consider the code to widespread electric-vehicle acceptance that even vaunted Tesla has yet to crack: the Bolt will deliver a 200-mile driving range in a roomy four-door form factor that starts at just $30,000 after factoring in the government’s $7,500 incentive.
Beating Tesla to the market with a long-range electric car that’s also sure to cost thousands less may not mean the Bolt is a car for everybody. But taking on Tesla and other rivals in the high-pressure electric-propulsion arms race could be interpreted as evidence Chevy is serious about all the other aspects behind putting to rest its bread-and-butter image.
