VE Commodore: Shorter lifecycle, more mileage

QUESTIONED further, Mr Mooney said a lifecycle did not necessarily mean an all-new vehicle. "Our lifecycles won’t be as long as this lifecycle (but) that doesn’t mean you do an all-new architecture either," he said. "We could re-skin the car and put an all-new ‘upper’ so it looked like an all-new car, and take the chassis and other (components). But typically you’d say in 10 to 12 years you might like take an architecture, before there’s new technologies and other things that might overwhelm it.

"As the crash test standards around the world start to evolve, as a manufacturer you have no choice sometimes other than to redo some of your structure. You like to keep your structure around – you know, it’s the stuff nobody sees. The customer doesn’t see the underbody – they don’t see all that stuff. If you get the geometries of the suspension right, and get what I call the fundamentals (right), you can carry it as long as you want." Why end exec, Acclaim?
"ALL these models have historic significance with some of our fleet customers, and some other buyers," Mr Mooney said. "And we actually brought some of the customers in and talked with them about what we wanted to do – and that’s where we ended up. I don’t claim to have all the historic rationale.

"I think our line-up was over-complicated in today’s market."