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Tribeca etc... Posted by Snowmobile [Email] (#686) [Profile/Gallery] (more from Snowmobile) on Fri, 25 Nov 2016 06:48:19 In Reply to: Re: Subaru just dropped six places in CR reliability rankings., cheaptech [Profile/Gallery] , Fri, 25 Nov 2016 05:41:10 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
I thought Tribeca was generally liked by those who owned them, but not really a success in the marketplace?
It can really be hard to know with this kind of stuff... How a product affects a brand, why people go to one brand vs another... I really wondered about Porsche making an SUV, and yet, that seems to have been a success for the company... maybe I'm wrong, but I see plenty of Cayennes on the roads. The Macan, I wondered about at first also, but in the flesh, it looks very sharp, and with greater performance (more Porsche like) than their first SUV effort, they've become thoroughly entrenched and part of the brand image.
Really, as I see it, Subaru is about "right sized" "rurally capable" vehicles with a kind of Japanese rally racing slant on the smaller models... Many of the subie buyers around here (ignoring the boy racer group) would fall into a similar kind of niche as Volvo or Saab wagon owners, but maybe with biases leaning more towards perceived "Japanese reliability" than "European ergonomics"... if that makes sense... certainly this is true of my many Subaru-owning friends... I don't know a Subaru owner who would want a mini-van or bigger SUV... so I think that is where they run into trouble with something larger like the Tribeca was... big SUV is just not part of the cult mantra... subie folk are mostly anti-bigSUV!
I've said the same things about SAAB for decades now... there was a niche that SAAB excelled at: hatchbacks, wagons, etc that had a perfect mix of utility, safety, performance, and design... really all of those cars from the late 70's to early 2000's had a unique style vs other manufacturers and hence the cult following. Introducing SUVs into the mix really did not work. In the early 2000's GM claimed that SAAB needed an SUV because exit surveys showed that former SAAB owners were "buying SUV's"... that is partially true, but in these parts, the SUVs they were buying were in significant proportion Outbacks, Foresters, XC70's, etc... not really the same as GM's idea of an SUV... and the reason? this was at a time when GM only offered the 9-3 as a sedan. What many wanted was a back end that would eat a dishwasher and perhaps AWD and a bit more clearance... 9-3X would have been popular in 2003 I would think! More so than 9-7x... Remember the 9-6 (Saabaru #2) was going to be a SAAB Tribeca. See image. Looks nicer than Tribeca, but meh as a SAAB for me anyway... (park it next to an SPG - does it fit?)
Anyway, I suppose this is too long - my point is success may have more to do with brand-fit, than simple "me-too" direct competition with existing established players... there may be a reason people come to your brand in the first place! Then again, well executed, like Porsche, it might work.
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