B-Segment Surprise: 2011 Chevrolet Viva

General Motors said Friday morning, 10 days after President Obama announced new fuel mileage standards and three days before the automaker declares bankruptcy, that it will build a new small car in an idled U.S. plant.
Thursday afternoon, retiring GM Vice Chairman/Product Chief Bob Lutz showed the Automotive Press Association a chart with recently produced and near-future product names in tiny letters. Most were known to the automotive press. One was not: Chevrolet Viva.
And on Friday, Forbes columnist Jerry Flint wrote of how the United Auto Workers has destroyed Detroit. Factories here are closing, even as import manufacturers open non-union shops, mostly in the South.

The reopened plant will be a UAW shop, of course. GM says in its release that the retooled plant will have capacity of 160,000 per year, building a combo of small and compact vehicles. GM will determine the sight selection in the future. Lake Orion, Michigan, Wilmington, Delaware or Shreveport, Louisiana, all have potential.
What about the small car? It’s not the Chevrolet Spark. That car, a four-door hatchback version of the Beat two-door hatch concept (which used a name Honda still owns), is on an old Daewoo platform. It cost GM some cash to beef up the body structure after it had been designed to meet U.S. and European crash standards.
The new b-segment small car and c-segment compact to be built in the U.S. must be on new, flexible platforms that could be assembled at any GM plant in the world that builds on those same platforms.
The next-generation Chevy Aveo is set for the 2011 model year. If the new car has the kind of design excellence Lutz claims GM has rediscovered, it should be a serious competitor for Ford’s 2011 Fiesta. In that case, the Aveo name will do it no favors, so “Viva” seems likely (the moniker dates back to a 1960s Vauxhall and has recently been used on compact GMs in Russia and Australia), if too directly influenced by the Ford’s Spanish name.
Building a Chevy Viva in a UAW plant will cost more than building the Aveo in South Korea. It should be much more stylish and upmarket compared with the current Aveo. Chevy would have the advantage over Ford of a more ready supply of its competitor if the b-segment, fueled also by the coming Fiat 500 and a small Dodge, takes off in the next few years.
GM says about 67-percent of GM cars and trucks sold in the U.S. are built in the U.S. (remember, this doesn’t include Canadian or Mexican NAFTA production) and that the number will rise to about 70 percent with the addition of the 160,000-unit b-/c-segment plant. An important fact as GM goes into Chapter 11 with help from the federal government, which wants to preserve U.S. jobs.
And addition of a relatively high-volume b-segment car won’t hurt when the 2012-16 Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations kick in.
What about the c-segment car to be built in the same factory? GM already has committed its Chevy Vega/Cavalier/Cobalt factory in Lordstown, Ohio, to production of the 2011 Chevy Cruze. And Volt is slated for Hamtramck, Michigan. That leaves the 2012 Chevy Orlando MPV and a 2012 Buick compact (go ahead, call it “Skylark”), both to be built on the same platform as the Cruze. Either is likely, although side-by-side production with the Cruze in Lordstown would make more sense for the Buick.