Ben's Weekend Special- Daewoo

1999 Daewoo Leganza
photo credit-Wikipedia

Trying to be a successful automaker in the U.S market is a huge challenge, especially within the last quarter century.  Carmakers such as Yugo and Daihatsu bit the dirt after only a few years on the market and others like Hyundai and Kia had a very rocky start before finding a healthy market demographic.  

And this is where we get to the Daewoo (which is apparently pronounced Dae-oo, according to John Davis of Motorweek).  The way I describe Daewoo is that they are the Mitsubishi of South Korea.  They make tons of other things aside from cars, such as heaters, hotel TVs (and hotels themselves), construction equipment, oil drilling, and textiles to name a few.  Daewoo Motors started building cars in the early 80s, making mostly re-badged GM products (remember the LeMans I talked about a while back?) But by the early 90s, Daewoo learned to walk on its own and started developing cars in-house.  Eventually, Daewoo became confident enough to take on the ultra competitive U.S market.  

In 1997, Daewoo dropped anchor in North America.  With them, they introduced us to three models, the Subcompact Lanos which came as a hatchback or a sedan, the Nubira, which came as a sedan and station wagon, and the Leganza, which was Daewoo's "premium" car. 

1999-2002 Lanos hatchback
photo credit-Wikipedia

Daewoo took a rather odd approach to marketing their cars.  Rather than invest thousands of dollars in producing commercials, newspaper ads, or press releases, Daewoo used "word of mouth" to draw customers to showrooms, much like a mom and pop shop.  This method backfired, as in the first few months, Daewoo, sold only a few hundred cars.  

Daewoo's next marketing idea was even more unconventional.  Rather than establish traditional dealerships to sell the cars, Daewoo would recruit prosperous college students (mostly marketing majors) to market the cars and sell them to their fellow college students.  The idea was for college students to bypass the stresses of Dealerships and haggling.  This plan was good...perhaps too good.  The idea was so innovative that other carmakers petitioned congress to outlaw such a practice.  But luckily for them, this strategy also backfired, as Daewoo didn't take into consideration that most college students don't have money or credit to even afford an old beater, let alone a brand new car.  So after two marketing strategies fell through, Daewoo eventually caved in to traditional marketing and sales tactics and sales slowly began to rise.  

2001 Daewoo Nubria Wagon

I was about 7 or 8 years old when Daewoo started appearing on the streets of Milwaukee.  I remember how my dad and I were puzzled at where Daewoo got those odd names for their cars.  This was also before I learned how to write in cursive, so whenever I see a Leganza, I always mis-pronounced the name as "Lasagna." And ironically, I didn't know I was pronouncing the Lanos and Nubira wrong all the way up to when I created this post...

Daewoo seemed to be on the right track to gaining a presence.  The cars were becoming more of a common sight on the street, advertisements were beginning to pop up, and the Nissan/Kia/Daewoo dealership near my house started to see more foot traffic.  However, in 2002, Daewoo literally disappeared overnight from the U.S market.  I first noticed this when I went to the 2003 Milwaukee Auto Show and found that Daewoo was noticeably absent from the list of automakers being present.  I asked about it's whereabouts to some auto show officials and they didn't even know.  

Well, it turns out that Daewoo was experiencing some financial problems back in South Korea.  Around the same time Daewoo started exporting cars to America, a recession hit Eastern Asia, weakening South Korea's currency.  The Daewoo Group (the entire company, not just it's car division) was forced to cut a ton of their assets and lay off a ton of people, making the recession even worse.  On top of that, Daewoo's top executives, including CEO Kim Woo-jung were arrested for fraud and embezzling while the company was sinking.  Daewoo's American expedition was pretty much doomed from the start.

Daewoo's car division was sold to GM (who already had a controlling stake in the automaker.) and was renamed "GM Daewoo."  Like they did with the LeMans of the 80s and 90s, GM would depend on their Korean department to make their small cars.  For those of you that know of Chevy's Aveo, Sonic, and Spark compact cars, those cars were all designed and assembled by Daewoo.  

So the departure of Daewoo wasn't due to the cars itself.  In fact, when I looked at websites such as Edmunds or cars.com, I found that these cars were actually quite reliable.  Most of the issues that people had with these things were small, tedious things such as the leather seats wearing away, glove boxes that won't stay closed, and cup holders that were "too small." Hell, I even knew a guy in High School that I bowled with whose mom had a Leganza.  I brought it up to him once and he told me that the power steering was unusually loose...but that his mom liked it like that.  

One last thing, I was watching "Taxi" (not the show, the 2004 movie starring Queen Latifah) where the title character ridicules a green hatchback, claiming she didn't want to "get Daewoo on her hands."Here's a link.