Intuit 60 Day Money Back Guarantee

Mark Reuss

When GM initiated its Money Back Guarantee, we were tempted to buy a CTS-V to keep for two months, drive the snot out of, and return. It would have been a fun two months but in the end our lazy side won. We figured there would be a 400-yard hurdle of red tape to leap, break, and fall through to get our money back and a $65,000 expense report wouldn't just sail through the normal checks and balances of our accounting department in New York. That, and the Caddy dealer would not accept our corporate AMEX.

Had we gone through with the 60-day scam, we would have been required to have an "exit" interview with Mark Reuss, GM's vice president of global product engineering, or one of his team members. And judging by a recent roundtable interview with Reuss, we think he would have smelled our BS over the phone.

Reuss is a self-proclaimed straight talker recently returned from an 18-month assignment running GM's Aussie wing, Holden. He took questions for about an hour, most of them dealing with recent quality concerns and GM's plan for a profitable future. He quickly turned to his cheat sheet of buy-back-guarantee stats. According to Reuss, less than 200 of the recent 222,000 GM customers are in the process of returning a car.

Of those 222,000 new-vehicle buyers, 653 have opted for the guarantee instead of a $500 rebate. And of those 653, 53 have already returned their car, and another 140 or so are in the process. Reuss cited examples of a few customers that were just not happy with the exact model they purchased. One wanted an automatic instead of the manual trans they initially bought. Another was dissatisfied in the paint and finish of a Silverado. But of the roughly 200 returns, GM is only losing about 10 percent to another make. Twenty cars is not a bad price to pay for what Reuss calls, "excellent consumer research."

Guarantees used to be more than just a safety net for consumers. They meant something, with reliability (perceived or actual) playing a big part in purchase decisions—just ask Honda and Toyota. All through the meeting we could not stop thinking about the scene in Tommy Boy when Tommy (played by Chris Farley) is trying to sell his brake pads and finally gets the buyer's attention with, "Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time." We are not saying a box filled with Farley's mess is similar to the cars GM is making today, but rather that the guarantee is not good enough. All four GM brands need to be great, from top to bottom.

Then Reuss said the message he wants to get to the employees is to stop worrying about your jobs and get back to producing good products. Inspiring words and something GM's middle management needs to make happen. He added, "We can do anything we want. And do it well." The CTS-V is evidence of that. However, if GM wants to turn the corner and be profitable again, it will need to engineer and build a full line of cars and trucks with the quality and value that the V delivers.

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