GoAuto hears from GM Car Czar Maximum Bob Lutz himself that the Camaro and G8 will be the last US market GM products based on Holdens RWD Zeta platform. The strategy we had a few years ago of basically deriving a whole sweeping global portfolio off the Australian Zeta architecture frankly, we have had to abandon that dream, said Lutz. This is because, whether you are in the United States or in China, fuel economy mandates are getting more and more severe, and we just could not base our strategy on doing relatively large and relatively heavy rear-wheel-drive cars. I suspect the same thing is going to start to bite the traditional rear-wheel drive producers. Not that theyre ditching the platform entirely. It is our intent to continue the Australian rear-wheel-drive cars; we will continue building them and doing a next generation and so forth and so on, says Mr Maximum. And, to be honest, they continue to be my favourite cars. I think they are absolutely wonderful - but the regulatory environment is such that it would be imprudent to base a whole global platform strategy on them much to my personal chagrin, by the way. And what of the rumored Alpha compact RWD platform?

What many of us would like to do (one day) is to do an all-new global rear-wheel drive architecture that would be considerably smaller, lighter and be capable of taking four-cylinder powertrains, says Lutz. That, I think, could be globally shared. Its not even in the plan at this point; its just what we tell ourselves in that there is going to have to be a next-generation Camaro, and there is going to have to be a next-generation Cadillac sedan, and so there is going to have to be a smaller and a way more efficient rear-wheel-drive architecture. But at this point it is just a gleam in our eye.