A microcosm of late 90s GM:
The final Seville was (and significantly narrowing the scope of the discussion compared
to before):
- Redesigned from the ground up to be able to be sold worldwide. The interior and drivetrain was designed from the start to be built from the factory as LHD or RHD (I'm pretty sure the first American market GM car to do so), and most of the relevant interior part numbers are even labeled to that effect if you check the tags on them. The models in all markets were wired for things like amber turn signals and rear foglights, the headlights were designed to meet European lighting regulations without requiring addon light fixtures, the bodyshell was redesigned compared to Greyhound Seville so a simple bumper swap made it fit within 5 meter size regulations, the interior was the most European in design any American car had ever had, etc.
- The car debuted at the Geneva motor show, and was the pace car at Le Mans.
- Models exported had standard features from the factory as needed for their designated market, like folding mirrors or heavy duty cooling; and could be built on the same assembly line as USDM models instead of converted by exporters after the fact by parts GM made for other markets but weren't interested in installing themselves (as was the case for all the other cars in that post), just like European cars built in America like the Z3 were.
- Had highly adaptable computer systems that allowed specific tuning for markets as needed (for example, that Clarkson review where he praised the car overall but hated the transmission was a change made to the transmission programming to make it pass European noise regulations because the 4T80 was a snappy and responsive transmission otherwise; and stuff that the US market wouldn't need like rear fog lamps were controlled in software) just like the European cars did.
That's an awful lot of effort to put into making the Seville a world car when the E39
kinda made it an also-ran from debut and was already out in Europe for several years by that point. GM once again put out a car by targeting the competitors on sale when development started. Substantially improved over the Greyhound Seville it may be, 1998 was already the absolute latest GM could have possibly tried to market a FWD car (on a platform designed to allow RWD!) as a serious alternative to a BMW 5-series, no matter how advanced the suspension, traction and stability control systems were, and they were
debuting the car then. The market had come a
long way in the 6 years since the Greyhound Seville debuted and legitimately took the fight to the best (albeit aging and still slowly reacting to Lexus) in the segment. How many did they ever realistically think they would sell to justify all this effort?
As I understand it, in the UK (the only market that they realistically could have done reasonably well unless Japan randomly fell in love with it), they sold around... 500.
)
