Remember Daewoo? The third South Korean automaker snuck quietly onto the American scene in 1998, with three models and a sales plan that involved college studen
ts hawking the cars, Mary Kay-style, to their friends. So what ever happened to Daewoo? The dealers disappeared in 2002, but their cars still have a presence here in the U.S. Here's what happened, and why.Daewoo certainly got an auspicious start. While Hyundai and Kia both started with a single model , Daewoo launched with a comprehensive lineup of three cars. The entry-level Lanos was available as both a two-door hatch or a four-door sedan, powered by a 105-hp 1.6-liter engine.
Sales were slow, though, and it shouldn't come as a big surprise that more than half of the cars sold in those first few months were bought by the campus advisors themselves. The students later filed a class-action lawsuit against Daewoo; not only did they have to pay sales tax on the full sticker price, but they were surprised to learn that the 50 percent discount was reported as income to the IRS.
Student uprisings aside, Daewoo didn't last long: Their U.S. foray corresponded with the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Daewoo Group, a massive conglomerate of which Daewoo Motors was a subsidiary, went bankrupt in 1999, its chairman fleeing to Vietnam to escape fraud and embezzlement chargers. The car division was sold to General Motors to be reorganized as GM Daewoo and later GM Korea. Daewoo sales never took off in the States, and their American experiment came to an end in 2002.
Production of the Lanos ceased in 2002, but GM continued to sell the car in knocked-down kit form to developing markets and third-world nations. Up until 2020 you could still buy a Chevrolet-badged Lanos in Egypt. Meanwhile, GM Daewoo's replacement for the Lanos, the Kalos, was available stateside asThe Nubura was redesigned after Daewoo's 2002 US retreat as the Daewoo Lacetti, though that was just one of many monikers it wore.
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