Oldsmobile

Cause of death

Killed by indifference

Made by

General Motors

GM could no longer say who the brand was for, and neither could its customers.

Oldsmobile was America's oldest surviving car brand, older than Ford, and it built the first mass-produced automobile in the country. Its problem by the 1990s was positional rather than technical: squeezed between Chevrolet below and Buick above, it spent a decade advertising that it was not your father's Oldsmobile, which mostly reminded everyone that it had been. The last one rolled off the line in 2004 after 107 years.