Basic GM engines are good solid designs. The 5.7 litre Chev motor is one of the greats in terms of being bullet-proof.
Trouble is with 98% of Yank stuff, there is bugger all attention to quality, so you can get a good or a bad one. I've had both. And their one problem is it's a big lump of metal that would do for a boat mooring and about as inefficient as it is possible to make. The Yanks were never driven to fuel efficient design.
American iron used to account for around 60% of the US market. Now its more like 20%. It's almost like the complacent auto companies and the United Auto Workers and their feather-bedded outlandish expectations in a diminishing market offered a road-map to the foreign manufacturers, and it's no wonder Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Mazda all walked in to the US. There used to be around 700,000 auto workers on US cars. Now there are around 73,000.
While US cars have improved somewhat in quality more recently, they are still big crap clunky ugly barges when viewed next to even the worst of the Asian cars. Body fitment is shoddy with no standard panel gaps, plastic looks like horrible plastic, nothing is neatly clipped up, fastenings are all odd sizes and nuts and bolt heads are shit metal that rounds off in a strong breeze, instrumentation is abysmal and awful looking and offers lots of glare, and they are more concerned with cup-holders than real function, seating is horrible and offers little or no support, they are about as slippery as a brick and they neither handle nor corner well or safely.
CP_e Standback & PNP; CP_e 3" SS Downpipe; Corksport FMIC with Top-mount K&N filter & OEM Ram CAI; Turbosmart BOV; Dashhawk; Prosport Boost Guage; JBR solid shift bushes; DBA 4000 Wiper-Slot front rotors; Hawk Ferro-Carbon HPS Street front brake pads (@ 69,000km); Sumitomo HTRZIII's in 225/45 x 18