First 2018 Chevrolet Equinox Design Sucked So Bad That Mark Reuss Has Vowed You'll Never See It

After a long eight-year run for the second-generation Chevrolet Equinox, General Motors finally dropped the third-generation 2018 Chevrolet Equinox in September 2016. The 2018 Chevrolet Equinox might not be your cup of tea — I like the look, and the diesel option — but we learned late last month that it could have been downright awful.

How bad was it? It looked too bulky, too odd, too underwhelming, according to focus groups. The Equinox’s chief engineer, Mark Cieslak, said, “What we have on paper we felt was not going to win.”

So GM went back to the drawing board.

But seriously, how bad was it? We want to know, as does Autoweek, which tweeted last Saturday, “We really want to see what the abandoned version looked like.”

GM’s executive vice president for global product development, the Twitter-affable Mark Reuss, responded just 10 minutes later. And, uh, my guess is they really don’t want us to see the first third-gen Equinox.

“Too bad. Ain’t gonna happen,” Mark Reuss replied to the Autoweek tweet.

Of course that’s what he’s going to say. If GM relented and showed us pictures and specs of a small crossover that wasn’t good enough to bring to an auto show, let alone bring to market, the automaker would have to suffer the consequences. Images of a failed GM design would be passed around the internet for the rest of time.

And yet, Mark Reuss didn’t really have to say anything. He wasn’t forced to comment on a tweet by a single publication on a Saturday afternoon.

Mark Reuss went out of his way to tell Autoweek’s editors and readers that they can’t, they shall not, they will never feast their eyes upon the failure that was the early Equinox draft.

Was it really that bad?

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.