[Nas Escobar]

It really takes a while, but when you go to junkyards and you start picking around GM cars to see what you can make fit in your car, you start to realize how much the cars have in common despite being different brands. I know for a while they were truly different cars, but since the 70's they have been more or less the same cars. Once divisions became sub brands and shared the same engines, that's when it was a wrap. What I find funny is that cars that bear no relation to each other except for the same brand have pieces that interchange while cars that were more or less developed together can be so vastly different.

For example you can get a FWD 3800 and use it in a Camaro provided that you swap the Camaro specific parts. The Camaro front seats fit the Cavalier and Sunfire. The 90's H body seats fit the B/D body cars, mostly the bubbles (Caprice/Impala, Roadmaster, Fleetwood) but IDK if they fit the 80's cars. You can swap independent rear suspension on a J body using N body parts. There's a write up of that on the Cavalier forum. The Cadillacs and the Aurora have the battery under the seat, but the Buicks have them in the hood. The cars are only the same structurally, but manage to be completely different... for example a 3800 swap into a Cadillac isn't doable as say a 3800 swap into a 1st gen W (which only Buick got, the rest had the DOHC engine that's infamous for being a bitch to work on). The 2004 and 2005 Pontiac Bonneville got Northstar engines (not sure how many know that), yet it wasn't a big deal as when the W body got a V8.