Is GM finished?

GM should be finished with apologizes to all of the workers that would lose their jobs. GM might be the most mismanaged company in the world and has been that why for the last 30 plus years.

The management team has been wrong about every consumer shift in the last 40 years except once the SUV boom which they over played and have tens to hundreds of thousand of excess supply at dealer lots. When they where getting fat on trucks they ignored their car business almost completely and have no short, medium or long term plans in this area that will be competitive. They do not take any responsibility, make horrible personal decisions and they are unwilling to make hard choices.

They have as many brands in NA as does Nissan, Honda, and Toyota put together with no clear brand message for any of them except Hummer but unfortunately for them the tide turned on that brand and it will not recover any time soon if ever. Saturn has been a money pit with losses going on 15 to 20 billion over its life, the brand was supposed to bring in the young but the opposite has occurred and it is now the brand of lower income seniors. Buick is only viable in China. It probably cost more to legalize Sabbs for sale in the US then the division makes and it should be shunted and a Euro only brand and put on the market. Pontiac is a joke with no brand identity except as a rental car and it too should be shunted. GMC should be the B2B brand with almost no consumer sales move the light trucks to chevy except again for B2B. Caddy is starting to recover but still needs a lot of love and this could be a bright spot of high margin cars if managed correctly which i have no faith in. Chevy is the mainstream brand that has only 2 cars worth a damn one of which is a halo car the other was a year late with a decent supply.

GM also has a bad habit of recruiting awful management such a klutz. Here is a great idea, hire someone from a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy when he was in charge. Then let him design a bunch of niche market vehicles that have at best a small market but are expensive to tool up for. Then on top of that let him insult about half the possible consumer base while your at it. The Camero was a great idea. Just what the world wanted another retro muscle car that took what is it going on now 5 years to market. The last version died because of low sales but this time it will be different. Exactly what is the market for the Camero anyways? 20 year old will not be able to afford it, its not particle for those with familys and very few people have a "second car" anymore so that leaves the nostalgia market who can more then likely afford a vett. Then you have the bait and switch volt that looks nothing at all like it was promised to be. The car will not be affordable if it is ever produced in number. Two money pits when they needed to have to spend 70 percent of their R and D on 4 cars. A that could actually compete with the Fit, one to go against the Civic/correla, one against Camery/accord and one against the Prius. What they offer now just does not serious. And there is still no evidence that they get this yet.

Finally to finish my rant they are to p----sy to make the hard decisions. They need to file for C11 but they wont. They have over 9000 total dealers in the US while Honda and Toyota have about 6000 between the two families. The only chance they have to kill brands and lower the dealer network is to file C11 and hope they can get a judge to allow them to skirt state franchise laws. They are also more worried about being the market share leader than making a profit. They are giving the cars away and in the process insuring that the customers they get are either the ever shrinking brand loyalists or those that only shop on payments. Anyone with a shred of long term finical savvy stays away from GM products because they do not hold value at all with all of the give aways and fleet sales. I can buy an Accord and feel safe that in 3 to 4 years the car will still be worth 16k plus that is not going to happen with a G8 or Malibu.
 
Fnord said:
Now GM is talking merger with Chrysler. Two sinking ships lashed together in rough seas ... my money is on the sharks.
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I have heard this one also. And, I am still trying to figure out on what planet this makes any sense at all. Half of all Chrysler sales are fleet sales and in the next year or two I would expect that number to climb to two thirds. So GM wants to take on 2 more brands that are even more worthless than the brands they already have, take on how many factories that they are going to have a hard time closing and take on yet another Union contract? Jeep is the only thing worth a damn and its value is shrinking by the day even with the dip in gas prices.
 
TheJim said:
I have heard this one also. And, I am still trying to figure out on what planet this makes any sense at all. Half of all Chrysler sales are fleet sales and in the next year or two I would expect that number to climb to two thirds. So GM wants to take on 2 more brands that are even more worthless than the brands they already have, take on how many factories that they are going to have a hard time closing and take on yet another Union contract? Jeep is the only thing worth a damn and its value is shrinking by the day even with the dip in gas prices.
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Maybe they think they need to be "too big to fail" without a reorganization ...
 
Oh come on you mean all those Nascar dads and good ol boys aren't going to take out a 3rd mortgage on the doublewide in order to purchase a few new Chevys and Chevy trucks to keep the flag waving, beer chugging apple pie chomping great american car company alive? Seems this idiotic industrial base never learns from the past. THis goes for Ford as well. How insane was it to keep churning out SUV's and other horsepower hogs? But then again we can thank W partially, remember his big incentive program for Americans to go out and buy that junk. I hope we do loose our autromobile companies. It'll serve us right. But we still won't have learned a thing from it all.
 
Damien Evans said:
I don't buy it. What's in it for Chrysler?
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What's in it for the owners of Chrysler? They shed all those money-losing factories, dump the UAW out the door, and gain the remaining 49% of GMAC, a win-win-win outcome for them.

What's in it for GM? Consolidating all those money-losing, overstaffed, union-heavy factories under one "too big to fail" umbrella, a lose-lose-lose outcome that they may very well be able to foist off on the taxpayers as the next state-supported Volga!
 
Damien Evans said:
I don't buy it. What's in it for Chrysler?
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To add a little more depth to balrog's great 1 line summery. Cerberus the equity firm that is bought out Chrysler from Dimer wants out of the car business asap. They seemed to have thought they had a real chance of turning the company around for either a quick flip or the long haul (not really sure, there is no constant position from them one way or the other) but like GM they hired a bad management team. They made what I thought was a good hire with Press as VP but that has not turned out so well but that could be because of the genius they got by hiring Nardelli as CEO. Nardelli is a f-up on a special level of recent CEO f-ups as he killed the Home Depot stock price and made enemies of most of the rest of the C level execs which is what he did when he worked at GE. He is a hatchet man that never really dealt with a union before and the UAW handed him his a--. Cerberus realizes their mistake and knows that a long term solution will cost them many times the cash on hand (which is anywhere from 6 to 12 billion), they figured out that they can't just push around the UAW because they actually want something in return for concessions. And finally they found out they have a dealer network that is too costly to trim back. They also know that the only 2 things that they have of any value is the Jeep brand that is less valuable by the day and their factories which truly are amazing almost Honda level.

This is the only near term deal that Cerberus has for Chrysler. There is a deal possible in the middle term with Nissan but that will most likely be just for the factories and not the dealership network but it will work because Cerberus can just liquidate and screw the dealers and let Nissan worry about the UAW. And there might be some long term deals with either the Indians or Chinese but I don't know if I necessarily buy into them as really on the table. Those two markets alone will have more than enough demand to meet their respective domestic supply for the next decade at least.

One thing is almost certain that Chrysler will not be around next year as an independent company they will either sell to GM or C11 and most likely liquidate. Cerberus will not spend any money on development for their cars and instead rebadge Nissans and other makes to satisfy state franchise laws hoping that the dealers decide to exit on their own.
 
Reason number 8,052,394 that GM should fail. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-autos7-2008oct07,0,1111687.story

Short summery. Klutz says the lower gas prices is more than likely going to kill the vaporware err volt. Nice waste of a half billion dollars there.

*On the bright side, GM believes that the lower gas prices will lead to a huge rebound of SUV sales and they are ahead of the market with hundreds of thousands of SUVs waiting on dealer lots.

*this is a joke but knowing the GM management team I would place money on some version of this coming out of their mouth in the next few weeks.
 
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Crowlogic said:
Oh come on you mean all those Nascar dads and good ol boys aren't going to take out a 3rd mortgage on the doublewide in order to purchase a few new Chevys and Chevy trucks to keep the flag waving, beer chugging apple pie chomping great american car company alive? Seems this idiotic industrial base never learns from the past. THis goes for Ford as well. How insane was it to keep churning out SUV's and other horsepower hogs? But then again we can thank W partially, remember his big incentive program for Americans to go out and buy that junk. I hope we do loose our autromobile companies. It'll serve us right. But we still won't have learned a thing from it all.
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They are the ones keeping GM afloat already as anyone with a smidgen of sense already is buying Toyota, Honda, Nissan hell even Hyundai. I understand you point about Ford but at least they learned from their mistake and hired new management that understands the problems and is addressing them. I don't know if the rest of Ford management will go along for the ride but they are already far ahead of the rest in this regard. Ford plans on bringing their highly rated Euro cars over here which I think is a great thing as the Euro Focus, Fiesta and Mondoa all have great reps over there, high build quality, great styling and sales success. As long as the only changes they make are option packages and trim levels they could have a great success, if they go redesign them for "domestic taste" they will bomb.
 
Crowlogic said:
How insane was it to keep churning out SUV's and other horsepower hogs? But then again we can thank W partially, remember his big incentive program for Americans to go out and buy that junk.
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What incentive program was that?

I hope we do loose our autromobile companies. It'll serve us right. But we still won't have learned a thing from it all.
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While we're learning, how about learning the difference between "lose" and "loose"? ;)
 
As I have noted elsewhere, Mattel is now worth more than GM.

I heard a commentator on the radio last night. With the windfall profits from oil, the Middle East oil countries could buy out the entire European banking system.
 
TheJim said:
Reason number 8,052,394 that GM should fail. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-autos7-2008oct07,0,1111687.story

Short summery. Klutz says the lower gas prices is more than likely going to kill the vaporware err volt. Nice waste of a half billion dollars there.

*On the bright side, GM believes that the lower gas prices will lead to a huge rebound of SUV sales and they are ahead of the market with hundreds of thousands of SUVs waiting on dealer lots.

*this is a joke but knowing the GM management team I would place money on some version of this coming out of their mouth in the next few weeks.
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Lower fuel prices are purely a response to the economic crises. No one is going to be spending too much on cars regardless of fuel costs.
 
I believe it's something so damn big and heavy it takes gobs of horsepower for it just to perform equally as well as a much smaller and lighter vehicle .... which would serve its owner just as well as the urban tank 99.8% of the time.
 
Just thinking said:
I believe it's something so damn big and heavy it takes gobs of horsepower for it just to perform equally as well as a much smaller and lighter vehicle .... which would serve its owner just as well as the urban tank 99.8% of the time.
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Most "SUV's" are just cars with funny looking fairing. They don't usually weight any more than the other cars.

The truth is most cars today, even the economy ones weigh FAR more than those "heavy pigs" of the 60's and early 70's
 
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