See… that’s also what I’m talking about. :)
Bingo.
There was analysis done in the LA Times some time ago that showed that having all the different brands did very little for GM’s market share, but significantly increased its costs. Also a nit; Toyota actually has three brands here in the US-Toyota, Lexus, and Scion.
This is spot-on.
Chevy and Pontiac have been hitting the same stupid demographics for years, it’s surprising that they didn’t merge them sooner. Those 4 represent the most different lineups and target the most diverse set of demographics of all the GM nameplates.
And as BC said, Subaru and Hummer are ripe for spinning off.
I think people are completely forgetting it’s not just the Big3 that go out - It’s the suppliers too, many of whom are used by the other automakers in their domestic production.
So what happens when Toyota, Honda, et al aren’t sourcing enough parts from these suppliers to keep them afloat? They’re already hurting too.
Half of U.S. auto suppliers face bankruptcy: study | Reuters
I don’t think Subaru is a division of GM. Do you mean Saab?
Subaru is a division of Fuji Heavy Industries.
No doubt; the ‘seat for ever ass and an ass for every seat’ model that GM (and to a lesser extent Ford and When-Plymouth-Was-Around-Chrysler) still has ingraned in its corporate culture makes sense only when you can have real product differenation between the various companies. I mean, GMC is just as much of a competator for GM as Ford is, complete with a seperate dealership network and advertising; I’ve never understood it’s reason for existance (you can have almost the exact same argument for Mercury in the Ford camp). It’s the fucking Michelob of car companies in that no one can quite figure out its continued existance other than sheer organization interta.
The opposing arguement to this is Oldsmobile and the circumstances that went to it’s closing. For a lot of reasons, the issue is still very fresh in the minds of GM management.
Seperate from the ‘what of GM survives’ discussion, I think that the announcements of the past few days are more of a wake-up call to the GM bondholders that have refused to take a haircut. From what I’ve read, they’ve been very hardcore in not accepting any writedown. This might be a shot across the bow.
He might mean Isuzu; IIRC they’re owned by GM. They mostly deal in medium duty diesel vehicles.
I can see that arguement; I’m just thinking in the ‘4 Company’ model. I think that Saturn can be the ‘entry vehicle’* for GM’s European/Outside America car platforms, and do well at it. Plus, you’ve got the whole seperate dealership network of Saturn. Might as well put it to good use.
*No puns were harmed in the making of this post.
Toyota, Honda, et al would be hurting a lot less if a bunch of their competition up and vanished. What is hurting suppliers is not the number of car companies doing business in the US, but the number of cars being produced. That’s down right now whether Chrysler (for instance) stays in business or not.
To look at it another way–if Chrysler went out of business tomorrow, it’s not like their customers are going to just stop buying cars. They will just have to buy them from someone else, and that someone else will need to ramp up production (thus requiring more materials from suppliers) to meet the new demand.
Is that a positive? Having so many dealerships is one of the things costing GM money. Toyota generally has one dealership in an area that carries both the Toyota and Lexus lines. GM will have three or more. How does that do anything other than increase overhead? To me, the Saturn dealer network is an asset that could be sold off, but doesn’t bring any value to GM. Because at the end of the day, if Saturn is losing money it’s losing money regardless of its strengths a positives.
It can be; though to be honest I’m not exactly sure that GM’s management level employees could leverage a carton of colored eggs delivered now for Easter (and get them out to the public) at this point. They’ve been doing better (Vue/Sky, Camero, Lambda platform, some of the engine designs, etc), but if they’d been doing that 10 or even 5 years ago we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Getting rid of the dealerships is going to cost money unless we decide that contract law means differently to auto companies than it does to (to yank up an example from recent news, and I don’t mean to be inflamatory) AIG. To be honest, shutting down the dealerships in a less then 4 model is going to cause a lot of problems; from a cost/benefit perspective, selling Saturn now, at a bottom time for automobiles, isn’t a great business idea.
Bleeding money on a car line that isn’t making money isn’t either though (I’ll take your word that they haven’t made a profit yet). Rock and a hard place kind of decisions never are. Unless Renault or Pugoet want’s to open up a line here.
With Renault one of two companies that has a BetterPlace contract and a mass market prototype, they might just start selling here.
I’d like to see GM go with just 3 brands: Saturn at the entry level, GM at the middle level, and them Pontiac as a rejuvenated high-end model. Ditch Cadillac–it has the stench of everything that is wrong with America at the moment to me. I’m sorry, but they are STILL advertising those fucking Escalades over and over during every sporting event, and trying to BRAG about it getting 20 mpg. That’s just wrong wrong wrong.
I know this won’t happen, but I’d love to see it nonetheless.
As a general metric, places like Zimbabwe have 80% unemployment. I’m fairly certain you don’t want to live there.
Then again, no one bailed out the Zimbabwean auto industry!
Based on the righties’ performance in the past decade, we’ll outsource it to Halliburton and it’ll get done in a half-assed fashion just enough to make sure everyone’s pockets involved are duly lined. At some point we’ll be informed that the war isn’t actually about Hitler, but bringing freedom to Spain.
Oh, and I thought GM had already announced they were phasing out Saturn and Saab. Of course it’s not like that can’t be reversed!
Yeah, Saturn was on the chopping block anyway. The brand never made any money, and when they started importing lame cars (I think they were Opels) and throwing a Saturn label on them it just got worse.
I own a Saturn, which is one of the reasons I expect to never again buy an American car.
To be fair, most of Saturn’s current lineup are not really American cars, as Menzo mentioned. The Vue, in particular, is just a rebranded Opel Antara. The Antara is manufactured in South Korea by GM Daewoo; the Vue is built in Mexico. Let’s hear it for American manufacturing!