This has been a big year for GM's organization alignment, with President Fritz Henderson opening up about the brand issue snafu and the appointment of four brand czars. HUMMER was meant to join forces with Cadillac and Saab in a premium channel, but while HUMMER is still in the family, it's apparently been put out on the lawn. GM Inside News (GMI) reports that GM is treating HUMMER as a goner, saying that the H4 program is on life support for handover to the next buyer, and the H3 GMT-700 program is kaput.

The bigger hearsay is that GM's board is considering euthanizing GMC or Pontiac. Those two brands were to be aligned in a brand channel with Buick (PBG). Getting rid of GMC could make some kind of sense, since it's entirely brand-engineered vehicles with some of the worst mileage numbers in the fleet. Shunning Pontiac would be a surprise to us since the Solstice and G8 have given it a nice brand awareness boost and it's got some products in the pipeline. If GMC or Pontiac did go, the GM board would consider folding Saturn into the PBG channel to maintain sales volume. In corporate-speak, we believe this is called GM's "gloves off" phase. Thanks for the tip, Dan!

 

GMC is a useless brand, it should go.

 

I guess there's the school of thought that says give Chevy trucks the Denali treatment on the high end and kill GMC. The big reason why GMC made sense was that trucks were extremely profitable, especially in the ridiculous volume they were moving. Now -- not so much. Trucks may be free-falling into a liability now, something no one could imagine just a few years ago.

However, there are still a lot of guys who will not buy a Chevy truck, for them it's GMC or nothing. I'd hate to see such knee-jerk reactions to gas prices and CAFE on this magnitude (killing a long standing traditional brand).

 

I honestly wouldn't care.

The economy isnt lucrative enough to support the old stupid ideas like GMC...

 

GMC has been around like 90 years or something... we have high gas prices for a year or so, and people think it's time to just kill it.

It made it through the gas crunch of the 70's OK.

It puts trucks and SUV's in showrooms that otherwise wouldn't have them. If Buick/Pontiac/GMC is truely treated as a GROUP, I see no problem with GMC.

Remember, Olds is gone, and GM NEVER got that volume back. The same woudl happen with GMC leaving, IMO.

 

I always thought that GMCs were just cheaper versions of Chevrolets. Kind of like the "equate" brand at Wal-Mart. Its essentially the same thing with different packaging. I could be wrong though, thats just how I always viewed them.

 

Actually its been a premium version. Chevy is the Sams Choice of everything GM.

 

If GMC goes away, the Buick/Pontiac dealership network goes with it. They will probably consolidate everything under the roof of your friendly neighborhood Chevy dealer.

This might be the first step towards GM actually rationalizing it's brand structure, which would be a good thing.

 

Yup, GMC is GM's second bets selling division. Why would anyone want to throw all those sales away?

GMC out sold Saturn and Buick combined and at a higher price per unit. GM probably spends as much money on Saab and they don't even get 1/10th the sales. Sierra is still selling over 13,000 units a month and they will sell over 150,000 of them this year.

Saab and Hummer should go before anything else.

 

Yeah, but GMC made something more than Yukon Denalis and Acadias back during the 70s:





I love GMC like no other brand (I basically grew up at the GMC dealership where my dad was service manager), but I'd rather be left with a bunch of fond memories than to see the brand reduced to selling rebadged crossovers and a bunch of useless luxury SUVs. It was bad enough that GMC's Class 8 business got spun off to White and then gobbled up by Volvo, and seeing a bunch of rebadged Isuzus on GMC lots wasn't fun, but the last straw was the sale of GM's medium-duty business to Navistar. GMC trucks used to be bought by the guys who drove a General or Top Kick during the day; now they're purchased by soccer moms who are probably pissed that their husbands couldn't afford a Escalade after the mortgage industry went underwater

Hopefully, someone at GM realizes that the GMC GMT900s are way better looking than their Chevy counterparts before the plug is pulled.

 

Once again I find myself quoting Mr. Bryant.

Quoted for truth.

(Which is not to say I'd like to see GMC canceled, as I fear much of that volume will be lost, as happened with Olds. But PLEASE make all the trucks look like Sierras instead of Silverados if they do pull the plug...)

 

With rising fuel prices it really should. It offers basically rebadges of almost all Chevy trucks and SUVs... there's very little value in doing that in this day and age unless you're going to differentiate the brand somehow. They always marketed themselves as 'pro grade' but in reality they were built identically to the Chevy products in terms of almost everything including their 'grade' of assembly and materials.

 

Completely bassakwards. GMC has always been a step above Chevrolet. (In luxury, power, options, price etc.)

The "GMC Truck" brand has a 100 year anniversary coming up in 4 years. I'd be shocked if they killed it now.

 

kill it...

 

How many years have they been talking about this? I'm sure there is a lot of unseen work involved with the dealers but some have already consolidated. What's the problem?