Just in case anyone is curious, the breakdown of the Canadian auto industry at the end of April looks like this:

General Motors 24.7%
Daimler-Chrylser 14.9%
Ford 13.3%
Toyota 11.1%
Honda 7.8%
Mazda 5.5%
Nissan 4.7%
Hyundai 4.4%
VolksWagen 2.3%
Kia 1.9%

While GM results are no surprise (at least to me) I was intrigued by the Ford, Toyota and Honda pieces of the pie. I would have assumed Ford would have been number 2. I also figured Honda would have a bigger piece of the pie since Civic is the best selling car in Canada. With all the doom and gloom about Toyota eclipsing GM, here Toyota has less than half the market share that GM does.

I wasn't able to find an article online to link to - this is taken from a newspaper article I read.

The top 10 cars in Canada for the first quarter:
Honda Civic 17,918
Mazda 3 15,420
Toyota Corolla 12,164
Toyota Yaris 11,080
Chev Cobalt 10,606
Toyota Camry 8,699
Pontiac Pursuit/G6 7,985
Chev Impala 7,360
Ford Focus 6,821
Dodge Calibre 6,626

I'm not sure why Pursuit and G6 are combined - they aren't even on the same platform... but I'm doing this verbatim so it may be a typo.

For those who argue that GM would be better off if GMC was done away with - Sierra outsold Silverado in the first quarter here in Canada:

Ford F150 23,463
Dodge Caravan 18,683
Dodge Ram 13,997
GMC Sierra 13,849
Chev Silverado 13,461
Ford Escape/Hybrid 7,826
Ford Ranger 7,603
Chev Uplander 6,418
Pontiac Montana 5,936
Honda CR-V 5,898

 

GMC should be done away with - and that is coming from someone who drives a Yukon.

 

And what's your reasoning behind this?
You do know that they bring in more money than their comparative Chevys with almost nothing else done to them?
We've gone over this plenty of times. There is certainly no reason to even consider doing away with GMC.

 

Probably Pursuit/G5 not G6

 

GMC only exists because Buick/Pontiac is a seperate sales channel from Chevy.

If/When GM consolidates their channels further, GMC will either become niche products or disappear.

 

But since GMC has the 2nd highest sales and likely 2nd highest profits I don't think we can say they should be shuttered quite yet.

 

Ok, maybe, but as it stands right now, there appears to be no real reason for GM to move in this direction since at least in Canada, GMC has outperformed (at least that quarter) Chevy Truck, with likely less dealerships selling the product. There are those diehards who buy a given brand and will not consider another GM brand even though the product is essentially (or even exactly) identical apart from styling. I believe that GM already experienced somewhat of a backlash when they axed Olds. While some of those Olds buyers may have moved on to another available GM brand, many moved on to other manufacturers too, which meant lost sales for the General.

Certainly it could be argued that Olds was a dying division so the numbers weren't all that great anyway, since buyers already abandoned the division (the news of impending demise of course did little for sales); that wouldn't appear to be the case with GMC, it's performing well (at least Sierra is performing well).

Yes, such a move on paper may likely end the "F150 is king of the sales hill" since GMC/Chev sales combined usually outstrip the Ford, but individually aren't enough to do so. Add to this that GM could then focus development of a single product rather than two, so a better product would result, yes. Simple right? Maybe not.

The big question then is if GM did merge GMC and Chevy Truck, would enough buyers remain in the fold and switch to Chevy so that the overall impact of the CK truck platform was not affected? This is still the most product loyal group of buyers left - Any degree of defection by these buyers (some of whom would be livid about the loss of their chosen brand) would hurt. These are after all high-margin vehicles and a negative shift in this market would have serious bottom line repercussions for the General.

 

I think that if GMC was folded into Chevy, the total sales volume decline would not be nearly as great as when Olds was killed. First, as you note, truck buyers are very loyal, and if they can't get a GMC then Chevy is very close. 95% of whatever you like about a GMC, you'll also find in a Chevy. Sure there'd be a few buyers who would 'cut off their nose to spite their face' and buy a Ford instead, but I doubt there'd be that many. Contrast that to Olds' cars, where an Intrigue or Alero really was a very different car (and arguably a much better car) than its Chevy cousin. In those cases, I don't blame a lot of Olds buyers for leaving the GM fold.

Many cite the huge costs of shuttering Olds as an impediment to doing it to more divisions. But I think in the case of GMC it wouldn't be nearly as bad. I'm sure GM learned some lesson with their Olds adventure and could do things better this time around. But more importantly, it would be very easy to give each GMC dealer a Chevy truck franchise and let them carry on as before, especially now that most of them also have Pontiac and Buick. That was an option that wasn't really available with the Olds dealers.

While it may not cost a lot in terms of product development to make a Sierra out of a Silverado, supporting those vehicles with marketing and advertising budgets and dealer support is not cheap. It would be better to focus the GMT-900 budget on one vehicle instead of 2.

And then there's the cases where vehicles aren't shared. For example, why in the hell did GMC get a lambda? Chevy is the mainstream people mover, and GMC is the "professional grade" truck division. Lambdas are clearly the former. So now Chevy, which is supposed to have a vehicle in every mainstream category, is without both a minivan and a large crossover. I'll bet with Chevy's marketing muscle and built in clientele, they could move a lot more Acadias than GMC.

One more point to make. Both Ford and DCX also used to sell identical trucks through two divisions. By the 1970s both of them got smart and folded their Mercury and Fargo divisions into the stronger main brand.

IMO this is a classic example of GM management stuck in its old way of thinking and too afraid to make tough decisions. They need to be reducing costs and redundancy wherever possible, yet they still think they hold 45% of the market and need 8 divisions. This is a case where an outsider with a fresh perspective and a bit of courage could probably make a much better decision.

 

I can't disagree with anything that's been said, except we don't really know how much of GMC's sales are "push" (more dealerships) versus "pull" (people think it's better than Chevy).

GMC is money, there's nothing really wrong with it right now. My gist was more that with Pontiac going RWD and Buick going with more luxurious Chinese products, it might make sense to consolidated Buick/Pontiac/Chevy into a single dealership channel. Which would leave GMC as an odd-man out.

 

There is some good logic/thought going on here so the only thing here I can comment on is that in Canada, GMC is part of and has been for some time now, the Pontiac/Buick channel so I'm not sure you can just slot in Chevy - unless GM decides to kill GMC at some point. You may be able to do so more easily in the US where this integration has only recently been happening.

As far push or pull sales go, I'm sure there are those who go GMC because they perceive some tangible differences beyond styling that makes the GMC more attractive to them.

By and large there are more Chevrolet channel dealerships (I think) than Pontiac/Buick/GMC dealerships so it may well be safely said that GMC has sold more volume (at least Sierra) from fewer total dealerships than Chevrolet.

R377 - there isn't much I can fault in your reasoning, in fact I agree with your assessment of the Olds shutdown being different than if GMC was suddenly shuttered. The big difference of course, being buyers for your product, or the lack thereof in Olds case. My big thing about the Olds thing was they had just spent time and money on a new gen Aurora only to announce the phase-out almost simultaneously. Talk about a buzz-kill for your flagship vehicle.They could have saved themselves some significant coin by not freshening the car - just to kill it.

Maybe GM should fold GMC into Chevrolet Truck - I dunno, but the sales numbers and profits seem to suggest that there's no reason for GM to do anything on that front; apart from marketing and design costs and inefficiencies associated with two products instead of one.