.

 

Again..this whole plan reeks of fail. GM will come out of this struggling to compete with Hyundai..forget about Toyota.

I wonder if they will take Ford with them. I am willing to bet the environmentalists are out dancing on a forest somewhere. The collapse of the big 3, plus the current administration will allow their agenda to get passed unchallenged.

 

If we're now talking about a court controlled bankruptcy, who's to decide who gets to buy the "good" parts? What is stopping someone else from outbidding the new "GM" company?

What about the flip-side, create a new company to buy up all the "bad" parts and liquidate them, while keeping the "good" parts under GM's control? (I know, pie in the sky crazy talk... )

 

There seems to have been a lot of people that thought the bailouts were bad based on free-market principles. There were also a lot of people that thought the bailouts were bad because they wouldn’t work. It seems to me that those in opposition to the bailouts were right if GM does file for bankruptcy.

No matter what state GM is in when they emerge from bankruptcy, the bailout money is gone (no sense in trying to call them loans any more) and the bailout money didn’t work other than to postpone what is supposed to happen when a company fails.

 

But first, WHO gets to decide what the good and bad parts ARE?

 

I’m very concerned about new MPG standards but mostly because it looks to be likely that individual states will be able to set their own standards and measure compliance in their own way. So what happens if California decided that vehicles must average 35mpg in city driving and they measure it not as a fleet-wide average but decide that’s the minimum for every vehicle or they can’t be sold in California? It’s those kinds of unknowns that may spell the doom for cars like the Camaro and the Corvette.

 

California is not THAT stupid!

You seem to forget that California is the birthplace of hot rodding. There are a lot of well-to-do hot rodders with big time political influence out here that would never allow that type of legislation to happen.

 

I'm not sure how this "Surgical" procedure will work...

Most Saabs/Hummers/Pontiacs/Saturns are made in factories with other makes, including Chevies Buicks and Cadillacs.

So if you have a factory producing Pontiacs and Chevys and running at 50% capacity and then you strip away one of the brands, then you have a factory running at 30% capacity...more of a money sink. Sure, it could be resolved eventually, but shifting production to different plants (and closing them) takes time.

Also, how do you split this part away from a shared factory to form the "Bad GM" to sell off?

...Not to mention that GM doesn't have "Pontiac Staff" and "Chevy Staff" at headquarters.

I'm starting to think that it's over for GM. Really Over.

 

The automotive aftermarket is a big industry. Alot of companies headquarters are in CA.

 

Route66Wanderer,

The change in font isn't needed and is annoying, please stop it.

 

Toyota is now the planet's biggest automotive producer.

Toyota has $100 Billion sitting in it's bank account, while GM owes roughly that amount total.

GM has been LOSING market share for nearly 25 years.Toyota has GAINED, and is now the 2nd biggest car company in the US.

Anyone who took a middle school Distributive Education class would know enough to figure out that you don't put all your resources into a segment of the market that is easily affected by the volitility of fuel prices, while virturally giving away cars to rental and fleet agencies simply because it's cheaper and easier than actually investing in cars to compete in the market place.


If you're concerened about the ***** and brain of the General Motors Corperation, then you're late to the party... General Motors castrated themselves, and did a self lobotomy many years ago, as anyone who has watched this entire disasterous drama unfold can tell you.

Throwing Toyota around as a boogie man is might be effective if Toyota was worse off than GM... but throwing it around under the current circumstances... to be honest... is something I'd expect in the movie "Rainman", where the Dustin Hoffman character simply can't grasp what is happening around him.. not at a site filled with people who live & breath the latest car news by the minute.



We really need to get our heads out of the toilet for a moment, and realize that bad smell is NOT coming from the guys in the other room that weren't bobbing for brown trout thinking it was a Ribeye steak. Sure, that might have been Ribeye steak before everything turned to s***, but being desparate to believe you have your face in a dinner plate instead of a toilet and prime choice instead of "number 2" isn't going to magically turn it into a steak on a plate.

That type of loyalty might impress the person making that steamy item for you, but that doesn't change the situation.

The General Motors Corperation as we know it was gone LONG before they got their 1st taxpayer check.... and LONG before the economy tanked. Even people with severe selective memory remember the fact that General Motor's stock plunged 90% from late summer 2007 to late summer 2008... and that the economy didn't start going critical till October. Or that GM went to Ford last summer looking for a merger or at least a pooling of resources...... and Ford ran away.


If anyone didn't get the memo, General Motors effectively went out of business just before December 31st, 2008. That was when they would have had to end all production in North America due to the lack of money, forced by their own actions over at least the past 15 years, but even moreso over this decade.


The only reason why this website's #1 conversation piece isn't about the Camaro that never reached production is NOT because of decisions and plans GM has made. GM has proven as late as March 31 that they still can't find their way out of a paper bag with a flashlight with the open end up. Their recovery plan was a sham. Even local Detroit papers... long a defender of GM and all things automotive... called GM's plans at best Denial that there was a problem, or that they needed to change.

The only entity with the authority and the power to help fix what's wrong with General Motors is the Federal Government, via dropping dealers, renegotiating contracts, effectively dealing with bondholders, trimming workforce regardless to agreements, and do it all under legal protection, while demanding GM run a car company that makes vehicles that compete with Toyota instead of running a fifedom that protects everyone's turf.

GM management had the ball.

They ran the General Motors Corperation into the ground.

The Feds (via a task force with actual teeth and the US tresury) are trying to put the pieces back together.


So...

If GM needs to take lessons from Toyota...
...a company that has grown market share...
...a company known for continuous improvement in it's vehicles...
...a company that has been focused on wide parts of the market instead of a sliver...
...a company that has a SOLID future, and plenty of money....

if GM can show that an American car company can compete with the best of the world instead of making up excuses and having appologists still denying anything is wrong at all...

....then it's about d*mn time!!!

 

No. It would be a 363 bankruptcy, which is specifically not dismantling.

You find a buyer, which in this case would be a brand new company funded by the government. It buys the parts it wants. If the new company wants Chevy, Cadillac, and Butiac-C, and a couple of dozen plants, that's what it gets. It hires the employees it wants at whatever deal they put together. They are brand new employees of a brand new company. The legacy liabilities and brands they don't want all stay with the liquidated part.

Think of it as a fresh start, because that's what it is. The liquidation goes on for years, but the new company has nothing to do with that.

 

Guy

In summary, you're basically saying that Wagoner was incompetent at the helm!!!

 

GM was in a no-win situation. They put their resources into the segment that made them money. If they'd put their resources into small cars, which had small margins, they wouldn't have lasted as long as they have. Labor costs for GM were too high to compete head-on in low margin segments.

It's not like GM didn't give small cars a try, with Saturn, which had a new labor agreement and might have made a go of it, if not for GM and UAW forces that didn't want it to.

I actually think today has been building for more like 50 years, not 15.

The import restraints in the 80s gave a reprieve (while filling Toyota and Honda coffers).

The moment that Honda started building good cars, with U.S. workers earning less money and benefits, it was just a matter of time. Because even if GM narrowed the gap in efficiency (hours per car), it could only build cars for the same cost if the UAW workers were more efficient.

If the UAW could have organized the transplants, to equalize wages and benefits between the transplants and the domestics, then there might have been a chance. But the UAW never could.

I'm sure the contract between The New GM and the UAW will be highly contentious. If The New GM doesn't get parity with Toyota and Honda, then we'll be back here again.

One hope for the UAW would be that the Card Check law passes and they're able to organize most of the transplants. But I predict an uphill battle in the senate on that one.

 

Who wants to bet GM's sales take a total **** this month?