what if GM came up with just a performance line to sell all of its sports cars through, kind of like a sub division of it. then you could go to one dealership with all the vette, camaro, fire bird, gto type of stuff and hopefully that would promote a lot more muscle cars to be built

 

I would think it would take a lot of money to develop a new brand from the ground up, not to mention not having name recognition or any other benefits that go along with an established brand. If you mean subdivision/performance line in the Ford/SVT sense, they're already working on that with GM Performance Division. But there really is no need for a new brand; GM has more history and nameplates at their disposal than anyone else. It's just a matter of loosening the purse strings and making something happen. I guess it's hard for them to do when trucks/SUVs are bring in all the cash.

 

Not a good idea. The idea of performance cars is the "halo" effect. If you took Corvette, GTO, etc... from those respective divisions, the image wouldn't be worthwhile.

When Toyota, Mazda, & Nissan stopped selling their image suffered, and to a smaller extent, so did their sales. All 3 are tripping over each other to bring image cars back to the US.

Also, a dirty little secret:
Performance cars aren't exactly great selling cars. Vettes sell about 24,000 cars per year, GTO is expected to sell about 20,000 which is a little more than Grand Prix GTP coupes sold last year, I suspect Trans Ams, Z28s, & SS didn't likely go beyond 24,000 last year if that. By comparison, the Oldsmobile Alero alone sold roughly 108,000 cars last year.