Gm Goes Down

[philbey]

It's been in the making for a long time. GM sold off their biggest profit maker years ago, which was the GM Finance portion of the business. The best performing brand they had underneath them was Corvette, but hey, it fills a niche market. Another fundamental problem, who was one of their biggest competitors???.....

 

...? Themselves. Just think about it for a moment. At present, their active brands include Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac and up until 2004, Oldsmobile. All brand names are synonymous with medium to large sedans, spanning the standurd to luxury range with a few variations within each brand.

 

Not only that but they were all building cars whilst paying no attention to changes in market trends. Why has Toyota gradually managed to eat up a large portion of GM's market share? Because people have been feeling the pinch of rising petrol costs and the cost of owning and running larger cars. Yeh, I know, americans don't care, they love their massive cars BUT.... The figures prove otherwise.

 

It's a dog eat dog, capitalist world. If you can't sell what the customers want to buy then it's over. And the writing has been on the wall for them for years.....

[MYSTIK[RL]]

It needs to be said that GM isn't dead. This isn't the kind of bankruptcy where you split up the viable companies, sell off the assets and call it a day. Basically what they're doing is restructuring their business not liquidating its assets. They will probably kill off some brands, (un?)fortunately holden wont be one of them. Give it a few months and you will see GM reemerge in its new form. Personally I don't think that will succeed either, too many shit cars for far too long.

 

with being said Hummer is being sold to a chinese company, so what little quality/saftey standard "may" go out the window, but that will remain to be seen.

 

and also Saturn is being sold to the Peneske Automotive Group, so maybe saturn will become a racing inspired brand rather than the "hip new thing" or "car with a difference" that GM was hoping for when saturn was launched.

[the witzl]

the main thing draggin down GM is the 401K (pension/superannuation) packages it has been providing to its workforce since the 50s and 60s. Basically GM workers, thanks to the awesomeness of unions, are given pensions for life after working for GM for only a few years.

 

This has meant that [something like] for every $1.00 GM currently spends in wages, it is paying another $0.50 in pensions.

 

That's pretty horrific when you think about it.

[LittleRedSpirit]

It shocks me how so many people have been using this US crisis to sink the boot into Holden. Holden is far from in the hands of administrators.

 

Holden is a long standing company that has serviced our market for a long time, and brought out cars specifically for our market, a lot of which have been rwd and quite fast or cool or practical. Thats a lot more than Toyota has tried to do in my opinion, as there is only so many names you can use for a Camry.

 

I hope Holden gets sold to an Australian company or individual. Then it can be wholly ours and not risk being dragged down by the US and their constant line of terrible decisions. Id like to see Holden employees with secure jobs and futures.

 

All brand loyalty aside, Aussies are Aussies and I support them. The Americans can go to hell with their tanks and terrible Mileage. I mean GM has been making 25 kinds of the same thing for about 40 years now, and most people haven't appreciated it for the last 15 or so. I'm amazed they lasted this long without realising how many changes need to be made to move forward.

 

Compare GM to Ford for a moment. Ford have started making smaller more economical cars in the last 25 years, I wonder why GM missed the boat. I mean Ford are the kind of company that has also been selling us the same crap for 40 years, but they had the good sense to expand the product range beyond 25 types of the same thing, and to scale down the proportion of large cars they make, in line with sales. Ive always been critical of Ford for using a lot of old technology and making few model changes, I'm now starting to see they have been more progressive than I had given them credit for with cars like the Focus coming into the line up.

[philbey]

Well said Red.