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I agree with you Dragoneye to a degree. GM made exactly what people wanted and made money hand over fist. Now where I blame GM is not knowing that this ride wasn’t going to go on forever and banking some of those bucks on improving the entire lineup including small cars. They saw huge profits on the large $40-60k SUV’s and neglected the rest until they couldn’t. Now they are scrambling to adjust to the market.
Katrina should have been a wakeup call that hey, we are vulnerable, we need to improve the entire portfolio and even if we don’t make much on small cars we should still strive to make the best small car. But they didn’t and now they are where they are. The problem with GM is it’s a big ass ship and its slow to react. Combined with entrenched bureaucracy that has rusted the tiller so it fights you whenever you want to make a turn. In the end what would be best for GM is to file Chap. 11, shed the needless brands, shed the bloated dealer network, downsize and become focused, firing most of upper white collar workforce. It would be a renaissance of the US auto industry.
I’d do away with dealers and franchise altogether but that isn’t going to happen. Direct from the factory, go to an auto mall with 20 different brands to choose from and just one or two testers of each car in inventory.
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