[fastball]

Originally Posted by Doin It For Dale

What I'm hearing is that GM plans on becoming a technology company, while keeping its four U.S. car brands alive.

GM recently acquired an autonomy company called Cruise Automation, and it's leading their autonomous vehicle development. GM, Honda, and others have invested a total of nearly $6 Billion into Cruise, and GM's President, Dan Ammann, just left his position to become the CEO of Cruise. Dan lead GM's acquisition of the company and was a major influence on GM's work in the Chinese market, which is being forced into EVs and autonomy. Dan also led GM out of bankruptcy as its Chief Financial Officer, so he knows a thing or two about managing finances.

GM's plan is to make Cruise Automation the world leader in autonomy software and hardware, and to sell that software and hardware to other automobile companies. This would bring huge profits for GM without much investment in manufacturing, which is an area that they struggle in. GM may also be working to develop EV batteries to sell to other companies, which would also be highly profitable. GM would keep their car brands and use all of their technology in their own cars, but they wouldn't rely on their car sales for profit. That's GM's plan, as far as I know, and it's a very sustainable one.

GM has to eliminate low-profit assets like the factories they plan to close, and they're going to stop investing in slow-selling products such as sedans, in order to fund new technologies. GM will also use platform sharing and parts sharing to keep spending low, and that means that more electronics and mechanical parts will be shared between gM vehicles. That will boost product reliability and make part replacements much cheaper.

I'm not sure of the full motivations behind eliminating 8,000 executive jobs, besides cutting spending and reducing the time for big decisions to be made. I hope that many of those jobs were in the marketing department, but we'll probably find out later. It will allow cars to come to the market a year to a year and a half faster, which is always good for business. It may also mean that the cars we see will be influenced more be engineers and less by people sitting at conference tables.

Originally Posted by Silverado57

Interesting analysis. As much as we love our big internal combustion engines, it's smart to explore other technologies and strategies. I hope that they succeed in this.

Originally Posted by Norm Peterson

Originally Posted by Doin It For Dale
What I'm hearing is that GM plans on becoming a technology company, while keeping its four U.S. car brands alive.

...

Exploring other directions is one thing.

Focusing on them to the point where the entire company heads off in a different direction and abandons the ICE car segment because it doesn't want to be seen as a "car company" any longer is something else entirely.

Ford's "mobility company" thinking is more of the same.


Norm

They just have to continue to offer something for people who will never buy autonomous or electric. Besides, the infrastructure of gas stations and internal combustion service stations is so pervasive and deeply rooted in every inch of America that it may be 100 years before other technologies take over. Or longer.

Shoving that technology at us is exactly like what Bob Lutz said about forcing fuel economy standards: it's like forcing people to lose weight by making it illegal to make pants with a waistline larger than 30"