Quote:
Originally Posted by Martinjlm
During the walk up to bankruptcy one thing was very clear…GM had too many brands to feed and too many nameplates within each brand. What wasn’t clear was which brands should survive and which should die. Oldsmobile and Buick had a lot of overlap. Pontiac and Chevrolet had a lot of overlap. GMC and Chevrolet had a lot of overlap. Saturn was its own thing, but beginning to look a lot more like slightly higher priced Chevrolets every day. Cadillac was its own thing. Hummer and Saab were in the mix but it was clear early on that they were goners.
Originally the Automotive Task Force wanted to GM to nuke Buick and GMC. GM pushed back. GMC had more conquest sales than any other division, so even though it’s trucks overlapped Chevrolet trucks big time, they were sold to people who wouldn’t set foot in a Chevrolet dealership and they were profitable. GMC saved. Buick was saved primarily on the potential of Buick in China. Oldsmobile was already on its way out, as were Saab and Hummer, so that just left Pontiac and Saturn to be dealt with. Neither had anything in the upcoming portfolios that wasn’t already covered by Chevrolet except the Kappa twins, Solstice and Skyy. Both were low volume roadsters nearing the end of their first generation and in search of a better platform for the next(?) generation. Easy kills.
The humorous thing is that in parallel to this is the Automotive Task Force was also pushing GM to absorb Chrysler and all those brands. Took about a week for us to show them that it would require either adding a number of additional brands (too many brands being a key reason for the bankruptcy position) and that the remedy to that would hav been to combine brands (Dodge = Pontiac, Chrysler = Buick, Plymouth = Chevrolet) and reduce thousands of people. We all know how that played out. Keep Hemi or Small Block? Keep HFV6 or PentaStar? The only easy part of the equation is that GM transmissions would be the standard.
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I remember hearing about it on the Internet. Actually it made the news. I saw that move as a desperation act, and that it would be problematic at best. All of those brands mixed up in a single bag, and historically those models were separate and competitive. The other problem I saw was that Toyota would eventually overtake this big fat new conglomerate with GM and those Hemis. To me it was the best thing to keep the two companies separate.