I want to get one thing out of the way, yes, we are testing the waters with car news. And, we will be testing the waters by rocking the boat on Pontiac. Hey, if we can make Sony Ericsson sell 10,000 T608 phones, pushing for 50,000 cars annually shouldn’t be too hard, right?
We’ve got the car people, we’ve got the tech people, and we know how to make bad decisions sting enough to reverse them.
First, after being told by great leaders that GM wouldn’t be managed by the government, then it was. Then government started telling GM how to act. GM wanted to keep Pontiac a niche brand, and the government said it wasn’t eco-friendly-small-car-ish enough for “New GM.”
No, I’m not holding a grudge, can’t speak for the rest of the staff though. But, we are going to circle the wagons and get Pontiac customers to stay in the GM fold. GM is a good company, it shouldn’t fall apart because of some really bad decisions in the past. Do we expect Pontiac to come back tomorrow? Nope. But, we do expect to get enough customers backing GM through the rough patch. When GM gets back on its feet, we expect them to sell what their customers want to buy.
Case-in-point, even six months after being killed off, interest in the Pontiac G8 continues to spike past the Chevy Camaro (per Google Trends). Granted this was after Bob Lutz commented that the G8 has a chance yet again of becoming a Chevy Caprice. But, it shows that America’s lone sport car brand needs to fit somewhere in the GM landscape.
To be honest, I don’t care too much how GM makes it work, and that’s a sentiment around the office. The public has come up with a lot of ideas over the past six months that GM hasn’t answered… tactily admitting they didn’t/couldn’t/were-prohibited from thinking these ideas through. From offering Pontiac as a sport-tuned option, to selling them as a sub-brand of Buick, there are lots of choices there.
Finally, look at Holden. They’re selling $1,000 Pontiac options left and right on three of their most popular models. That’s $1,000 customers in America, the home of Pontiac, would be willing to pony up. The company that invented E-REV technology will, at some point, have to give up on hiding behind fuel economy regulations, and give sport car buyers what they want.
And we’ll be doing what we do best; informing while organizing the community to get what customers want.
ETA? After iConsole Alpha 1.
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GM as a whole should’ve been left to sink. If I make poor business decisions in managing my business, for 20 years, wasting money, overpaying for labor without regard to sustainability, just assuming that stuff will keep selling and we’ll shore up the balance later, where’s MY cushy multi-billion dollar check from Obama? I was a chevy guy up until I bought my Chevy Colorado. A pickup truck with plastic everything, right down to door and tailgate handles, and an utter rattle trap. Reminiscent of the AMC or Renault. They without regard then slashed people’s pensions, killed their savings, and wrote multiple generations of entire families that literally put their entire working life into GM off like a bad hair day. They should’ve been forced to liquidate to cover their pension and other retirement responsibilities. End of story.
The issue is that GM is necessary for national security. Who do you think builds war vehicles during a war? Domestic auto makers. Chrysler is now going to be owned by Fiat, leaving us with GM and Ford. We need at least two operational vehicle manufacturers capable of building the complex vehicles in such large quantities.
However, I do agree that a normal Chapter 11 restructuring, not sinking, would have been the best approach.
Unfortunately, with pension obligation benefits in the multi-billions, there were enough citizens that would have had their retirements devastated to make that impossible.
I disagree that New GM has “slashed pensions”. That largely depends on how well New GM stock will perform in the open market, and is an infinitely better deal than they should have gotten in any sense of the law.