If General Motors is to bounce back from its beleaguered state, it’s got to deliver on its promises. Vice Chairman Bob Lutz made one when he said that the Pontiac G8, scheduled for the chopping block at the end of the year, will eventually resurface in Chevrolet showrooms as the Caprice.
"The last time we looked at [the G8], we decided that we would continue to import it as a Chevrolet," Lutz said. "It is kind of too good to waste." Despite the Vice Chairman’s promise, there still seems to be mixed feeling within the organization regarding the future of the G8. One of the people against the move happens to be CEO Fritz Henderson, who has been repeatedly heard saying that he isn’t a fan of rebadging.
Nevertheless, Lutz is bent on keeping his promise, saying that the wheels have already been set in motion and that export agreements with a number of countries, specifically Australia, where the Holden Commodore has already been rebadged as Chevrolets in a slew of countries. This precedent, according to Lutz, is something that he is looking at using in order to repackage the G8 as a Chevrolet-badged vehicle under the Caprice name.
General Motors has long been itching to get back on its feet after a disastrous stretch that saw it come on the brink of bankruptcy. Thanks to the government’s intervention and a company-wide house-cleaning meant to give the company a fresh start, General Motors is finally ready to roll. In a move that will change the complexion of American car manufacturing, GM decided on veering away from their ‘business as usual’ approach and instead, work on a new attitude of quality over quantity, a promise made with the intent of paying more attention to its customers and vehicles.
After selling the last of its good assets to a new, government-backed automaker, GM CEO Fritz Henderson declared that GM is ready to turn another chapter in their storied history, a chapter he says will bring GM back to the top of the auto industry.
“The last 100 days has shown everyone, including ourselves, that a company not known for quick action can indeed move very fast,” he said. “Starting today, we want to take that intensity, the decisiveness and the speed of these last several weeks, and transfer it from the battlefield triage of the bankruptcy process to the day-to-day operations of the new company.”
General Motors may be a long ways from getting back on its feet in the US, but in another country, the Detroit-based manufacturer is standing tall.
Despite a tenuous hold on the US auto market, GM can take comfort in the fact that they’re Chinese consumer base has more than picked up the slack, accounting for a whopping 814,442 vehicles in sales in the first six months of 2009.
It doesn’t come as the least bit surprising to us to see China establish themselves as the world’s leading auto market. After all, the country still comprises about 1/6th of the entire world’s population so naturally, that many people would entail a lot of customers too. GM also benefited through a number of stimulus policies the Chinese government has implemented, allowing foreign brands to import their products easier.
General Motors and Toyota may have ended their 25-year run as production partners at the NUMMI plant in California. Yet despite the split, the two auto giants are still in the works on a new partnership. We’ve heard that Toyota is in talks with GM about the possibility of supplying a rendering of Toyota’s popular Prius hybrid vehicle to its Detroit-based counterpart.
While the plan has yet to be finalized, sources have said that the two heads of both companies - Toyota president Akio Toyoda and GM top dog Fritz Henderson - are expected to convene at the GM headquarters in Michigan sometime in August.
As a boy, GM’s former global purchasing czar, Bo Andersson, snatched his neighbor’s cat and sold it for $5 in order to satisfy his sweet tooth. Now Russian carmaker GAZ has snatched Andersson from GM as it moves fast to take full advantage of its planned acquisition of Opel with partners Magna and Russia’s largest lender Sberbank.
GAZ announced on Monday that it has invited Andersson to head its board of directors. "The ex-vice president of GM, Bo Andersson, has expressed his agreement to take the post of the chairman of the board of directors of GAZ," the company said in a statement.
Andersson spent more than two decades at GM after earlier posts at Saab. Most recently, Andersson had been GM’s group vice president for purchasing and supply chain. Andersson’s resignation from GM was a surprise to many. Upon leaving GM, Andersson said in a brief e-mail to a new organization, "I have a new better job where I will work as CEO." At the time Andersson had declined to say exactly where he was headed.
Andersson was an aggressive cost cutter for GM and his knowledge of the GM system will help GAZ get up to speed quickly. GM has since announced that Bob Socia, currently executive vice president of Shanghai General Motors, will be appointed GM vice president, Global Purchasing and Supply Chain.
RIP Pontiac. General Motors announced today that Pontiac will not live to see its 85th birthday.
GM’s original plans for Pontiac were for it to become a niche brand under its new viability plan. Now the cuts have gone deeper, and Pontiac is completely cut off. All fans of GM’s performance division can do now is hope for a revival sometime in the future.
This will be a quick death. GM announced “The Pontiac brand will be phased out by the end of 2010”, which is the equivalent of a fire sale in the automotive world. But Pontiac is not the only one to be hurried out the door. The revised plan moves up the “resolution” of Saab, Saturn, and Hummer to the end of 2009, “at the latest”.
There is no word about if any of Pontiac’s car will be absorbed into other lines. The only cars that are unique to Pontiac in the U.S. are the G8 and Vibe. Disposing of the G8 should be as easy a stopping the boats from Australia, but the Vibe, which is joint venture with Toyota, may be harder to untangle.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, General Motors decided to reinvent the automobile. It teamed up with Segway to create a two-wheeled, two-seat urban people mover. Called the P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), it carries many of the design ideas that we once thought were pipe dreams coming out of design schools.
The PUMA is part of a vision of a vehicle network that is able to recognize outside objects, including other moving vehicles, so that they can all interact and avoid each other. The compact vehicle integrates a lithium-ion battery, digital smart energy management, two-wheel balancing, dual electric wheel motors, and a dockable user interface that allows off-board connectivity. If anyone is scared of two-wheeled motoring, there are two small wheels placed at the front and back of the concept for stability.
Each charge to the PUMA’s battery should be good for 35 miles (GM did not indicate recharge times.) Since this is designed as for urban areas, the top speed is 35 mph.
GM’s direct engine technology is being offered in many of their 2009 models. This new technology increases power while reducing fuel consumption. Injecting the fuel directly into the combustion chamber allows the engineers better control of fuel delivery and waste less of the pertrolium based product.
Last year, talking about RWD models, Lutz said: "We’ve pushed the pause button. It’s no longer full speed ahead." This year, at the Detroit Auto Show he confirmed that GM’s Zeta platform is dead and that Pontiac G8 and Chevrolet Camaro are the last models built on this platform to be sold in USA.
With the new fuel-economy target legislation and the severe economic crisis large RWD cars make no sense. This means GM will focus on Sigma RWD and all-wheel-drive architecture used for models like CTS, STS and SRX.
"The strategy we had a few years ago of basically deriving a whole sweeping global portfolio off the Australian Zeta architecture ... frankly, we have had to abandon that dream. This is because, whether you are in the United States or in China, fuel economy mandates are getting more and more severe, and we just could not base our strategy on doing relatively large and relatively heavy rear-wheel-drive cars. And I suspect the same thing is going to start to bite the traditional rear-wheel drive producers," said Bob Lutz.
With a little help from a tanking global economy and miserable 2008 auto sales, Toyota has finally overtaken General Motors place at the top of the pack for worldwide sales. GM has topped the sales chart for the last 77 years, but Toyota has been making a hard charge over the last decade. In 2008, Toyota sold 8.97 million units worldwide compared to GM’s 8.36 million. While GM execs downplay the importance of the No. 1 spot, it definitely gives Toyota new bragging rights for worldwide domination.
For GM President Fritz Henderson, it’s more important to regain GM’s financial strength since the company hasn’t posted a profit since 2004 and is now relying on a $4 billion federal emergency loans to stay alive. In its home market, GM still stands at the top (with Toyota a distant second) but saw overall U.S. sales drop 22.7 percent compared to 2007. GM, comprised of eight individual brands, sold 2.95 million vehicles in 2008. Not all sales figures were down for GM as it saw minor gains in emerging foreign markets such as Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The automotive industry as a whole shrank 18 percent with sales dropping to approximately 13.25 million units.
Although Toyota is now officially at the top, it isn’t immune to the current economic problems either. Just a year after marking its 50th year of selling cars in the United States, Toyota posted the biggest sales decline among its major Japanese competitors with a 15.4 percent drop compared to 2007. Honda, Nissan and Mazda all posted declines, while Subaru was the only Japanese automaker to post a sales increase for 2008, albeit a scant 0.3 percent. Toyota probably doesn’t have much time to bask in its glory as GM readies a host of competitive vehicles including the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, 2010 Buick LaCrosse and 2010 Cadillac SRX.
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