I wonder if Ford is about to suffer the same fate? Kerkorian does sounds a lot like Kevorkian…wonder if ol’ Kirk is a doctor, too??? =)

GM’s core clientele have slowly died out with my dad’s generation. My uncle buys a new Chevy every 2 years like clock work (old habits die hard). He is 84. Who will replace him?

Leave Chevy and Cadillac.

Classic GM BS. They pull the start and stop levers so often it is a wonder anything gets done.

I agree with one thing: Further investment in the Aura would be stupid. It’s a flop, and goes after the exact same market as the Malibu does.

Stop advertising Saturn. Don’t develop any new Saturns. Let the brand die a slow, but inexpensive death. Hire the guys who managed Isuzu’s retreat to do it for you at the lowest possible cost.

Saturn was the wrong answer to the questions GM faced in the 1980s and remains a money sucking bad idea. Enough, already.

People keep assuming that winding down Saturn would cost billions because of the Oldsmobile experience. That is wrong on two counts. One, there are far fewer Saturn dealers than their were Olds dealers, and since they are stand alone showrooms GM doesn’t need to make nice for ongoing relationship purposes. Two … look at the Isuzu example instead of the Oldsmobile example. Starve ‘em to death is the cheapest plan.

if they blow up Saturn, where will they sell the Opels?

IMHO, the only way killing GMC (pre C-11) makes any sense is as a Machiavellian plot to kill off as many BPG dealers as possible w/o having to buy them out. Ok, sure, PUs and SUVs are a declining market. They were declining last year also, but GMC sold a half million units while Pontiac sold 358K. I havn’t been paying attention to sales numbers this year, but I’m guessing GMC will still outsell Pontiac. What all this boils down to is this – if you have a BPG dealership, GMC is your best seller, followed by Pontiac, and then Buick. Eliminate GMC and you’ll eliminate many of the dealers.

Saturn, it’s going to stay until C11. Too costly to buy out the dealers.

It is my opinion that if the three brands are joined at the hip. If you kill one of them, you have to kill them all. Plus, they make a much larger percentage of GM’s sales (combined) than Saturn, and have many more dealers.

The following brands, IMHO, should be killed (or sold if possible):

Saturn
Hummer
Saab (domestically; it probably should survive in Europe and in some/all other world markets outside US/Canada)

That would leave Chevy, Caddy, and PBG in the US, which is much more managable than the current mess they have now. The three brands I would kill all have collapsing sales with no chance of recovery, with Hummer and Saab’s domestic sales both being microscopic in particular. Saturn, although with more sales than the other two, has equally bad chances of recovery. PBG has a possibility of stabalizing, or at least will shrink slower than Saturn.

There is one thing no one has said GM doesn’t do rational things, in their mind would it make sense to kill of a CAR brand with the SUV/truck market falling to it’s knees.

Saturn is no longer a car brand.

Jan-May 2008 Saturn sales:

Cars: 34,840
Trucks: 48,453

The “trucks” in question are, of course, Outlooks, Vues, and a few (134) leftover Relays. But there you go-Saturn sells more SUVs than cars these days.

DEC 22, 2010 — The last Buick, a 2010 Lucerne, rolled off the assembly line today. Its final destination is the Smithsonian museum.

In related news, Toyota and Nissan report record shortages of their respective Avalon and Maxima sedans…

Maybe we should start a TTAC Mini-Deathwatch pool, with members betting on which GM brand goes first. My money is on Pontiac…

I personally think they should get rid of Buick but I have a feeling GMC will be the one GM gets rid of.

jwltch: make Buick into a competitor against Lexus/Bentley

Buick is already supposed to be competing against Lexus, have you seen the ads, well when they had them. But Bentley, seriously Bentley, for real someone actually said that and wasn’t joking. GM doesn’t have anything to compete with Bentley not even Cadillac has enough of a brand reputaion these days to comete in the price range, just look at the XLR sales, and that’s still $40,000 shy of a baby Bentley.

It didn’t make sense to create an all new dealer network to merely sell plastic-sided Corolla-clones, and once you’ve convinced the world that “Saturn” means “plastic-sided Corolla-clone”, you can’t then turn around and sell them sportscars and crossovers that cost thirty thousand dollars, especially since Saturn dealers don’t haggle and those same products, wearing slightly different sheet metal, can be found at dealers for other GM brands that do haggle.

Oh yeah, and they’ve quit selling plastic-sided Corolla-clones to boot! (The Astra is a hatchback, not a sedan, and is not plastic-sided or particularlly fuel efficient.)

What GM should have done, decades ago, was to make Saturn to Oldsmobile what Scion is to Toyota-that is, a seperate dealer “experience” within the existing Oldsmobile dealer framework. The Toyota situation when it created Scion (an established brand which was considered to skew too old) was identical to Oldsmobile’s at the time. Both Scion and Saturn are no-haggle (no-haggle works great with low-end, unique product). Both are a “different kind of car company”. In fact, one could say that Toyota learned from GM’s mistakes in making Saturn, and took what worked and threw away what didn’t, when they made Scion.

It sucks for current SUV owners, but I still wouldn’t hate to be a Honda dealer. I may also get some bargain basement SUV trade-ins and still turn a profit, since there will always be a market of people who just need something to haul the boat to the launch on weekends, or moms who live a mile from soccer practice.

It’s politcally correct right now to kick Hummer while it’s down.

Wagoner can market the engineered implosion of the brand as a “success of vision for the future” angle or whatever, handy for the Annual (Final?) Report.

Killing Hummer would not effect revenue flow much.

I’ve personally never seen a stand-alone Hummer dealer. They always seem to be integrated in either large multi-brand GM dealerships, or as a add-on to some boutique car place.

Killing Hummer at this point kills an internal competitor against so many other widgets GM is trying to sell, to like ten people. Fratricide triage has never been a GM strongsuit, but sense might finally make sense to these morons in this case.

Brand-loyalty to Hummer is low, the whole thing was a fad commensurate with the wide-ranging fad for SUV’s that crashed just 24 months ago. Easy come easy go. All GM’s other brands have a following of some sort that will be pissed off if you kill it.

GM could actually recover a couple of nickels for Rick’s perma-pension by selling Hummer instead of axeing it. Hummer still has valuable contracts with the government for on-going procurement, depot-maintenance and logistics for the all HMMVW’s operated by Uncle Sam, and all the thousands and thousands Uncle Sam has given/subsidized etc. for foreign operators like those stand up guys, the Egyptian paramilitary secret police.

For all those reasons my money is on the Death of Hummer. Of course at this point I imagine the Rickinator probably will want to kill whatever makes the biggest cost-reduction that is legal to put on the books RIGHT NOW. I have no idea what the internal dynamics at GM are like that would identify that brand. But then again I think Rick Wagoner is just as confused and uninformed about GM’s internal dynamics as I am, so it could just be a lottery crapshoot I guess.

I can almost see a dartboard in the luxurious wood-paneled board-room at RenCen now, with blindfolded Armani suits chucking darts to see where they land at this point frankly. It’s how they seem to run the company anyways.

GM killed Saturn when it killed the grossly cheap, cheerful, plastic cars with great fuel economy that the brand was known for.

Everything they sell now from the Outlook to the Astra is priced right out of Saturn fan’s hands.

Would Saturn franchisees have a choice?

What if GM cut all ties with Daewoo and Suzuki, and gave Daewoo the Saturn brand and dealer network as a parting “gift?” The idea of rebadging Daewoos as Saturns makes a lot of sense from both a business and branding perspective.

Saturn should be going head to head with Kia in the economy wars, which will be fighting over a bigger and bigger pie as gas continues to climb in price.

There have been no announcements, this is all speculation.

There’s no reason Opels can’t be sold as Chevrolets here just like they are in other parts of the Americas.