Slimmin’ Down: Automakers to submit plans to Treasury

In many ways as unsurprising as it is incredible, the details of GM and Chrysler’s plans to redo their business models is going to be submitted to the Treasury Department today (Ford did not take money from the Feds, so they don’t have to submit a restructuring plan). Apparently, GM is going to slim down to just 4 brands, from the 8 they currently sell in the US. The list is:

1. Chevrolet
2. Buick
3. GMC
4. Cadillac

What’s missing from the list? Some of the brands were expected to be cut, notably Saab, Hummer, and Saturn. But Pontiac!!!

Pontiac has been the sporting face of GM for a long time, despite mostly not living up to the image. Other GM brands, with their own management and agendas, produced their own sportscars, reducing Pontiac to sort of a façade. Take the Chevy Corvette and Camaro. Pontiac got a version of the Camaro, the Firebird, for pretty much the entire life of the car. But the Corvette was the halo car for GM, and it was a Chevy, so Pontiac could never meet or exceed the performance of that car.

This is despite the fact that lately, there was some thinking that Pontiac would become a specialty, sportscar-only brand, making cars along the lines of the Solstice, G8, and the GTO exclusively. However, that’s also a little hard to believe when you consider the introduction of this monstrosity, the Pontiac G3, which is a rebadged version of that old GM favorite, the Daewoo Kalos/Chevy Aveo. Talk about mixed messages! What about the Kalos/Aveo is sporty?

So after my initial shock (“no, don’t kill the General’s sportscars!”), I’ve realized that Pontiac is just as warped and off-message as any brand at GM. Like Saturn, the brand-image has been tainted, and maybe it deserves to die to allow GM to start focusing on not competing with itself.

[Source: NYT]