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Jun 1, 2009 - Morning Or Night?

Was it a red sky last and sailor's delight, or a red sky this morning and GM take warning? Today's the day for "the announcement" and naturally enough there was all sorts of media speculation about what it will all mean, liberally sprinkled with plenty of gloom and doom since that's all they seem comfortable doing. (If it bleeds, it leads)

A NY Times blog yesterday had several experts weighing in on different aspects of the situation and this comment by a professor or economics on closing dealerships caught my eye:

For us consumers, we’ll soon have only half as many places to buy G.M. products....To me that matters; the only dealership convenient to me is a G.M. one, and that’s where I’ve bought my last two cars...If that business goes, the next closest G.M. dealer is 35 miles to the north.

Hmm... there are options professor. But then even he realizes that the dealer network may be a bit bloated:

The last decade has brought us far more options than the local dealer; I first searched online when my daughter bought a car – and she found one out of town. Still, with fewer dealerships, there’ll be less inventory to choose from, tipping the balance further away from G.M. products.

GM has to be able to compete. They can't do it the way they are configured now so change and pain is unavoidable. A couple of questions in a lot of our minds today are going to be why we didn't let GM simply go into bankruptcy proceeding before we threw all that money at them? And is there any chance of getting that wasted money back?

2:55 am | Categories: automotive news, gm Permalink | Alert Administrator

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