Chazman

I agree, lots of double-speak.

Assuming Alpha's mass is held under control and it's package protected for a GenV smallblock, man alive, I could so many variations spun off of this architecture - just froma powertrain perspective alone. I can see Cadillac's V version and Camaro's Z/28 sharing developement and components. And you're right, I can also see I4 and turbo I4 versions being very successful, both on the sales floor and the race track. I'm sure we'll see developement of the Gen V smallblock continue, (assuming GM survives). As long as GM sells trucks and Corvettes, it will need a smallblock - and the Gen V will have the technology to deal with next decade's emissions and CAFE.

Seems very sensible to me. As many of you know, my automotive world revolves around Camaro and my daily driver is a CTS, and have seriously cross-shopped cars like the 3 series and A4 in the past, so I will be watching with great interest how things develop with Alpha. A couple of points: I hope we can get a brilliant Camaro out of this. Smaller, lighter, less bulky looking. Something which in base form, can be nicely motivated with an efficient I4 at that end, but also suitable to finally give me my beloved Z/28 on the performance end. A smaller displacement (5.0L?), GDI, Gen V smallblock would round out such a package nicely, IMO. My personal disappointment in the 5th gen is well documented, but I hope it will be an adequate place keeper for the brand, until a more appropriate one can come - if it comes. I hope the Cadillac Alpha is a no excuses competitor for the 3 series. Something that 3 series/C class/A4 owner may actually WANT to buy. And that's going to take proper engineering, focus, packaging and marketing. It's a tall order, and I hope that GM will have the people assembled in order to pull it off. Once you have these two important pillars set in the Alpha program, it seems to me that modulating a Buick version in between would be relatively easy.

In which way? ( and don't get me wrong, because the GTO was on my shopping list)

I agree with alot of what you say here PCS. And I'll go one further. I think the GTO did great harm to Pontiac. Not so much because it was a sales flop, but because in one fell swoop, it took Pontiac in a whole new direction. Up until the Monaro was imported as the GTO, AFAIK, Pontiac had a pretty sizzling line-up coming, with AWD and SC'd Epsilon models. When the GTO came, it seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room - and there was no one left to fight for much else.

Yeah, but they manage their brands brilliantly. GM has showed a failure to thrive in that regard.

To some extent Pontiac has displayed a failure to thrive in it's advertised position as a "performance brand". I mean GM has certainly lavished lots of interesting products on Pontiac over the past decade. Solstice, GTO, G8. The best and most developed W-car ever, the GP GXP. A coupe and convertible version of the G6 - and the only G6 which was certified with a stick for awhile. During the 4th gen F-car days, the Firebird was blessed with a budget completely uncommensurate with the tiny sales volume it had. Obviously this whole "American BMW" thing for Pontiac, hasn't stuck with the American public. Those that want a BMW, just go and buy the real thing. Those who are looking for something else, buy a Mazda or Scion. For a long time, I had wanted Pontiac to transform itself into a "youth brand", (regardless of which demographic actually purchased their cars), like Scion or Mazda or even Mini Cooper. It may be too late for even that now.

You make good points. Sloan's concept is probably easier to apply if you've got 45% of the market, rather than the 19% GM currently has. Plus, I really doubt that it's possible to exert that sort of discipline on the dealers. Shutting down brands is risky and expensive. But when you are spending money to develop and market products which directly compete against each other, I just don't see that as a good business model.

I got one too.

Last month, not even one G8 was sold for every Pontiac dealer. Unless Pontiac dealers can sell like 50 times as many Holdens as they already do, I just don't see that as viable.

The issue with the Fiat deal was allowing a "put" in the agreement. Why in the world would (at the time) a powerful GM want a struggling Fiat to have such control over them? I was a very poorly crafted deal - for GM. Also it was $2 billion in cash with an additional $4 billion in stock. The whole point of the deal was to get Fiat's intellectual property on the Fiat diesel. I submit that something like that could have been done for MUCH less than $6billion. I will say that the aquisition of Daewoo was a brilliant move, and GM has been able to capitalize on it. I also agree that moving up the 900's was a smart move at the time and pretty much agree with the rest of your statement too. But for every Daewoo deal, we have a GMAC debacle. Wagoner and the Board have always been alittle behind, alittle slow for the situation at hand. Too mired in old guard culture to move quickly and decisively and too concerned about next quarter's numbers over the long term health of the company. They've done a decent job oversees, especially Asia and Eastern Europe, but GMNA is an unmittigated financial disaster. And really, they've had years, even decades to prepare for this.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Rick Wagoner's 31-year career may fall victim to the mistakes of the industry and his own, even if General Motors Corp. survives. The GM chief executive officer unleashed scrutiny of his record after asking for a government bailout to keep the Detroit automaker in business. Now, his departure may be a necessary condition of any federal rescue, business leaders and lawmakers say. ``Management needs to be replaced,'' said Robert Crandall, former chairman and CEO of American Airlines parent AMR Corp. ``The fact is that the management as a whole has had lots of opportunities to fix this. They haven't.'' Wagoner has run the world's largest automaker for the past eight years, presiding over $73 billion in losses beginning in 2005. He already endured a fight with dissident shareholders and several failed turnarounds and may argue he knows the company better than most who could take his job. The 55-year-old executive joined GM in 1977, as U.S. automakers were fending off Japanese competitors who recognized the need a decade earlier to build fuel-efficient vehicles. While U.S. auto sales broke records during Wagoner's years as CEO, the three major producers -- Ford Motor Co., Chrysler LLC and GM -- battled against high labor costs from pension and retiree health care obligations. Removing CEOs ``There's the feeling that next to financial services, automotive execs are the dumbest people in the world,'' said Thomas Stallkamp, a former Chrysler president who worked at the car company when it received emergency government loans in 1980. ``There are probably some symbolic moves that somebody's going to ask for.'' The federal government insisted on replacing the CEOs of American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they received aid. Lawmakers including Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said some executives may have to go before GM and the other U.S. automakers receive $25 billion in new government loans. ``It's pretty clear that management has made some pretty bad decisions over the last 20 years,'' Brown said, adding that changing management is something that Congress must ``think seriously about.'' Wagoner won't offer to resign, he told Automotive News this week. ``It's not clear to me what purpose would be served,'' he said. ``Our job is to make sure we have the best management team to run GM.'' Board Support He wasn't available for comment. ``Nothing has changed relative to the GM board's support for the GM management team,'' the company said in an e-mailed statement. The automaker, which may lose its title as the biggest to Toyota Motor Corp. at the end of the year, has dropped almost six percentage points of U.S. market share during Wagoner's tenure, falling to 22 percent as of Sept. 30. GM stock, at a six-decade low, has sunk 95 percent under the 6-foot-4-inch, Wilmington, Delaware-born executive. ``It's hard to imagine how a management team that has presided over this sort of decline would instill confidence that they can manage their way out of it,'' said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. Still, Wagoner has shown staying power, weathering the losses and activist investor Kirk Kerkorian's 2006 push for an alliance with Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co., Elson said. A case can be made that Wagoner shouldn't be blamed for GM's travails, he said, because it has been hamstrung by the costs of providing health care to 1 million employees and dependents, an issue that should have been handled by the government. Bet Against Hybrids As CEO, the former Duke University basketball player and Harvard University MBA early on bet against gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, focusing research on hydrogen technology. GM offered its first full-scale hybrids in 2007, a decade after Toyota introduced the Prius. He kept GM focused on trucks and sport-utility vehicles, only to press for development of the Volt plug-in electric car when gasoline prices soared. Truck and SUV sales are down 16 percent since 2004. Wagoner used the purchase of South Korea's Daewoo Motor Co. to expand GM's overseas sales 51 percent to 5.5 million cars and trucks by 2007. He wrung concessions from labor unions last year, including cutting wages in half for new hires and offloading retiree health care to a union-run trust by 2010. `Fundamentally Restructuring' ``We believe that we were well along to fundamentally restructuring our business before the current financial crisis, in terms of product quality, productivity, energy solutions and costs,'' Tony Cervone, a GM spokesman, said. ``That strategy will be what leads us to success in the future.'' Finding the right person willing to take the job may extend Wagoner's longevity. Firing management will cause more trouble than it solves if a new team has to relearn the issues and deal with federal overseers new to the car market, Stallkamp said. ``You can't parachute in a bunch of people that don't know anything about it,'' said Stallkamp, 62, now a partner at the buyout firm Ripplewood Holdings LLC. He said he ``has a lot of respect'' for many executives at the automakers and wasn't referring to any one person. President-elect Barack Obama is pushing for Congress to approve as much as $50 billion for the automakers and appoint a czar or board to oversee them, people familiar with the matter said yesterday. Iacocca's Strategy Stallkamp recalled fighting with a government board that wanted to delay investments in light trucks and minivans during the Chrysler bailout. Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca pressed for them and the family-friendly vans turned out to be one of the automaker's 1980s successes. Wagoner's situation differs from Iacocca's, and the other Big Three auto leaders, because of his three-decade GM employment. Ford CEO Alan Mulally took up his post in 2006 after a career at Boeing Co. Robert Nardelli became Chrysler's CEO in 2007 after running Home Depot Inc. Iacocca, known as a product innovator responsible for the Ford Mustang, was brought in to help fix Chrysler in 1978. He lobbied Congress for a bailout, and in January 1980 $1.5 billion in federally guaranteed loans was signed into law. Chrysler repaid them three years later. ``Lee Iacocca had a clear plan to return that company to profitability,'' said Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland. ``These guys do not.'' Time for Pay Cuts Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said in a letter yesterday to the three auto leaders that they should follow Iacocca's example and cut their own pay. Iacocca took a $1 yearly salary and his executives as much as 10 percent less after the bailout, according to the letter. The bailout for automakers faces opposition from Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama who sits on the Senate Banking Committee. The Bush administration also opposes using any of the $700 billion financial-rescue package to aid automakers. Wagoner, the CEOs of Ford and Chrysler, and the United Auto Workers president have been invited to testify at a Nov. 19 hearing before the House Financial Services Committee. In several bailouts, the government has required top executives to leave when it takes financial control of companies. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson replaced Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd and Freddie Mac's Richard Syron when he put the two mortgage-finance companies into government conservatorship in September. AIG chief Robert Willumstad left after the Fed took control the same month. Volunteered to Resign In 1984, federal regulators replaced the board chairman and CEO of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co. after taking an 80 percent ownership stake. The chairman of Lockheed Aircraft Corp., now part of Lockheed Martin Corp., kept his job when the defense contractor won $250 million in federal loan guarantees in 1971, even after offering to resign. ``The management is more interested in Lockheed's survival than in any jobs, and that starts with me,'' Lockheed Chairman Daniel Haughtontold Time magazine. Aid to the automakers must come with conditions that reduce their U.S. production costs to match or beat those of Toyota, said Crandall, who managed a unionized workforce as American Airlines CEO from 1985 to 1998. Toyota generated pretax profit of $922 per vehicle on North American sales in 2007, while GM lost $729, according a June report by New York-based consulting firm Oliver Wyman. ``If we don't impose conditions that we honestly believe will make GM successful, then we're just kidding ourselves,'' said Crandall, who last owned an American car 10 years ago and now drives a Toyota. ``Their costs are simply out of whack and the quality isn't up to snuff.''

One more thing.... Ford's Mullaly demonstrates LEADERSHIP here. Ford has already said that they are prepared to to move forward even without a bailout. OTOH, rather than the strong leadership that GM is desperate for right now, Wagoner looks like a pathetic beached whale. He won't resign, but cries that GM is finished in 30-60 days without help. He won't resign, but is getting screwed over by GM's own finance arm - which he and the Board made possible, by allowing Cerberus to take controlling interest in. Gee, had he not GIVEN Fiat $6billion to let GM walk away - he might have another couple of months to grovel with now. To Rick Wagoner and the Board of Directors, I say grow some balls. Come up with a valid plan. Lord knows, you've had years of warning that this day would come. Show some leadership when GM needs it the most - or step aside.

Exactly right on all counts. And what exactly does Rick want to do with the estimated $22B he will eventually ask the US Government for? Finance another 12 months of "cash burn"? RW and the Board have made so many strategic blunders, it just plain doesn't matter if he is charming or not - it's time for a new approach. I want GM to survive and thrive as much as anyone else here does. But to do that, GM must make some radical and tough choices. They must totally restructure their decision making process. GM must transform themselves from the bottom up. Will RW and the current Board do that? I don't think so. After that, there's nothing else to talk about.

They also sold controlling interest of GMAC - a critical strategic asset, and were the architects of the Fiat debacle. BTW, the G8 sold 1000 units last month and unless GM gets a bailout, it may not be around long enough to deliver the first retail Camaro.

I think it's time for Wagoner to go as well as the entire Board of Directors.

Wagoner: GM needs federal help before Obama takes office Jamie LaReau Automotive News November 10, 2008 - 4:40 pm ET DETROIT -- General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner says GM's financial distress is so dire that it must line up financial assistance from Washington before President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January. "This is an issue that needs to be addressed urgently," Wagoner said during an exclusive interview today with Automotive News. Now is the time to "overshoot, not undershoot" when it comes to assistance for the auto industry, he added. In return for financial aid, General Motors is willing to offer the government preferred stock, set limits on executive compensation and speed the introduction of fuel-efficient vehicles. But Wagoner said he is not prepared to resign in return for government aid. "I don't think it'd be a very smart move," he said. "I think our job is to make sure we have the best management team to run GM. It's not clear to me what purpose would be served. …" Wagoner conducted his interview three days after GM posted its fifth straight quarterly loss and said it may run out of cash within a few months. GM reported that it had burned $6.9 billion in cash during the third quarter, dropping its cash reserves to $16.2 billion. To stay in business, the company must maintain reserves of $11 billion to $14 billion. Wagoner said the company's cash burn in the fourth quarter will ease to $1 billion a month. "We expect our fourth-quarter cash burn -- even with a very weak industry -- to be more like the first two quarters," he said. Wagoner declined to say how much money GM needs from Washington. But he said GM's turnaround plan assumes industry sales of 11.7 million new cars and trucks next year. "I'd say the funding request that's gone into Washington would cover us under that scenario," Wagoner said. Without government assistance, the automaker will not survive if industry sales stay mired at 11 million units, Wagoner said. "I'd question whether the U.S. industry as a whole could survive that without support," he noted. Even with government aid, Wagoner said, GM will have to do "significantly more restructuring" if industry sales stay this low. But if annual industry sales return to 15 million units in a few years, Wagoner said, "We'd be doing pretty good."

Okay, here we go. http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2008/11/insid...-subaru-co.html

Are they still on?

Actually, I'm looking forward to seeing how it does. And I also see it as a modern equivalent to a 240SX.

Heinricy won't be easily replaced.

Anyone know anything about these wheels?

Love it!

Sorry for your loss PCS.

Just me, but I think this is the first bit of good news all day. Good because... 1) Maybe, just maybe, Chrysler has a slim chance of survival, (for a short time), if Cerberus resigns itself to the fact that it must actually try to make this company work. 2) Maybe a humbled Cerberus will be more open minded about Carlos Ghosn's offer - and maybe if Cerberus takes him more seriously, he'll sweeten the deal. 3) GM doesn't have the time nor energy to be dealing with this kind of "merger" right now - or really at any time. It needs to concentrate on it's own business and make the tough decisions required to restructure. Of course, you need strong leadership for that. 4) GM won't be the ones dismantling and closing down Chrysler. That part was giving me a sick feeling ever since word of this leaked out.