They need to get Honda level quality and keep the flash.

I’m not sure if the VE Commodore based Pontiacs will save the brand but they are damn fine cars for the money.

One wonders just how relevant the 6.0-litre plus V8′s are going to be with the price of fuel on the rise – and it hurts me to say that as I was the owner of the previous model LS2 equipped Oz version of the Ute (truck). It rocked!!! And drank like a fish…

GM could have so many brands back when they controlled 50% of the market in the US, but with thier market share at 21% and falling, they are over-saturated.

Of perhaps more importance than the number of brands is the fact that GM has far too many dealers, which average 1/3 the unit sales of a comaprable Toyota dealership. This has led to internecine price wars as dealers struggle to survive. This “race to the bottom” is destroying GM’s brands and killing resale values.

GM needs Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, and maybe Buick. Saturn and Pontiac, which cannibalize sales mostly from Chevy, need to go.

Most of all, GM needs to pare its dealer network by about 40% so the dealers can survive, and to kill off the disastrous priced cutting among competing dealers that hurts overall profitability, since GM is forced to put incentive dollars on the cars to move them.

Unfortunately, US franchise laws make it nearly impossible for GM to cut dealers.

The G8 should have been the new Impala. No need to continue to pour resources into a dead brand like Pontiac.

Or Saturn. The Aura *is* the same as a Malibu, thought the Malibu is more developed, and the Astra should be the Cobalt. The Vue should be the small Chevy SUV.

GM launches a good car, but then they whither on the vine for lack of marketing resources. G6, Aura, Vue, Torrent, Vibe, Lucerne, XLR, the list goes on and on.

With effective management practice – there’s every reason to figure that the formula can be made to work. They have to make sure 1) quality continues to improve (sharply) and 2) that the brands maintain distinct identities to avoid extinction.

We have only to the look at the VW-Audi Group to see that this is so.

At last years NY show the Saturn Aura was the darling of the show with a bit of promotion from GM and then nothing as they had committed the big bucks to launching Buick CUVs (yawn) and spread the rest of the money pretty much evenly around the rest of the products. The result being that the Aura is a decent car that no one hears about.

GM needs to be 3, maybe 4 brands, Chevy, Cadillac and ?, so two of the three, Pontiac, Buick or Saturn needs to die.

Jim