Thursday, November 27, 2008

GM Said to Study Shedding Saturn, Saab, Pontiac to Win U.S. Aid

General Motors Corp., working to cut costs to win $12 billion in government loans, is studying whether to shed its Saturn, Saab and Pontiac brands in addition to Hummer, people familiar with the matter said.

Selling or dropping brands would save money and reduce overlap as the biggest U.S. automaker struggles to avoid running out of operating cash by year’s end, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified because no decision has been made. GM’s other U.S. brands are Chevrolet, GMC, Buick and Cadillac.

GM has been trying to combine Cadillac/Hummer/Saab and Pontiac/Buick/GMC brands into big dealerships able to benefit from higher volumes and lower marketing costs. Toyota Motor Corp., which includes the Scion brand, sold an average of 1,071 cars at U.S. dealerships in 2007 compared with 274 at Saturn, 118 at Pontiac and 115 at Saab, according to Automotive News.

2 comments:

Brenna Ormiston said...

I think that this sounds like a good idea. At the very least, it shows that GM is trying to improve itself without the help of the government.

KT said...

But the beginning of this Article its siad that GM was doing this to try to win a 12 million dollar government loans, so I would question whether GM is actually trying to better itself or just using this as a gimmick to win over the government loan.