Posted 7:45 PM by steve

If you could cherry pick among GM's different brands, you could put together a pretty decent line up. GM offers a pretty good pickup truck, a pretty good full size SUV, a pretty good crossover, a pretty good full sized sedan, a couple pretty good compact cars, a pretty good sports car and so on. The problem is that in order to give each brand a full line up of models, GM ended up with too many cars that either have nothing special going for them or are redundant with another GM model. Put another way, there's a good car company in GM, the problem is that it's stuck alongside a bunch of losers.

So... if I were rebuilding GM from the ashes, I would definitely consider eliminating ALL of the brands (and not just Pontiac or one or two others) and selling the best of the GM lineup through a single brand.

As for the name of this new brand, unfortunately, none of the existing names work. Each of them has spent billions on advertising trying to carve out a niche; and in this case, they've been successful: they all occupy niches which precludes each of them from them appealing to the entire car-buying audience. I did (for a couple of seconds) think of using GM as the moniker, unfortunately, while it was unintended, GM has firmly established itself as a name that nobody wants.

So the new group needs a new name.... and, drawing from the past (and recognizing that I am better at concept than the actual details), I propose: American Motors.

(yes, I know American Motors has a fuzzy past, but not with 90% of today's car buyers. yes, I know that American Motors may not have the biggest appeal for overseas, but I doubt many of the people who are now buying GM cars overseas are unaware of the American-owned nature of the company).

Whatever you call it, I think a key for GM is to not look at this as Chevy -vs- Pontiac -vs- Buick and so on but as a way of putting together the strongest line up of cars as possible. EACH brand has junk in it and it doesn't make sense to keep bad cars around because 'their' brand gets to live another day. Nor does it do any good to throw out the babies when you throw out the dishwater (getting rid of Pontiac's good cars when getting rid of the Pontiac brand). And just as it doesn't make sense to drop good models, neither does it make sense to get rid of the good people that Pontiac has or its good factories; GM ought to cherry pick people and factories just as it should do with car models.