[396ssrat]

Originally Posted by protovack

Nothing like a little corporate restructuring to bring all the GM naysayers out of the woodwork to bash GM and predict its failure. Funny, you'd never know that there are so many intelligent, visionary executives sitting around on Camaro6.com who could solve all of GMs problems in 5 minutes because they're so much smarter than the people running a global corporation that sells hundreds of thousands of cars every year. I appreciate the critical viewpoint, and its important to keep GM accountable, absolutely. But the level of discourse in this thread is grade school level at best. Most people have absolutely no clue what kinds of sacrifices and hard decisions it takes to keep a huge company running and thriving, in a market where there is such insane competition. All the companies have their issues, even the german luxury makers have big issues. VW for god's sake there are hundreds of thousands of VW cars sitting rotting in parking lots right now due to essentially corporate fraud on a grand scale.

People in the US have this myopic view of the world where GM is evil, GM is the only car company in the world with problems, GM is sponging off the american taxpayers which is a load of BS, often spoken by people with an agenda to push. The euro companies have it stupidly simple compared to GM--all their employees live in semi-socialist nanny states and they have healthcare and benefits all guaranteed by the government already. GM has provided huge amounts of economic growth in this country and has stuck around in places where nobody else would go. You don't think the other companies try to play the system? The ONLY reason toyota and others have plants in the USA is because those states basically said we'll give you a free ride. If they hadn't been willing to do that, the companies would be somewhere else too. It's essentially a repeat of history in a different place. Some day, the Toyota plant in Kentucky will close and leave a few thousand people without jobs.

One must deal in economic realities. GM can't stay in Detroit forever, or Oshawa forever. As long as you want to show up on a Chevrolet lot and expect to walk away with a car for thousands less than MSRP every time, then you have to deal with the consequences of those type of expectations. Paying the healthcare costs and benefits for American workers is super expensive. I wonder how many people would actually choose to pay more for their car knowing that it was made in the USA by workers with great stable jobs with benefits. Sure a lot of people will claim of course they would, but when it comes down to signing the papers, people want to pay as little as possible and get as much as possible.

You are paying the healthcare and retirement for government workers aren't you? They seem to stay in business and they produce nothing. When trucks are discounted thousands of dollars GM is still making a profit. All you have to do is listen to buyers, not Bean counters. Stop building the same damn vehicle for more than 3 years.