[stovt001]

These ideas for keeping brands and giving them a specific purpose sound great, but there are a few problems:

1) The growth of the internet and the information people have easy access to makes it much harder to differentiate a brand. A car company just can't slap a new badge on another brand's car and say it is something completely different. A quick trip to Edmunds or any other car website will let a customer know that whatever they are looking at is just the 20th car built on the Lambda platform and they could get the exact same thing with a Chevy badge for thousands less.

2) GM swore up and down for years that they'd stop badge engineering, and it has only gotten worse. Having GM keep anything more than 3 NA brands (and that is pushing it) is like strapping cartons on cigarettes to someone who is trying to quit.

3) When the primary GM NA hierarchy was formed (Chevy -> Pontiac -> Olds -> Buick -> Caddy) GM practically owned the American market. Ford owned most of the rest, Chrysler had a solid chunk, and everyone else was a footnote. Now GM has no greater market share than Toyota with its 3 brands. There is only room for so many brands in the market and as new ones enter, some have to leave.

4)GM just gave us the Pontiac G3. What makes you think they have any interest in making it a performance brand? Even if they wanted to do a lineup of performance cars, the dealers keep screaming for rebadged Cobalts, Aveos, and Equinoxes. Buick, on the other hand, is sticking perfectly to its brand differentiation.

5) Corporate culture is everything. Saab built its image on quirkiness and Pontiac built its image on rebelliousness. Both of those words perfectly described everything GM corporate culture is NOT.