After several months of silence, it appears Penske has opted to retract his offer to purchase Saturn from General Motors.

Following a script so eerily similar to my earlier prediction that it prompted me to buy lottery tickets, Penske had planned to use the Saturn dealer network as a domestic channel for future distribution of Renault-Samsung’s line of rebadged Renault and Nissan products. In the interim though, GM was going to continue supplying some existing vehicles to the Tupperware Car Company through 2012, give or take.

So it’s so long to the plastic-fantastic arm of General Motors. Unlike Pontiac, we hardly knew ye.

Blame management, the unions, asymmetrical trade regulations or tough competition — because the blasé love to blame. But no matter where your armchair analysis pins responsibility, the fact is that America’s once-proud R&D and manufacturing powerhouse has been reduced to bankruptcy — a fate that almost no other government has allowed to befall their automakers.

The President is priming the country for a bankruptcy that will affect assembly workers, suppliers, dealerships, and an already economically battered Midwest. We’ll liveblog his comments after the jump.

Continue reading Liveblog: Obama primes a post-industrial America.

For those who are trying to pick the important details out of the GM restructuring stories flying around today, here’s what we know so far:

(Updated 5:00 p.m., 4/27)
– Pontiac is to be phased out entirely by the end of 2010; Hummer and Saturn will be phased out by the end of 2009; Saab will hopefully be sold off shortly, and it seems GM is fairly confident this will happen.
– The G8 will be gone as of the end of this model year (2009).
– The G6, G3, Solstice and Torrent will slowly disappear through the 2009 and 2010 model years.
– The Vibe will likely be the final production vehicle in the lineup.
– More than 20,000 layoffs are expected, though it’s not known yet which divisions (obviously, Pontiac-related is a safe bet here) and facilities will be impacted.
– There will be an “acceleration” of plant idling and shut-down along with a significant reduction in the dealer network — reportedly up to 40%.
– The restructuring plan will result in the taxpayers and union trusts owning a hefty chunk of General Motors.
– Bankruptcy is still not off the table.
– There is currently no viable offer on the table for the Saturn dealership network.

Click through for more.

Continue reading Quick Hit — GM Restructuring

By Byron Hurd

GM’s press conference on Sunday was not the most depressing of the day’s events (See: Chrysler), but it certainly wasn’t the most inspiring either. Wagoner’s communications team set him up with a healthy four hundred words that had nothing to do with GM’s financial trouble. Now that’s a solid corporate communications strategy when everything is business as usual, but when you’ve just been floated a loan by some 300 million of your peers, a little humility may be in order. (See: Chrysler — sensing a pattern?). But while ChryCo’s conference may have been the most depressing of the bunch, it was the non-event that was Pontiac’s presence at NAIAS that depressed, disturbed, and frankly offended me as both an enthusiast and as “member” of the press. If you’ve ever shown up to a party where you’re surrounded by dozens of people who were your friends just days before and suddenly don’t want to talk to you, look at you, acknowledge you, or even share the same hundred-square foot area of their apartment, then you know what it’s like to be Pontiac. You don’t know what you did (or didn’t do), but suddenly you’re the fattest, pinkest, most foul-smelling elephant ever to be under the table.

Continue reading Lord Byron — Pontiac (Was) Car.

Behold, our new, colon-filled title! Seriously, Speed:Sport:Life is a much better title than Dubspeed Driven, despite my ineffectual and half-hearted grousing to the contrary, since, as I mention in the podcast, it’s hard to make a quality first impression that shows off our professionalism and dedication to the honest truth about the automotive industry when I have the word “Dub” tacked onto the front of my name badge. And the fact that I’m roughly 20 years too young to be considered a human being in the automotive industry. And my wardrobe, which consists almost entirely of jeans and t-shirts purchased off the Internet. But I’ll be damned if we didn’t fix that first problem! Anyway, we’ve got a quality but short podcast for you this week. Enjoy.

 

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