GM Closes 4 Plants - Apparently The US Really Does Want Fuel Efficient Cars!

Arlington, Texas dodged another bullet. GM is closing 4 plants that make gas guzzling trucks and SUVs and the Arlington plant is not one of them! Good news for local auto workers, but in general bad news for GM. The brain dead management of General Motors has been stuck in the “bigger is better” rut while the rest of the world long ago realized that smaller and more gas efficient cars were better suited to the current economy and ecology.

Poor GM. Stuck in the fossil fuel age along with Ford. Both companies had plenty of chance to retool and start making better-smaller-smarter cars but they were blinded by temporary bumps in sales of a few models and decided to go bigger instead of smaller. The size of the largest SUVs has increased continuously since they were first introduced. The apex of this lemmings run toward obsolescence was the Hummer. As the widest and least fuel efficient car or car-like vehicle on the road, the Hummer screams excess and boorishness. Still it had its market with under-endowed men and suburban moms seeking assault vehicle to pick little Suzy and Timmy up from the Montessori school.

Now as gas climbs over $4:00 a gallon and the economy is in a shambles, GM finally realizes it needs to create a small fuel efficient car or even better an electric one. The Chevy Volt holds their future, but that will not see a dealer showroom until 2010. For the next two years GM will have to limp along selling its oversized and overpriced cars to a dwindling number of consumers who have unlimited funds.

Toyota and Honda saw this coming years ago. They have been importing hybrids and fuel efficient conventional cars for years. Their market share has steadily climbed and yet GM failed to notice. GM even had hybrid technology in its Saturn line and yet failed to promote and expand that. Instead the dinosaurs at GM decided to put hybrid engines in their largest SUVs . Now this does make some sense, because now instead of 14 mpg they get 22 mpg. Meanwhile Toyota and the other Japanese carmakers have vehicles that get up to 50 mpg and Honda will introduce a fully electric/hydrogen car in the very near future.

If Ford and GM had real management instead of the brain dead MBAs that are so focused on this quarter’s profits that they fail to see the big picture they might have kept making the electric cars created for California. They had the key to their company’s future in their hands and they recalled and destroyed it.

It’s time the stockholders of the US car companies tossed the management fossils of US carmakers out on their ears and get some folks with a vision and a real grasp of where the market is headed.