If this truly is the end of Saab, maybe it’s just as well Bob Sinclair isn’t around to see it.

Sinclair, who died in May at age 77, made Saab a success in the United States. As head of U.S. operations in the 1980s, he pushed his reluctant Swedish bosses to add content and luxury to their cars.

We forget just how well Saab was doing in this country a couple of decades ago, nearly hitting sales of 50,000 units before the October 1987 stock market crash. Saab was quirky, but also cool.

Think how hard it is these days to take a brand upmarket. You have to marvel at Sinclair, who retired in 1991. In fact, Saab may be the last brand to make a successful transition from downmarket to upmarket — here or anywhere.

In December 1989, General Motors was cash-flush and distressed that it had lost out to Ford in bidding for Jaguar. So GM acquired half of Saab. Several years later, it bought the rest.

You can trace the beginning of the end of Saab to the January 1990 press conference in Trollhattan at which GM was introduced as Saab’s 50 percent shareholder. David Herman, an American GM executive installed as CEO, was perplexed when a Swedish journalist asked him what the Saab brand stood for. I remember that the reporters and Saab employees kept remarking about that.

GM kept getting it wrong in Trollhattan. At first, the U.S. company was too hands-off. So what you got were years of indecision. It took almost 15 years for GM to become serious about leveraging its economies of scale to help slow-growing Saab. Early in this decade, Rick Wagoner finally decided that in trying to safeguard Saab’s brand character, GM had been overly deferential.

So six years ago, GM folded Saab’s independent product development and manufacturing operations into Opel’s. But that didn’t work, either. It seemed as if Saab was never more than an afterthought at GM.

I can’t help thinking that an independent Saab, led by independent thinkers like Bob Sinclair, would have done much better these past 20 years.

Column courtesy of Automotive News.

In the new Detroit, it’s all about the CEO, all about having the right guy in command at the right time.

We are in the era of the outsider hero.

The relative calm at Ford Motor Co. these days is attributed to Alan Mulally’s arrival in September 2006.

Chrysler Group’s future is bound up in the style and personality of Sergio Marchionne, who as an outsider transformed Fiat and now tries to do the same in Auburn Hills.

The board of General Motors Co. wants a Mulally or Marchionne of its own. The company never has really had someone like that. That’s why Fritz Henderson had to go.

Henderson was an insider, a GM lifer. The board wants a superman.

True, Henderson was a different kind of insider. He spent much of his career overseas fixing GM’s Asia-Pacific and European businesses. He gained a reputation as a fast-moving, somewhat unconventional turnaround specialist before coming to Detroit in 2006 as CFO.

But Rick Wagoner was once a smart gate-crasher from overseas operations, too. Eventually, GM’s Detroit culture grinds you down and takes over your reputation.

Although GM did not specifically rule out promoting from within, it is clear the new board wants to find a little magic out there somewhere. It needs a phe-nom.

That doesn’t mean bringing in an illustrious auto industry star, a Jim Press. Whoever takes over from acting CEO Ed Whitacre likely will be someone we’ve never heard of.

Mulally was all but unknown to the auto industry when Bill Ford snared him from the No. 2 spot at Boeing. Marchionne was an even bigger mystery when he moved to Fiat in 2006 from SGS Group, the Swiss inspections, auditing and certification services company.

Henderson was way more than a just bean-counter, but there was no evidence that he was a true revenue builder.

In former times, revenue builder meant product specialist — a Bob Lutz. But the new General Motors needs more than that as it prepares to go public in a year or so.

It needs more than a car guy, or even proven turnaround idol. It needs a confidence-builder, an inspirer. That can make all the difference.

Column courtesy of Automotive News.

Column courtesy of Automotive News

Going. Going. Gone.

Any day now, a revered 83-year-old brand — Pontiac — will be a relic of the past, and a relic of what General Motors used to be.

Pontiac was introduced in 1926 to fill the price gap between Chevrolet and Oldsmobile, and the brand has had an up-and-down life.

It was a solid performer in its earlier days. But sales were unsatisfactory in the mid-1950s, and I’m sure some GM executives asked, “Do we really need Pontiac?”

After 1956 the answer was a thunderous, “You bet we do!” That year, Bunkie Knudsen, Pete Estes and John DeLorean took over Pontiac — Knudsen as general manager, Estes as chief engineer and DeLorean as assistant chief engineer.

Their first car was the 1959 model, and it was a sensation. It had great styling, a split grille and, most important, “Wide-Track Drive,” a phrase coined by Pontiac’s ad agency, MacManus, John and Adams. Buyers told salesmen, “I want one of those Wide Tracks.”

The Glory Days

Estes and DeLorean succeeded Knudsen in the general manager’s office, and that decade was Pontiac’s golden age. In 1962 the brand was No. 3 in U.S. sales, and it stayed in third place until 1971. Sales peaked at 896,980 in 1978. Before Wide Track, Pontiac usually was in sixth place.

Today, all that is history.

GM, as we knew it, is gone, and so is Pontiac. The new downsized General Motors dumped it, along with Saturn and Hummer. The latter two were relative newcomers; Saturn arrived in 1990 and Hummer came in 2000.

I’m sure there was a hot debate in the GM boardroom when it came time to kill a few brands. Saturn had never been success (it was supposed to be an import fighter, remember?) and the humongous Hummer was a remnant of the SUV craze. Out they go.

But do we keep Buick or do we keep Pontiac? Pontiac partisans surely stressed sales; Pontiac has outsold Buick in 42 of the last 51 years. Pontiac clearly has the edge in styling. It’s GM’s sporty car division, and it has a fleet of small cars.

They kept Buick

Buick backers had history on their side. Buick was the foundation of GM when Billy Durant began putting GM together; Pontiac is a relative newcomer by comparison.

Buick also could call on GM patriarch Alfred Sloan and his theory of brand progression. Sloan felt buyers should step up from a Chevrolet to a Pontiac, to an Oldsmobile, to a Buick and, finally, to a Cadillac as their economic situation improved. Chevy to Pontiac is a mighty small step indeed, but Chevy to Buick is a significant step up the ladder.

But in the end, Buick lived and Pontiac died.

On Oct. 1, Pontiac dealers had 14,200 new cars and trucks on hand. Since then about 6,900 G6 models have been built for fleet sales. October sales totaled 10,646. Thus, about 10,450 remain. All should be sold by the end of this month.

Pontiac then will join Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Studebaker, Packard, Winton, Duesenberg and many other proud brands in the automotive graveyard. Pontiac will have sold an estimated 41 million cars and trucks during its 83-year life.

Column courtesy of Automotive News.

Two weeks ago, in an item in our “On the Table” column, I suggested that the Smart adventure was nearing an end, saying the following: “Back when this venture was first announced I went on record as saying it would last 12 months, tops. Well, 20 months in and with sales trending downward month after month – October sales were down a staggering 70.4 percent – I think we can safely say that the Smart experiment is a bust. Even with an electric version allegedly coming here, it doesn’t matter. It’s a niche car, and the niche has been filled. Buh-bye now.”

Smart (and for this discussion I will capitalize the “S” even though the official name of the vehicle uses a lower case “s”) is the huggable two-seat urban car that enjoyed considerable success in its home European markets when it was launched several years ago, and it was easy to see why. It fit perfectly in the manically crowded streets and byways in cities all across Europe, and it was an instant success. Americans even became very familiar with the sight of the Daimler-owned Smart during their travels over there, commenting often about how you saw Smart cars “everywhere.”

Wondering how to capitalize on the success of Smart in Europe, the idea of bringing the Smart car over here was something that was visited and re-visited often by Daimler, but the timing never seemed right. Or maybe it was just because Dieter Zetsche – the incredibly overrated German auto executive who initially was Mr. Popular here but who then flamed-out big-time by being a major player in Daimler AG’s gross mishandling of its Chrysler infatuation – couldn’t envision a scenario where it could be done with a modicum of profitability.

That is until he began discussions with auto entrepreneur Roger Penske in late 2006, which continued throughout 2007, culminating in an agreement by which Penske would create a distribution network for Smart. That deal was announced with much fanfare at the Detroit Auto Show in January 2008, and the Smart launch in the U.S. was under way.

At first the timing of the Smart launch seemed visionary, because this country was headed for the highest recorded gasoline prices in our history, and Smart sales took off. In typical American consumer fashion, the “first on the block” syndrome played heavily in the Smart car’s initial success. It was cute and huggable, it was dramatically different, it came in bright, cuddly colors, and it seemed like the right car, at the right time, with the right affiliation, a “hipster” star in the making.

After all, if Roger was involved, it had to be a successful proposition, right? And at first it was boom times for Smart, with almost 2700 cars sold in May 2008, and 24,622 for that year. A fairly respectable showing for what was – by any measure – a niche car.

Slowly but surely, however, reality set in. After the “first on the block, gotta get me one of those” buyers were sated, and the small car frenzy that was initiated by $4.00+ per gallon gasoline gave way to more rational thought, the Smart was exposed for what it really was: a very nice European urban micro car albeit with some serious drawbacks that made it ill-suited for most of the U.S.

What were those drawbacks? There were three. First of all was the fact that the transmission was so far below par that it actually negatively impacted the driving experience. It was (and is) jerky and balky, and only the most starry-eyed early-adopter consumers could ignore the fact that it was simply unacceptable for contemporary motoring. Secondly, the mileage wasn’t all that great in comparison to other fuel-efficient offerings out there. And finally, the value component left a lot to be desired because you could simply get more car (as in more room and comfort) – with mileage that was comparable or better to the Smart – for pretty close to the same money as a fully-loaded Smart.

And once gasoline prices started to ease up and consumers took a deep breath and took a giant step back and surveyed the market, it was clear that the Smart came up short in the Big Picture of vehicles out there. And the sales started to wane, month by month.

Which brings us to where we are today, and that is with just 661 cars sold last month and 13,082 sold year-to-date in 2009, Smart sales are well and truly in the tank.

Seeing where this is going – in other words, nowhere good – Daimler is taking a flyer on giving Smart a new reason for being as a short-term urban rental car. In a program that was announced today in Austin, Texas, Smart cars will be offered to consumers in a new program called car2go.

The car2go rental program makes Smart cars available to registered consumers in Austin for as long as needed, after which they can then return the cars to designated parking spaces in and around the city which are included in the fee. The cost will be 35 cents per minute including insurance and gas and the cars will also be available for one day or multiple day uses.

Two hundred Smart ForTwo cars will be initially allotted for the effort, mirroring a program Daimler first tested in Ulm, Germany, last year. The pilot program will be run by Austin city employees, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Austin views itself as one of America’s visionary “green” cities, and its leaders see this as a golden opportunity to curb urban congestion.

And the idea is to take it to other cities, too, with Zetsche hinting at the fact that many other cities are interested in the new program. That’s all well and good, but the interesting thing is that this is a Daimler AG program and that the Penske Automotive Group – the U.S. distributors for Smart – is not involved.

Right now the Smart brand is dead in the water in the U.S., and that presents a huge problem for Smart dealers across the country – and for Roger Penske. It’s fine that Dieter and his troops are thinking of ways to pump up the Smart ForTwo’s raison d’etre, but in order for Smart to continue to be viable in the U.S., it desperately needs a larger car. Like yesterday.

At one point there was a larger Smart “ForFour” in Europe from 2004 to 2006 based on the European Mitsubishi Colt, and Daimler is said to be considering a new-generation Smart “ForFour” concept now, but nothing has been decided as of yet. They better get on with it because without a larger Smart vehicle the Smart brand will not survive in this country, period.

What’s the lesson in all of this, if there is one buried in here somewhere?

There are two, actually. The travails of the Smart car adventure in this country reveal two, time-honored High-Octane Truths about this business.

The first is that this is a relentlessly tough business (yeah, I know, that’s a bulletin, right?). You can line up all of the seemingly essential ingredients – and believe me having Roger Penske involved is very much about having the right “essential” ingredient – but that unto itself is really no guarantee of the level of success that will be achieved. There is a kaleidoscope of variables involved – distribution, pricing, the retail component, market conditions, promotion, marketing, “the buzz” etc., etc., etc., and any one of those things can go awry, and in a big way too.

Which leads me to the next High-Octane Truth about this business and that is you can have all of those aforementioned variables in perfect order, but if the product itself isn’t up to snuff it ultimately won’t matter, because it is, was, and always will be about the product.

As a car, the Smart leaves a lot to be desired. You don’t enter this market with a built-in fatal flaw – and believe me, the Smart gearbox is a fatal flaw – and expect to succeed. Combine that with a value quotient that comes up short when compared to, for example, the Honda Fit, and add to it the notoriously short attention span of the American car buying consumer, and you have a recipe for a short-term proposition in this market, at best, because in the end “buzz” can only carry you so far.

Oh, and by the way, I think there are a few lessons in here somewhere for Sergio’s Fiat-Chrysler entourage, if they can quit pontificating to themselves long enough to pay attention, that is…

Thanks for listening.

Column courtesy of AutoExtremist.

Raising taxes on gasoline is political suicide in the United States. Any politician foolish enough to propose raising the gas tax would be hounded out of office, or never elected in the first place. We, the American people, will see to that.

You see, we don’t like taxes of any sort. And we especially hate gas taxes. Owning a car in America isn’t so much of a privilege as it is a necessity. Most our communities don’t have public transportation. So we need our wheels to get to work, or school, or going out for fun, or whatever else we want to do with them. In America, even the poorest among us drive cars. And none of us want the government taxing our mobility out of our reach.

But maybe the problem is that the American people have never been properly sold on the need to raise the gas tax. Here’s my pitch.

Because we keep the price of oil so cheap, we use an awful lot of it: 20 million barrels a day, every single day. About half of that is used for transportation purposes. And because we import so much oil, it has a debilitating impact on our trade deficit. Every year we ship $300 billion out of this country to pay our oil bills. Indeed, it is a key contributor to why the United States has gone from being a creditor nation to a debtor nation, a shocking development that calls into question this nation’s ability to remain a world leader. People in debt don’t call the shots. They get told what to do.

Worse still, we import a lot of that oil from troubled hot spots in the world. It leaves us very vulnerable to cut-offs, and forces us to deal with less-than-friendly regimes that we could otherwise choose to ignore.

Then there’s the impact on the auto industry. Automakers are under the gun to meet fuel efficiency standards that will force them to build millions of small cars that fit in the A, B and C-class segments. If the price of gasoline is high they should have no problem selling these cars, as we saw in the summer of 2008 when gas prices shot over $4 a gallon. But if gas prices remain relatively low, like they are right now, there’s going to be acres of lonely small cars gathering dust on dealer lots. That alone will threaten the financial viability of most automakers in this country.

A lot of people assure me that gasoline prices are going to rise on their own anyway as the global economy recovers. But these are largely the same people who assured me a year ago that gas would never, ever fall back under $4 a gallon again. What if the “experts” are wrong this time too, and oil prices stay pretty much where they are? I can categorically guarantee you that would be a disaster for the auto industry.

Meanwhile, we have a deadly war that is raging in Afghanistan. The Defense Department says it will cost $65 billion next year without any troop build-up, and over $100 billion if the President decides to send in more troops. The escalating costs in Afghanistan are wiping out any savings from withdrawing from Iraq.

Our troops in Afghanistan need new types of MRAP vehicles (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected). They’re being killed up by roadside bombs because the MRAPs we developed for Iraq are ineffective in Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain and rocky dirt roads. We need to get our troops what they need, and we need to get it to them as fast as possible, cost be damned. But how do we come up with the money to pay for it?

I think we need to start by taxing oil, but not just any oil. Only imported oil. A $5 tax on every barrel of oil that is imported into this country would raise over $18 billion a year. A $25 tax on imported oil would just about pay for the entire Afghan war.

And this kind of tax would dovetail perfectly our national needs. We could get our troops the equipment that will save their lives. We could ensure stability in the auto industry. And we would spur development of new domestic sources of fuel.

With specific goals spelled out as to how this money would be spent, I believe the American people would finally accept a tax designed to raise the price of oil. All I have to do now is find a politician brave enough to propose it.

Column courtesy of Autoblog and Autoline Detroit.

A reader writes: “After subscribing to your magazine for more years than I can remember, I was amazed that you actually tested a (gasp!) Buick. With all your cheerleading for BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche, you actually came down to testing an affordable, dependable vehicle driven by more people than you care to admit. In case you haven’t noticed, in most of the country there are laws that work against a 224-mph road bomb, so what’s the use of having one. Let’s have more articles on affordable cars more suitable for daily use…”

Another writes: “In a time when one in 10 of us is unemployed, I found myself forced to sell my highly modified 600-horsepower Trailblazer SS for something more ‘sensible and affordable.’ I just finished reading the August issue, and I have to thank you for the fantastic, albeit brief, escape from reality…the ultimate boyhood fantasy: jets and Vettes ["Blue Devil versus Blue Angel"]. For just a few minutes, I felt like I was driving the ultimate American sports car, [then] barrel rolling into the sunset while Kenny Loggins wailed about the “Danger Zone” in the background. That article was the most fun I’ve had reading your magazine after many years as a subscriber.”

See our dilemma?

The automobile started out as a rich man’s plaything in the early part of the 20th century. Within 20 years, however, Henry Ford’s simple, functional Model T had put America on wheels, precipitating massive social change. Passenger miles traveled by automobile were only 25 percent of rail passenger miles in 1922, but were four times as great as rail passenger miles by 1929. Fast-food joints, shopping malls, drive-in theaters-business ideas that hadn’t even existed a decade earlier-were made possible in the 1920s and ’30s by mass automobility.

On this date 20 years ago in Berlin, some minor East German Communist party leader named Günter Schabowski was giving a press conference. The party is adapting to the needs of the people, he was saying, the party responds to the needs of the people, blah blah blah. And, oh yeah, pretty much anyone who wants to can go to West Berlin whenever they feel like it. When an Italian reporter in the press room asked Schabowski when this policy was to go into effect he famously replied, “Immediately.”

At that time, I happened to be living off the fringes of the Cold War in Wiesbaden, West Germany. I was editing magazines published for American Forces in Europe. One of the magazines was a car magazine. We wrote about Porsches winning Le Mans, how much Prost and Senna hated each other, how evil Jean-Marie Balestre really was, stuff like that. I like to think that these tales of Western mechanical decadence were what spurred the revolution. Some credit Gorbachev, others Reagan, still others the failure of Communism. I think it was my write-up of the 24 Hours of Le Mans the previous June.

In 1989, there were more than half a million American service members in Europe, mostly in Germany, waiting for the Russians to start pouring through the Fulda Gap. They had lots of tanks, jets and big, honking guns. As you may have noticed, the Russians never did pour through the Fulda Gap. Schabowski’s announcement that day amounted to a big white flag of surrender. The Cold War, which had been going on for something like half a century, was over. They knew we weren’t going to invade, we knew they weren’t going to invade. Worldwide peace had broken out.

Now even a muttonhead like me could see this was some kind of a big deal. I remember watching American Forces Network TV, the semiofficial source of information for American troops in the European theater, and no one on air that night really knew what to say. They’d all been lined up waiting for something to happen, and now it looked like what was going to happen was peace. Did this mean everybody could go home? The generals were on the air trying to explain to their troops that, hey, don’t pack up the tanks, like, today or anything because we still have to sort a few things out here.

That’s when I figured maybe I should go to Berlin to see it all for myself.

As luck would have it, I happened to be driving a 911 that week (Porsche was then and remains today extraordinarily nice to me). So I called up a friend, picked her up and we blasted up die Autobahn in dem 911. As you know, the city of Berlin was then surrounded by the German Democratic Republic, also known as the GDR, DDR or East Germany. So we drove up to the border with East Germany thinking we’d just continue east to Berlin. But you still needed some kind of silly commie paperwork to drive through and when we got there, we noticed the border was clogged with jubilant former Communists–thousands of them. Our Porsche was a $60,000 automotive jewel in a sea of gawdawful papier-mâché Communist mechanical mayhem: Trabants, Wartburgs, Skodas, Dacias. Not only did we feel inappropriately wealthy and capitalistic, we weren’t getting anywhere.

So we parked the Porsche, got on a train and pulled into Berlin on a cold, sunny November morning to have a look at the new face of freedom. Freedom’s a funny thing sometimes. Apparently for these guys, it was all about bananas. They couldn’t get bananas in East Germany, but the West Germans were lousy with bananas and were handing them out like an earlier generation handed out chocolate and nylons. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t have the Porsche with us; the revolution might have ended right there thanks to the decadence of an air-cooled flat-six making more horsepower than all the assembled Trabants between there and Potsdam.

We found the wall and climbed up on top. GDR border guards in towers only a few feet away spoke to us in happy deutsch. We chipped away some souvenir chunks. Over by the Brandenburg Gate, foreign news crews wandered through the crowd yelling, “Does anyone here speak English?” The part of the wall surrounding the gate had been cleared of last night’s revelers and was now manned by GDR border guards trying to look stern as they accepted roses from the West.

It was a great experience, the closest I’d ever been to history. But I had to get home and pack. I had a new job at a magazine named AutoWeek, and I was flying to Detroit in a couple days. Auf Wiedersehen, baby. Enjoy the freedom, and just wait till you get into a Porsche.

Column courtesy of AutoWeek.

Earlier this summer, after GM had run through bankruptcy like a greased pig, our John Phillips threw a page of questions onto my desk. The queries sought to make sense of the rearranged domestic car industry. There were a lot of them, but they demanded answers. Here are the most pressing five:

Q: If it’s true that Americans will only buy small, fuel-efficient cars when gas exceeds $4 per gallon—and stays there—why would Fiat’s range of small cars help Chrysler?

A: Fiat’s small cars won’t help Chrysler, but its engine technology and mid-size platform will. The critical distinction here is between “small” and “fuel efficient.”

It’s true that Americans want big cars—they represent security, utility, and status to those of us poor unfortunate souls condemned to living between the coasts. But we also want fuel-efficient cars, especially with so much volatility in gas prices. The two would appear to be at odds. It wasn’t until recently that cars such as the Ford Fusion hybrid and the Chevy Malibu four-cylinder/six-speed automatic broke the “fuel efficient means small” paradigm. What Fiat will give Chrysler are the platforms to make cars like that—C- and D-segment fillers with modern, fuel-efficient powertrains.

And although coming CAFE regs are mainly supply-side sleight of hand, Fiat will have to build as many high-mpg cars as it can, in America, to satisfy the government. Everyone involved hopes this will stabilize Chrysler’s vitals.

Q: Why does GM—or Chrysler or Ford—care how many dealers it has? (GM plans to go from 6000 dealers in the U.S. to 3600. Honda has 1300 here, Toyota 1500.) If any given dealer can sell enough cars to turn a profit, who cares how many there are?

A: The care and feeding of dealers is expensive. Carmakers have to train all of them, for one thing. Also, there are certain costs, such as “dealer holdback” (an amount given to dealers from the automaker to offset the interest costs on loans), that are administered on a per-dealer basis rather than a per-car basis. The more dealers an automaker has, the higher its fixed costs. So the object for the carmaker is to maximize sales per dealership. To look at GM’s dealer body prior to offloading its four hobbled brands, you’d think it still owned half the market. No, make that one-and-a-half of the market.

Q: Why can’t GM follow the successful leads of Toyota and Honda, offering a mainstream brand and a luxury brand? Wouldn’t Cadillac and Chevrolet suffice? What’s the point of keeping Buick and GMC?

A: There is now alignment between GM and Toyota on this front. Toyota actually has four brands if you look hard enough: Scion, Toyota, Lexus, and Toyota truck. Chevy will soon comprise a very Toyota-like 70 percent of GM’s sales, with the rest split among premium-priced Cadillac, Buick, and GMC. Buick sticks around because it sells well in China, and because there are those American customers who won’t buy Chevrolets. GMC lives on because it demands premium pricing without much corporate heavy lifting.

Q: Ford didn’t take government bailouts, but it did sell off subsidiaries in the past few years and effectively mortgaged the company to raise cash. Will it soon similarly face Chrysler’s and GM’s crises/bankruptcies? Should Ford declare bankruptcy, too, so it can emerge at least as competitive as GM and Chrysler?

A: When the Big Three went to Capitol Hill last fall, my friend Jim Hall, an auto analyst, asked me: “What’s special about Ford, structurally speaking?” He went on to talk about the differentiating effect of its dual-class share structure, in which the family holds the voting rights. If the company goes bankrupt, the reputational hit—and the risk that the family could lose control—is enormous. Ford took an arguably bigger risk in mortgaging itself in 2006, but it’s paying off: The company avoided public ire by not taking a bailout, and its purchase consideration and market share are finally growing.

Q: If there had been no bailout monies, wouldn’t Chrysler and GM simply have gone into bankruptcy a few months earlier than they did? What, specifically, did the bailout money achieve other than forestalling bankruptcy for a few months?

A: According to presidential auto task force head Ron Bloom, “These were completely failed enterprises in need of restructuring.” Don’t sugarcoat it, Ronnie. Without the government’s oversight, though, it’s safe to say GM and Chrysler would have been liquidated. And without the government’s investment, GM’s and Chrysler’s chapter 11 filings wouldn’t have happened with such whiplash-inducing swiftness; the claims of complainants wouldn’t have been swept under the rug, and more suppliers to GM and Chrysler would have drowned. Bloom may be a bit self-serving here, but the man has a point.

Column courtesy of Car and Driver