GM began to counter the rumor and rabble with its Facts and Fiction site. Now they've gone a step further and introduced a video series called The Case for GM. The introduction video is by Christopher Barger, director of global communications technology, telling us that the series is meant to address your questions, and letting us know that the series will provide answers and insight from a large number of GM "team" members. The second vid is from top guy Rick Wagoner, answering the question "What do you say to those with concerns about GM's future?" Let us be clear that we applaud the effort GM is making to speak to the public. Nevertheless, this video highlights the problem: Wagoner doesn't say anything. At least, nothing we didn't already know. He talks about growth in emerging markets, and hybrids are out, and GM is excited about the Volt and the "electrification of the vehicle," and how GM's design team is showing its reignited passion for cars and trucks. Yeah, so... This also highlights the difficulty with the idea itself: how much can GM say? They can't talk about future product, they can't give away their technology R&D, they can't commit to revealing anything we don't already know. It would almost be better if they just took the day's latest bad news and said "This story isn't accurate, and this is why...," giving us any examples they could. What we would love to see is if they did a series of videos that took cars in GM's lineup and compared them side-by-side with competitor cars and showed us "This is why the GM product is as good or better." But we realize that would be a bit unfair. Not even Toyota or Honda is going to do that. But GM says that they want this to be a dialogue, so Autoblog readers, why don't you let GM know what you really want to know -- keep it constructive, remember! -- and maybe you'll get some of your questions answered. We have little doubt that GM can win -- but we would rather see more concrete answers on the showroom floor.
GM Vice Chairman Bob "Maximum" Lutz published a new post today on the corporate GM Fastlane Blog that addresses the automaker's newest concept that debuted recently at Auto China 2008 in Beijing: the Invicta. The concept heavily hints at what the next-generation Buick LaCrosse will look like, but Bob points out that the global architecture underpinning the vehicle will be the basis of new cars for Chevy, Saab, Opel/Vauxhall and more. In the past, we would've expected those accompanying models to be rebadged versions with different grilles, headlights and taillights, but Bob explains how GM's new global platform sharing process is different than the rebadging of old. In a nutshell, he says that the money saved from sharing common platforms see will be put into making everything that customer's will see - exterior and interior design, specifically - completely different. While it's great to hear Bob talk about how GM finally "gets it" when it comes to producing common products across an empire of brands, it's something that other automakers like VW/Audi have been doing for years while the General kept feeding us "triplets" of every model it made. So kudos to GM for finally getting it, but it took 'em long enough.
Bob Lutz understands how the automotive media operates, which is why on the same day that General Motors announced its largest loss ever, he pops up on the GM Fastlane Blog to talk about some good news: retail sales in January were up 11.2%.
The interesting thing is that this record $38.7 billion loss that the automotive media's talking (too much) about is not at all attributable to GM's performance at selling cars and trucks around the world in 2007. Nearly all of it is the result of an accounting adjustment, which we explained in detail last November. It represents past losses that GM was legally allowed to wait to report and finally did in Q3 2007.
Regardless of the truth, sensational headlines that include the words "record loss" have been plastered across the interweb all day. Since it's too hard explaining how the tax system for large corporations works, Lutz instead pulls the old "bad news here, look over there" trick. He points out that GM was one of the few automakers to report a rise in sales last month at 2.1%. According to our By the Numbers calculations, GM was the only automaker with multiple brands to do so.
And Bob knows exactly how to make that impressive achievement even more impressive: take out the fleet sales and show people that retail sales in January rose 11.2%. Automakers, especially domestic ones, have been deliberately lowering their sales to fleet companies in order to restore some value to their brands. They have to overcome these lower fleet sales with higher retail sales in order to continue posting sales gains. In the past 12 months, Ford was able to do it only once, posting a 0.4% sales gain in November 2007. GM did it three times, not including last month.
If it were up to us, we'd have each automaker break down its sales numbers every month so we could see fleet sales versus retail sales for ourselves. Maybe GM will be the first to start this trend, but until then it's interesting to see some retail sales figures for January that Bob provides: Impala up 44%, Cobalt up 65%, Malibu up 198%. All told, GM sales in the U.S. were up 11.2% last month when counting just retail sales, which are the sales that really matter.
