It's a sad day for any American who grew up with GM always being a part of our lives.....and now they filed for bankruptcy......it's a sad day for all of us....so many years.....so many memories of GM cars....makes me want to hang on to anything I can to keep those memories alive(GM cars)....so many iconic cars over the years many of them Oldsmobile....thanx GM for a great ride over the years and so many really COOL cars....hope we never lose that sense of who we are and what has always seperated us as a country and Americans from anywhere or anyone else....hope we never lose it....just my way of venting....Oldsdroptop

 

I agree with you buddy. That's why I enjoy driving my 60's GM cars that I have as well. Too many good memories and certainly much better looking than anything produced today.

I was listening to the news channel earlier and they were saying that GM was going to be made into two companies, the old GM and a new GM? The old one will be the non-profitable entities (I am assuming this will be liquidated) and the new one will be the profitable side of the business (The part of GM that will emerge from bankruptcy).

So I am confused as to how this will work. The only part of GM that was making money was the subsidiary in China. So does that mean our bailout money is for the chinese? Or somehow they will magically make Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Cadillac profitable overnight by ridding themselves of Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer, and Saab? I guess only time will tell.

All I know is there is a bunch of executives making a lot of money at GM these last 20 years that drove this company into the ground. What a shame.

 

Someone on this forum once wrote that GM started down the wrong path when accountants started running GM and not the engineers and stylists. Having owned 5 of their cars from the 70's, 80's and 90's, I can tell you their products aren't what they used to be. I still love my '71 Cutlass, but there's a new Ford F-150 parked next to it now.

 

Great post! Hopefully GM will survive, but realistically they are unlikely to ever again produce the kind of cars that captured the imagination of so many. Actually in my opinion GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been failing to do that since the mid 1970's. They all failed to design and produce that which made them successful in pursuit of trying to copy competitors they should have been able to blow off in a heartbeat. They all basically succeeded in abandoning their customers for all the wrong reasons.

Thank goodness I have eight wonderful examples of those cars which exemplified what American cars should be. The way I see it, I can keep driving wonderfully powerful, colorful, eye catching land yachts for at least a couple of million miles as long as there is gasoline to be sold and parts to be had, or until the cars have outlived me.

Though now nearly 48 years old, there is no car that will stop traffic faster than a '62 Oldsmobile Starfire. Damn those are great cars and I'm lucky to have two of them.

 

Mike, that was probably me beating that drum! And like you, I have Ford trucks in my driveway.

 

Yep GM self destructed by giving customers to many generic cars. The worst decision they made was shutting down the Oldsmobile engine plants there loyal customers loved those rocket engines so much so that when GM tried to put Chevy 350's in the Oldsmobile's customers hit the roof. Then the folks at the design department became very good at making cars they couldn't even give away. To be fair Ford and Chrysler did the same thing.

 

They didn't shut down the Olds engine plants at that time. The Cutlass was the no. 1 selling car in America in the late 1970s and Olds just couldn't build motors fast enough.

99.9% of those customers couldn't tell the difference. It was the class action lawyers who encouraged these customers to hit the roof. The owners got $200 and an extended warranty. The lawyers got millions.

 

I look at it this way; Oldsmobile left with the grace, class and style it always was known for. The send off for Oldsmobile while sad was handled as an event and will be complete with those memories. The way the others will go will always be over shadowed by money, government intervention and bad management. Thank you GM for not letting our wonderful cars be included in this fiasco.

 

Actually they had oversold 350 and 403 engines to Buick and Pontiac and then didn't have enough engine plant capacity to take care of their own needs. They were also selling to Cadillac for the EFI 350 in the Seville.

They elected to honor their commitments/contracts to B-P-Cad and bought engines for themselves from Chevrolet. There was a reason the higher-line Divisions wanted the Oldsmobile engines instead of contracting for Chevrolet engines themselves. Oldsmobile paid the price.

I have always believed that GM's "corporate engine" program was the beginning of their descent into mediocrity. No matter what the bean counters and MBAs say, when GM was essentially five different car companies making very individualised product tailored to specific market segments, they were successful. When they started listening to the MBAs with each Division having to build a car on every platform they had, everything went to hell. They cannot deny that.

 

Absolutely!!!! I too don't believe it was the redundancy of *having* 4 divisions, it was the bean counters not recognizing what the distinctions were and thus erasing the distinctions and *creating* the redundancies!

 

BINGO!

 

x4 rocketraider, wmachine & texascarnut! The average American is a "sheep"...it's about keeping up with the Jones'. What happened to individualism? Of course, like Padavano said, when Cutlass was the best selling car 30 years ago, we didn't mind keeping up with the Jones'. As long as they were buying Oldsmobiles!