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Cars and Drivers

GM (GM): We Have Made Our Bed, But Will Not Sleep In It

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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There was nothing wrong with relying heavily on pick-ups and SUVs for the bulk of GM’s (GM) sales. That is what CEO Rick Wagoner told the FT. The fact that "light trucks made up 52 per cent of GM’s US vehicle sales last month, compared with 34 per cent for Toyota." should be ignored.

Wagoner believes that the Japanese went after the light truck market just as much as his company did, but that they were late to the game. That is good for Toyota (TM). By the time it got close to being a contender for SUV sales, the market collapsed. It had only one foot in the door when the house fell in. GM was not so lucky.

GM wants history to recall that it did what was necessary to make money, catering to the American buyer who wanted the big truck with the bigger engine and the sports car which got 10 miles per gallon but went zero to sixty in under six seconds.

But, the claim of past intelligence is false. Toyota spread its bets widely across the board. It and its Japanese counterparts stayed in the small sedan business. GM and Ford (F) nearly exited that end of the market.

No matter what Wagoner wants to remember, his memory is convenient.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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