Mastodon

GM Terminating Pontiac [15 Years Late]

So General Motors (GM), the wayward American automaker, has announced that they will be killing the Pontiac brand. This isn’t a bad move, except that it’s way too little (Saturn, Buick, Hummer, and possibly others should be axed too) and it’s way too late (Pontiac stopped making sense at least 15 years ago). Reducing the irrational hodge-podge of internally competitive brands now won’t help; doing it a decade ago probably would have.

GM is also trying desperately to avoid the bankruptcy court—even though the court is really the only way for GM to break the stranglehold of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union—by announcing its intent to use various bizarre financial tricks to, essentially, nationalize themselves and put us taxpayers on the hook for their decades of mismanagement.

All-in-all, nothing has really changed. GM is still a money pit, and it’s a money pit that has already received billions of taxpayer dollars to help them hobble along. Bankruptcy remains the last, best hope for a GM resurgence. More federal investment won’t do anything but prolong the inevitable.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.