My question all along is who is going to buy a car from Gummint Motors when they start rolling off the line?
They might sell some fleet vehicles to the US Govt, but are citizens really going to go for this? I see GM getting the treatment from citizens that Smith & Wesson did when they sold their soul to the Clintons.
Besides, with quality brands like Ford, Honda and Toyota available, who would be so dumb as to buy GM?
In the end, it would be healthier for all if this totally burned the unions and the administration and everyone learns a valuable lesson. But then, socialists aren’t able to learn.
“My question all along is who is going to buy a car from Gummint Motors when they start rolling off the line?”
I ask myself the same question with the idea of not imposing my own prejudices upon the issue. IOW, not me. But that doesn’t mean others won’t.
It’s certainly likely that GM cars post-BK will have one or more of the following buyer’s incentives, some/most of them stupid/perverse, but if there are enough of them, then there are some who will vote their pocketbooks versus their ideologies. Remember, GM as a government boondoggle and a thinly veiled pension and make-work system will be a company that doesn’t have to make a dime. You can already get some of these incentives on some car purchases, it’s just a matter of gathering enough of them and people will buy a Trabant or a Yugo.
1: possible tax credits/rebates
2: possible (green) tax credits for trading in your old clunker
3: guaranteed trade-in value (say, on a sliding scale, owning the car & trading it in 1 year old costs $1500 off the price of a new one, 2 years old, $3K off the price of a new one, 3 years old $4.5K off a new one)
4: Automatic payment moratorium if you lose your job
5: guaranteed loaner in the case of repair requiring multi-days in the shop. Pick you up/tow your car to the repairing dealer.
6: impressive P&L guarantee (witness Hyundai)
7: how about making it a condition of mortgage relief that you move your loan to GMAC and buy one of their cars? Is that sick or what?
Without saying any or all of this will or won’t happen, all I am saying is that the incentives could be made quite irresistable to a class of beginning car buyers, you know, young 0bama voter types, and hyped as “rebuilding Americas’s brand”. The folks who voted for 0bama want to be told what to do. This is that.
If the company’s purpose is to essentially bribe a low-income class of working or wish-they-were-working people during a prolonged recession/depression, think about the “branding”:
Whenever you/we talk about FDR, the people who lived through that era worshipped him like a god/father figure. They went to school on the GI Bill, they workd for the WPA and CCC when those were the only jobs available. He talked “hope” and etc; etc; etc; you will never get them to admit that it all flopped quite undecisively around economy-wise until WW2. You rarely hear folks talking about “what was good for the country” before they divert into “I had work when there was no other work around”, or “there was no other way I could have gone to college, and become an engineer, and neither you nor I would be sitting in this nice house today if that hadn’t happened, so be careful what you criticize”.
So, big picture wise, I foresee the possibility of GM being used in exactly this way. Create a class of voters among the young low-income and unemployed who can drive green cars, at government (public) expense, get the free medical care they deserve, got to college at public expense, and take part in rebuilding a greener and more diverse America. Go ahead and vomit all you want, hordes of folks will buy this picture, IMO. It will be “cool” to drive the same Volkscar around as millions of other folks do, it won’t be like wanting to own something special like you or I would probably want to do. From the communist standpoint, it would be probably the most portable, easily imposable method of suppressing originality and individuality, maybe right up there with univ. medical care. Get my drift?