Image: carsguide.com.au
Words by Dionysis Nanos
I’m going to be honest people. As I was turning my computer on to write this article I had no idea what I would actually write about. Call it boredom or call it the pain of a routine which I shouldn’t really get into, but my mind was a complete blank. Maybe I should write about a plane or for an obscure supercar which either never saw the light of day or died so soon after it did that it made for an interesting enough story I thought, but then it sort of hit home. Grand daddy General Motors killed off yet another car maker just this past week in the form of Holden, announcing that by 2021 the brand would be completely phased out, nearly three years after the last actual Holden, the Commodore, rolled off the production line. Granted, here in Europe and practically everywhere else in the world you won’t catch many people shedding a tear about a car company that’s on the other side of the globe, but this is not just about Holden. This is a deeper issue with a car maker that’s created more pain and frustration in the automotive business than seemingly everyone else, including VW and the much replayed Dieselgate scandal and Carlos Ghosn who took Nissan and turned it from a car maker who made exceptionally reliable and dependable cars to the automotive equivalent of a whoopee cushion.
See, Holden isn’t the first (although let’s hope it’s the last) car maker General Terror has taken out of its misery. It joins Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Hummer (don’t get me started on the “relaunch” of Hummer… yet), Saturn, Daewoo and of course Saab to the big junkyard in heaven, after it too got the standard GM treatment that’s split in two distinct phases. The first phase involves the car makers being forced to sell rebadged garbage cans, with all the design merit of one too, and with build quality and reliability that makes a Yugo look like a Rolls Royce. The second phase is the one that makes for the most laughs because the car buying public isn’t dumb enough to buy a roll of toilet paper with alloy wheels (most of the times at least), so when sales inevitably plummet, GM puts its best surprised Pikachu face on and decides to shut down operations of said company they ran to the ground. The only exception to this was Saab that managed to escape the claws of GM but ultimately had wounds so deep that a short while later it died a slow and agonizing death.
The evil lair where all the automotive Blofelds plot their next move
At least Holden is having a more, dare I say, civilized death, much like the one Pontiac and Oldsmobile had. Papa GM made his horses useless by giving them all sorts of substances to keep them performing and when ultimately they clapped out he just took them to back of the barn and made the local crows fly and the kids cry. Now some got sold off luckily, like Opel/Vauxhall that got sold to Peugeot and are currently making some really good cars, but most met their creator, and just like this papa GM has been left with one horse that he puts different saddles on to disguise it as having more.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that GM has f***ed up big time, in what has been a mathematical approach to failure. And if it was just the bad car making it would have been at least excusable. The problem here is that with GM saying “Well that’s all folks” and shutting down factories, whole families are being dragged down the rabbit hole too. And at least it would make sense for Pontiac and Oldsmobile workers to be absorbed to other US factories, but in the case of Saab the whole city of Trollhättan got hit by the closing of the factory and with Holden things are worse as we’re not talking about a city but for a whole country. Dealers, factory workers and facilities are all gone and the reason? GM’s complete incompetence and inability to run its divisions properly while at the same time executives are sitting high up in their Detroit offices touching each other’s privates and smiling thinking about how the 2021 Chevy Silverado is cheaper to make than the previous one, completely ignoring the fact that the car is built worse than a thirty year old virgin with a receding hairline and a room that’s dirty and hot for all the wrong reasons.
The last Saab, or should I say the last rebadge attempt by Saab. Thank GM as always
But here are some tissues to wipe your tears from laughing too hard, cause while jobs and families are being pounded to the ground like the world’s most depressing haka, GM apparently has a greater goal. Oh yes. Apparently the world’s worst Bond villains are shutting down everything in order to focus on electrification, because that would justify everything right? I mean “focusing resources on an effort to make electric cars the norm in the coming years” definitely sounds more professional than “dear God we’ve made such a mess of everything that there’s no coming back unless we set everything on fire, change our IDs and move to Brazil, but we can’t do that because we’re still one of the biggest car makers in the world by some miracle”, but even that is another example of casual GM lying. Hey at least until our electric cars are ready you can keep yourself occupied with the GMC Acadia and the Cadillac Escalade! What no don’t walk away, we’ll give you a warranty because your car will be so broken we’ll see your new car in the next two months more than you will! Sir I’m not going to stick the warranty where you tell me to!
In short, GM doesn’t look at cars like cars. For the executives cars are the numbers on the spreadsheet that pay them their fat paychecks every month. They don’t care about build quality, cost of ownership, reliability, design. For them the more you get from your car the less they make. Granted, not all cars they’ve made over the years have been complete disasters, with most of them being hit or miss, and GM isn’t the only car maker guilty of doing that. Pretty much everyone is doing it cause this is the world we live in. But GM has been doing it for so long and has made so many mistakes and has killed so many brands that they should have learned by now. But no. They’re still following the same tactics, destroying everything in their way and not listening to anyone like a teenage Godzilla. Now should GM go bust? Absolutely not! People and jobs are connected to every aspect of GM, from design to manufacturing, and no person should be left without a job. So let’s hope things begin to change as there’s not much else we can really do. Time will tell…