When people are buying fewer cars , or cars of increased competition the company has to shrink , shrinking is better than dieing.
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But people aren't buying fewer cars. They are buying fewer GM cars. GM could have made more desirable cars staring in the 1980's. They designed the most boring and awful cars sold anywhere in the 1980's. Instead of innovating, they decided to push trucks, because trucks could guzzle, whereas cars could not. They put leather seats and all manner of cushy crap on huge, lumbering, gas-guzzling trucks and advertised these as a proper way to take little Becky-Sue to ballet class.
GM had the ability to make reliable, fuel efficient cars like Camrys, Sentras, Altimas and such, but they peddled Suburbans and Silverados and Azteks. They screwed up bigtime in the 80's, and followed that with peddling trucks to people had no real need of trucks in the 90's. Only now are they coming around and building reliable cars like the Chevy Malibu.
The execs got raises, and the workers, who had nothing to do with the stupidity of poor R&D, got the sack.
Will there ever be a Chevy Volt? They seem to be spending a huge amount of money advertising a car no one can buy or even sit in at the auto show.