I'm sure this has been debated to death.
The loss of 25K jobs has very little to do with foreign car purchases, directly. GM continues to loose the quality/design game and frankly now that they have improved quality, begining to loose the design game, which in the highly competitive market kills your product.
GM cars are as not as good a overall quality as the big three Japanese companies (Lexus/Toyota, Infinity/Nissan) Acura/Honda) a corporation has been poorly run, poorly managed for the last 20 years. Do they have some success? Yes. Is it consistent. No. Most analysts feel GM has too many competing brands, too many models withing those brands and quality is poor compared to their peers.
In addtion, GM is in a large part held hostage to union demands and as a result, a hell of a lot of pension obligations. They also have a huge load of cash (30 billion or something like that) which isn't being invested back into their infrastructure or paying off their pension debt. I believe S&P (or Moody's) has downgraded both them and Ford to junk status.
If you look @ the newest "brands" of GM they are probably Saturn and Hummer. Well Saturn out of the gate rivaled Lexus in overall quality. New plants new design, new everything. A huge success. Not sure about it as a brand today. I don't think it's doing very well in terms of sales and quality.
Hummer was huge success for GM because it was a new design, and broke the mold of the standard SUV's. Remember Ford really created the 90's station wagon to combat the success so Chrysler's mini van.
Unfortunately GM isn't quick to respond and then when things get bad, they overeact, sending the company into a tailspin. I suspect GM will try to kill Pontiac, or Buick brands since the average buyer age is well into the 60's+, and the consumer sees many brands, many models.
All said, HUMMER is probably the ONLY brand for GM that is somewhat safe, but 10mpg trucks in a 2.50 a gallon market is gonna limit your buyer population.
I will be very interested to see how this plays out over the next few years. Be rest assured, the oil companies are NEVER going to allow gas back down to below 2.00 a gallon. The economic uncertainity allowed them to do what they have wanted to do for years, but the American public wouldn't accept it. Now, I guess we will. Lord knows I did.
