When you buy something from Apple the packaging has emblazoned on it conspiciously, "Designed in California." Obviously the hardware is made in China. Holden is making the same transition: providing high value and highly profitable engineering services to its global parent company. Design is another high value area where Holden is making a mark with designs like the Torana, Efijay and now the VE Monaro Coupe.

Holden does very little manufacturing in comparison to the engineering it does such as the VE platform, the Chevrolet Camaro, and the global variants of its Commodore/Statesman vehicles. I expect a day will come when it no longer does the capital intensive and low profit manufacturing, replacing it instead with engineering and design services - much like Apple does.

This is the clever country is it not? Why the crying over Mitsubishi manufacturing going offshore when it was heavily subsidised by government anyway?

Business Magazine suggests that General Motors may have too many brands. There are currently Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, GMC, and Hummer in the US market. The magazine suggests that the American car manufacturers pare back their brands significantly. From the article:

G.M.'s biggest problem, however, is its unwieldy collection of eight brands--Cadillac, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Saturn, Saab, G.M.C., and Hummer. Each product line has its own dealers, its own development costs, and its own marketing budget, meaning that all those resources are diluted to the point of impotence. If you're shopping for a midpriced sedan, for example, G.M. has six. Buick by itself has two. Toyota, by comparison, has just one--the Camry, which sells nearly as many vehicles each year as all six of G.M.'s offerings combined.

and;

Some executives privately concede that G.M. needs only three or four U.S. brands: Cadillac, Chevrolet, G.M.C., and perhaps Saturn.

Chevrolet and Cadillac would make the most sense. Toyota has three brands in the US; Toyota, Lexus and Scion, the latter is suffering from poor sales. By the same token I would not be surprised to see Holden become Chevrolet one day as car manufacturing and brands become more and more global and the local oddities and markets cease to become as important.

It is interesting to see the reaction on car forums devoted to discussing General Motors' fortunes. I suspect most of these type of generalist forums are young kids, but even so, rather than car lovers forums, they are really marketing forums. All they want to discuss is what brand, what colour, what the car should be named. There isn't much on the 'car' itself.

Quite amusing.

All car sales are down though. Inflation doesn't bite necessarily, but a rapid change in the rate of inflation does - and gas fits that profile. Fords big seller, the F-150, got outsold by Japanese passenger cars for the first time i na long while.

There is also news that GM is considering closing four truck plants in North America. The problem for the automotive industry is that it cannot respond to fast market fluctuations. The lead time for any platform of factory is often ten years. Even integrating a new part into a car can take three years.

Rapid changes in consumer buying patterns can leave car manufacturers with a lot of wasted capital expense which is no longer making money or bringing in revenue. The situation car manufacturers are in now are the perils of a capital intensive and heavily regulated industry.

John McElroy writes that GM's business model of regionalism worked well when the automotive business was larger protected prior to the internationalization of trade in 1980s. This ceased to be efficient when globalisation and the economies of scale stemming from it came into effect. McElroy writes:

But the strategy fell apart, at least for GM, when automotive trade became really big on a global basis.Until then, GM's portfolio of brands gave it the greatest economies of scale of any automaker.

But when companies like Toyota and Honda were able to expand their sales to many markets in the world, they were able to offset GM's advantage. They could make Corollas and Civics in huge numbers and sell them everywhere.

That isn't really a brand issue though, it is more that GM was fraying its capital investments into too many platforms. The much touted Zeta platform, for instance, which Holden developed for GM appears to only have an application in the Chevrolet Camaro outside of the Holden Commodore range and its international variants.

McElroy argues that too many brands mean that there is too much fighting for both development, engineering and marketing, despite the badge swapping that goes on amongst the GM makes;

Toyota can pour all of its development and marketing money into two brands (I'm ignoring Scion for the moment since it only exists in the U.S. market). Every year the company comes out with about four new or significantly refreshed Toyotas and about three new Lexus models. How can a Chevrolet or a Cadillac compete when they each come out with maybe one new model a year?

McElroy's argument is that GM should rationalize its operations down to Chevrolet and Cadillac with the two sharing platforms much in the way Toyota and Lexus do. Ford faces similar difficulties, and ironically McElroy suggests this poses problems for European manufacturers too;

That's why GM will likely kill off HUMMER, and why Pontiac and Buick could end up on the endangered species list. It's why Ford will kill Mercury and sell Volvo. And it makes me wonder how long VW will be able to maintain such a large portfolio

Volkswagon includes Audi, Seat, Skoda, Lamborghini, Bentley and Bugatti. Not long after this article came the rumor that GM was considering killing off a brand, though it was speculation with GMC and Pontiac being the two main suspects. Which was amusing as it is the equivalent of linkbait on the automotive boards as poster after poster and comment after comment laid out each person"s view of the ultimate 'brand' lineup from GM. The irony being that automotive forum boards are less about cars and more about marketing with everyone being an expert on brand marketing.

The October 2008 production and sales break-downs for GM are in their investor section. This contains information on what brands are selling what volume and what cars/trucks are selling the best from GM's inventory. Of the GM brands active in the US, and there are a few, Chevrolet was the best seller by a long shot:

• 107,313 - Chevrolet
• 21,109 - GMC
• 13,054 - Pontiac
• 9,541 - Cadillac
• 8,583 - Saturn
• 7,642 - Buick
• 1,975 - Saab
• 1,368 - Hummer

So what does GM sell the most of?

• 31,689 - Chevrolet Silverado
• 22,107 - Chevrolet Impala
• 11,256 - GMC Sierra
• 10,874 - Chevrolet Malibu
• 6,788 - Pontiac G6

The Silverado and Sierra are the same truck just with a different badge. Of the Australian connection the Pontiac G8 (Holden Commodore) sold 1,082 units in October 2008 which isn't that much, but then, Saab sold a grand total of 1,659 in the same month. Of the Corvette marque there were 1,170 sold in October.

It looks like, that even with higher oil prices, the SUV and full size pickup is still the most popular of GM's offerings. I suspect those that are attacking the manufacturers in the US for not making fuel efficient cars that people want to buy are projecting what they think GM should be producing rather than the reality of what US consumers actually buy.

It is easy to forget that Toyota and Nissan both offer full size pickup trucks in the American market. They are locally built as well. The Ford F150 outsells the Toyota Camry. The Ford pickup is the best selling vehicle in America.

John Stewart asks why we gave General Motors twenty billion dollars just so they could go bankrupt six months later. Dick Cheney has the answer:

"I thought that, eventually, the right outcome was going to be bankruptcy," Cheney said of the company during the second part of interview with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that aired Tuesday night.

"[GM] had to go through such a dramatic restructuring to have any chance of survival that they had to be able to renegotiate labor contracts and so forth," he said. "And the president decided that he did not want to be the one who pulled the plug just before he left office."

Cheney said that rather than acting on GM, the Bush administration "put together a package that tided GM over until the new administration had a chance to look at it."

Or playing the game of kick the can as a co-worker called it. So rather than good policy or dealing with it directly, or just consulting with the next Administration as to how they want to deal with it, we spend twenty billion dollars instead as a carry over so it doesn't happen on your watch.

The Washington System does not have as obvious a convention of 'caretaker government' as the Westminster system does, probably because the Westminster executive controls both the Executive and Legislative and can push through money bills. However there is an element of caretaker government in the change over of control of the Legislature in the Washington System, and to an extent in the Executive.

It is possible this was seen by the Bush Administration as a caretaker role and not making 'policy' in the remaining period before the Obama Administration took over. Given the overt political nature of the Bush Administration, and the general level of incompetence as well, I seriously doubt it.