The Swedish automaker has another lease on life. After GM announced that the company would be closed last week after talks with potential suitor Spyker fell through, Spyker said “not so fast” and submitted another deal. “Despite our collective 11th-hour set-back, we are returning to the table with a renewed offer,” said Spyker Chief Executive Victor Muller. Saab’s 3,400 employees must be pleased that they’re being taken on such a comfortable merry-go-round. source
Dear rich people, we think we’d be a perfect fit for you.General Motors has had an incredibly rough last twelve months or so (though they’re recovering). Between a bankruptcy and a watchdog federal government, they’ve had zero room for error. And now their nine-month-old CEO, Frederick “Fritz” Henderson, is retiring. We smell a job opening! Here are three reasons GM should hire us as CEO:
Fresh bloodWe’re not the old guard, General Motors. We don’t do (#&@ the old way. In fact, we have no clue what the old way was! When we step into Fritz Henderson’s dusty old office (after having an exterminator go in and check for termites and bailout money), we plan on running the company as if we don’t know what we’re doing. But we do!
cars with brevity Here at ShortFormBlog, we know a thing or two about keeping things short and efficient. And we know that the government is on your back about creating more efficient cars. We plan on bringing our blogging technology to General Motors, and we’re going to upgrade the engines from internal combustion to WordPress. Thank us later, guys.
Family reunionWe know some of your old workers aren’t happy with you – all those layoffs, the concessions you forced the United Auto Workers to take, the outsourcing – and we plan to make it up to them, using the only method we know how – we’ll move them out of Michigan and put them in a state that isn’t a black hole of depression. Sound fair? source
$1.15 billionamount in losses the auto manufacturer had as a result of their bankruptcy in July; they have $42.6 billion in cash on hand
$3.3 billionamount of cash it generated in the third quarter – GM plans on repaying its government loans early as a result of the strong quarter source
We avoided a dirty joke in the headline. The formerly-bankrupt General Motors says that its sale of Hummer to the menacingly-named Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. is still on track. They didn’t come to an agreement with the Chinese manufacturer last quarter but plan to keep working at it this quarter. We avoided another dirty joke ending this post. source
Chrysler’s already scattered their archives. Much of the history of GM and Chrysler is well-embedded into American history. Which is why it’s a damn shame that one of Chrysler’s pre-bankruptcy owners, Cerberus, decided to close off the engineering library at the Chrysler Technical Center. They later gave large chunks of it away to whomever. The Truth About Cars’ Bob Elton makes an impassioned plea for auto companies to remember their history – the good and bad – and keep that information safe and available to the public. Especially in the wake of the fact that, you know, the American public owns huge chunks of it now. source