Back in the 80's, the 90's...I mean, if you look at a 95 Pontiac Grand Am...it's a terrible hunk of crap. It hasn't aged well. Sitting next to a 95 Acura Integra, or even an 89 CRX, the Pontiac looks SIGNIFICANTLY older than the Honda will. The engines were disgustingly bad back then, let alone now when they weep oil from every crack and crevice and parts are impossible to find for them. They have a pretty serious recent history of delivering absolutely NOTHING worth buying, but people kept loyally buying the cars anyways because it was the big General that could do no wrong. You're talking about the time period when an absolutely epic percentage of cars sold worldwide were sold by a company under the flag of GM.

Nothing can last forever, especially not something that has debased it's very foundation by abuse and misuse. For a solid two decades GM was nothing but a way for the people who worked for it to make gobs of money. They honestly thought that after the 70's, they had won and would stay on top forever. A few, and I repeat a FEW design teams came up with innovative ideas that honestly would have been interesting cars but as a rule of thumb, higher ups in GM quashed those ideas, or at the least stifled them because of the cost of development and production. Some of the cars that made it through (though not unscathed) were things like the Fiero, the Aurora, the...the...right, I can't think of any more but I'm sure there's a few that slipped through. If you need proof, look at how long the C4 Corvette was in production ESSENTIALLY unchanged. Then take a good look at the changes that DID happen to it as it aged, it got...more bland...worse, mostly. They've settled themselves with this and have spent the past 7-8 years working to drag themselves out of it, but quite possibly have done so simply far too late to save what we know as GM. The best thing that GM can do right now is to simply break out ALL of it's brands, sell production facilities to the brands, and allow each brand to negotiate contracts with workers, or to simply hire new workers, since the current contracts are with GM. This means that the non-profitable companies now flying solo will not only have a chance, but be ramrodded into making changes to become profitable, no longer able to duck underneath the big GM tarp when rainy days come. It's a tough way to do it, and it won't happen because of the political backlash from the UAW against the politicians in Washington. The terrifying thought for all of this is the fact that the United Auto Workers Union, who were instrumental in dragging all three of the American car megacorps down...will now have a massive say in how this whole thing gets handled and restructured by the government. A relatively small group of people who were being overpaid in an industry producing inferior quality products will now have a loud voice over how the rest of us will see our tax dollars being used to help safeguard their jobs. Europe, on the other hand, is going through something totally different, and their governments are widely starting to see that government spending hasn't fixed their economic problems, and instead is now a massive burden of state debt that their economies can't rise up out of. You don't need to be a fortune teller to see what the way down this road leads to.