What about the fact that Ford will most likely be unable to build cars because they share suppliers, and most of the suppliers could not continue to sat in business if they lost half their orders. It's a complicated situtation, and it might be cheaper to bail out GM then let them die.

The Prius is highly profitable, which you can see immediately when you take a look under the hood. There is nothing supercalifragilisticexpealidocious in there. Toyota is just too good a player, so they don't want to admit it. Because if they did, everyone would try to take that part of their business away. Toyota makes fewer of them now because they saw the sales drop coming. They know who bought the car for the green image sake and who bought it out of desperation over gas prices. Look at their pricing policy. They won't give it to you for free or at a loss like most other companies will with most models (especially SUVs). They know that the hard core Prius owner will buy the car no matter what. So they just cut back on production and keep the line profitable. It's called supply and demand. If demand is down, you cut supply. And if that does not convince you, look at their original exponential production schedule. It will tell you how many they expected to sell. One does not scale up like that on a loss leader (at least Japanese companies do not).

But I agree... it would take ten years for any American hybrid to be as successful as the Prius. And that's just not enough by two orders of magnitude to save GM or anybody else.

The fact still remains that GM is a failed company running on fumes. If the management really wanted to be competitive they should have cut models, dealerships and while increasing mileage annually. They did none of these things. In fact when approached by members of the actors guilde to do free advertisments for green engergy cars GM said not interested. These men are not managers and if we keep giving them money it will keep being wasted. ENOUGH

Amen!

There is unfortunately a barrier to this. When GM shutter Oldsmobile a few years ago, it cost them billions of dollars, mainly because of laws to protect dealerships. (These are the same laws that prevent online shopping for new cars). These laws would need to be changed in order to shed brands, because GM certainly doesn't have the cash to settle the dealership problem.