GM is expected to sell on the order of 2.5 to 3 million more vehicles than Toyota globally in 2011, reclaiming #1 in the world, over 1 million ahead of #2 VW.

GM has generated $Billions in profits for 5 successive quarters, $3.5B last quarter alone. The company has received no additional government funding since the capital invested to finance the bankruptcy in 2009, all but $26.5B of which has been returned through loan repayments and stock sale in the IPO.
If the remaining government stake were sold at today’s price (down along with Ford and the auto sector), taxpayers will have lost around $10-12B. A lot of money, but to bring perspective, a few days interest on our national debt, about $2 or $3 out of the pocket of most taxpayers.
Meanwhile GM is resurgent, hiring engineers and other workers and investing over $5B in capital improvements in America in 2010 and 2011 with cash generated by the business, while maintaining hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs which many communities across the midwest depend upon.

For too many years, I was forced, by the poor quality of US brands, to buy Japanese, and even some European brands.

I look forward to owning US Brands again, and for a long time to come.

During the 1960s, American car companies — like other American businesses — started to think of themselves as generic businesses applying business models to the marketing of a generic product. They didn’t really care what product they were selling — hemorrhoidal suppositories, cars, it was all the same. They invested heavily in advertising and other marketing services, and they spared no expense on those things. In order to pay for it, they relentless removed the quality from all of their products until they became incapable of making a first-class product. They just didn’t know how to do it anymore. This did not just happen to the car companies. It happened to every type of business in America. Food businesses, clothing businesses, just about everything sold to consumers in America experienced a decline in quality during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. The greatest economy in the world was, in effect, ransacked by managers applying a business school philosophy that, in essence, legitimized self-dealing and encouraged senior managers to plunder their employers. Thus, when the Oil Embargo hit and America needed fuel-efficient cars, the American car companies were unable to respond because they had been converted into “cash cows” — which means companies in which little or no investment is made in research and development, enabling such companies to operate at inflated profit margins until their products become obsolete — at which time they are shut down or sold. Not every industry was hit as hard as the automobile industry, but all sectors of the U.S. economy are affected by the philosophy that a manager has a moral imperative to act purely in his or her self interest. This philosophy has spread beyond the industrial sector and accounts for the changes we have seen in academia and the health care industry.

Each manufacturer has a global supply chain, which is naturally biased towards their parent company, but ask most people in the South (GA, TN, SC) if Kia, VW, BMW Toyota et al support US workers with huge investments, compared to the empty wastelands that used to be GM factories.

Detroit is coming back, which is a great thing for our country, but we should NEVER, EVER buy cars just based on patriotism, because that is what caused them to get so damn awful in the first place. Ford, who did not take billions of our money, makes the best products so far, because they have got the fact that you need quality to compete. Chrysler is getting there thanks to Fiat. GM is still not sure, and is throwing a lot of old re-badged stuff around.