NBC led the evening news Monday night with the rhetorical question, 'Can a troubled GM save its bottom line?' We've discussed GM's mounting and seemingly intractable problems here many times before, most recently under the heading 'Shrinking to Survive.' General Motors is getting smaller, all right, but the process has a very different connotation to the company's Japanese competitors, for whom shrinking means having a lighter, smaller and more economical car to sell to American motorists as they acclimate themselves to $2.25+ gasoline. In fact, Toyota, Lexus and Honda all offer hybrids that customers have been lining up to buy. The newest is a full-size SUV that, despite delivering considerably better mileage than the conventionally powered Lexus it is designed to replace, yields more horsepower and better overall performance. How did Japanese car makers find themselves once again in exactly the right place at the right time? It wasn't blind luck, that's for sure, and they weren't responding to a spike in gas prices, as we hope GM eventually will a few years down the road. Rather, at least five years ago, Honda and Toyota (which makes the Lexus) evidently foresaw America's swing back to fuel-consciousness ' for whatever reasons ' and decided to act. At the time, some of you might recall, GM was gearing up production of Hummers and Suburbans ' behemoths that they later would have to practically give away to make room for next year's models. 1.5M Cars Recalled GM's mounting problems are nothing new, and it would appear that the story NBC originally had planned to air concerned the manufacturer's latest recall -- of 1.5 million cars with a possible seat-belt defect. But the editors must have decided the recall news would provide perfect cover for airing a much bigger GM story ' one that,
LATEST TRADES
