GM has plenty of credibility, high quality, and highly rated dealerships, not to mention a boatload of cash. GM has engineer Mary Barra at the helm and won't be floundering this time around, trying to cut their way into growth. No worries about GM.
I would not assume that what happened yesterday at FCA will happen tomorrow at STLA. Real change takes time. You could have written some of this in 1990 when many predicted Chrysler's imminent bankruptcy, and yet in 1996, Chrysler was booming.
I will absolutely agree that keeping the 200 and Dart in Belv. with Cherokee would have made perfect sense since they all shared a platform and it was a flex plant. They could have had 60,000 each sales of 200 and Dart and done just fine.
Part of the problem is how long it took to get the new engines. I suspect they don't have the programmers to put the new engines into that many new vehicles at once. Sergio rushed them and got glitches.
GM has downsized globally (exited opel and europe, india, australia etc), and cut sedans etc, and expensively unnecessarily brought forward huge ev (actual models not just r&d or tech) and autonomous driving investments. Meanwhile its only large non n america exposure, China, has been yielding little in the last few years and seems at-risk given geopolitics, xi jingpin arbitrary extreme policy centralization etc.
It had to do all this in a rush in the 2 years before pandemic stimulus+qe, while also propping up its share price via buybacks.
This suddenly AFTER smugly saying no to any consideration of Marchionne's formal merger offer..."we don't need to....we are busy and successfully merging with ourselves..."
This was the 3rd time GM has avoided the inevitable, merging for scale economies: failing to acquire FIAT group (then including ferrari new holland iveco....) when Marchionne offered it up (cost GM 2billion $ not to....only to have opel end up in stellantis lap in the end in any case) AND then again during 2008 when they, including bob lutz, refused to takeover Chrysler Corp as part of bailout (before marchionne and fiat were in the mix)
Since then GM has done nothing but shrink, have dismal returns on capital since 2008...and is now as perilously just n american market dependent as....FORD, with just a few pickups and suv s that make money.
And so: vulnerable to a sales and profits recession. Against that are the large subsidies from us govt for ev transition etc, so yeah share prices will stay....exactly where they were : in 2008!
Ie., when marchionne asked gm ford vw hyundai et al : do you earn your cost of capital OVER the business and economic cycles?
GM and Ford's answers are in: of course not!
The opposite is of course true of exfca pre and esp now post merger.
I believe if the GM merger had happened or even the hostile takeover bid by marchionne (which was indeed fully financed and ready to go before being cancelled by john elkann):
Gm platforms engines ev tech would'v been deployed and amortized over hugely greater GLOBAL scale including opel and china and latam: instead of needing giorgio for jeep alfa dodge and maserati now even chrysler ev s, the gme engines, the delayed ev. rollout, the annulment of the cusw and gm sedans, the abandonment of india (gm and fiat) and china (stellantis). And chrysler as well as dodge would'v gotten fuller new lineups and...etc.
Btw Marchionne started all the cancelations and launching of giorgio research and doubling down on v8 s and cancelling belvedere, dropping incentives and fleet sales etc AFTER the gm merger or hostile takeover plan A failed, then the all-set merger with VW failed (at the last minute due to dieselgate)....
Since fca was now alone, still sub scale in europe and sub scale in n america midsize fwd sedans and cuv s....but with still large net debt with a recession expected by 2020...
Margins were amped, profitability soared, incentives slashed, higher priced big v8 s etc ...
So that....stellantis etc and guess what? Look who has global scale and reach (not china though), tons of cash accumulated, by far the best margins in n america AND europe+middle east AND latam and the prospective scale economies for electrification via giorgio ev/stla large as THE only usa+canada 'platform'.
Ie who has 'earned' his cost of capital since 2008, now that the cycle is at an end (no more free money for gm ford and say vw etc)?
NOT gm. NOT ford.....but exFCA(even if u don't count ferrari).