GM’s biggest beast — the Hummer

Talk about downsizing.

GM’s biggest beast has hummed its final tune under the bankrupt company’s ownership. Once the arch-symbol of American super-sizing, environmental carelessness, and insatiable thirst for fossil fuels, the Hummer brand is nearly sold.

GM is not saying with whom it has reached a tentative agreement (according to news reports Tuesday, GM had reached a preliminary agreement with a company in China), but any company buying the brand had best be ready to concentrate on the ever-shrinking, but still viable niche market for this hungry growler. A hot product for GM for a while, it turned out to be one of the many "distractions’" that arose from GM offering too much product while not paying attention to what was once its core: selling cars to Americans.

The symbolism here is great as companies from what was once America’s industrial heartland, where they grew cars like Napa Valley grows grapes — Detroit and Ohio, likely the two states hit hardest by GM’s bankruptcy — are cutting their crops, leaving some fields permanently fallow.

Instead of big maples, towering pines, vast fields of tall and whispering corn, America’s Big Three are on the prowl for a smaller crop: the small cars they let wither on the vine while trimming the bountiful profits of SUV and truck sales.

"Let the Koreans have the small car market,’’ a top GM executive told me during the heyday of huge vehicles, huge profits.

And how’s that worked out?

Plays well in Seoul and Tokyo, if not in Peoria.

But what’s interesting down on the industrial farm is that the three American manufacturers are taking a trident’s prong approach to bringing small cars to American roads.

GM — vague as it so often has been, as it sent white smoke messages from its tangled innards in the gleaming towers on the Detroit River — says it will stay right at home, thank you, shedding its European Opel division, and developing a small car right here on American soil.

In a new ad already launched, the announcer intones, “There was a time when our cost structure could compete worldwide. Not anymore.”

And then he makes a promise that the U.S. government, now the saddled owner of most of GM, surely must hope is fulfilled: “This is not about going out of business. This is about getting down to business,” he says, backed by images of America’s own triad: an American flag, sports, and a moon landing. Made me hunger for a slice of apple pie.

But what of Chrysler, also a government protectorate?

They are betting on a deal with Fiat that will let them build small American cars on Fiat platforms. And I can think of a good example: Fiat makes a spiffy little two-door hatchback called the Abarth 500.

Blunt of nose, sloped of butt, but with a nice greenhouse of glass for visibility, it cranks 135 horsepower and 152 pounds-feet of torque from a turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Turbos mean power and gas savings. That translates into a top speed of 128 miles per hour should you get on a club track (or go racing in the right division), ensconced in wraparound sports seats and reading the turbo-boost gauge. A model called the Esseesse (the sound the passenger makes at top speed?) cranks out 160 horsepower. Younger buyers like smaller, zippier cars. Other than perhaps a Jeep, or a Viper none of them can afford, I’m hard-pressed to conjure a Chrysler product to bring young buyers into the fold.

And then there is Ford, perhaps best suited to jump on the small car train.

That’s because they already build a wonderful Ford Focus in Europe. Built it here once, dropped it. Why oh why? But it’s coming back, crossing the seas for home.

Then there’s the Fiesta, smaller yet. I haven’t driven it in Europe, but it’s a good seller there and you can be sure — knowing what I know about European tastes and demand for quality and reliability — that this will not be the Fiesta that, in the U.S., should have been called the Siesta.

And even one step further than this (detailed Ford story coming soon) is a Ford work/delivery van called the Transit, already nearly a million strong in other parts of the world and built in Turkey, that is so suited to a myriad of tasks performed by tradespeople, craftspeople, and delivery companies. Why so suited: It carries a lot of cargo, can easily replace the 20-foot box trucks that many of these folks use but are larger than they need, and, importantly, you can park it easily in the thickest of cities.

Did it in Manhattan myself on a delivery route. But as I said, more to come.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/wheels/090602/gm%E2%80%99s-biggest-beast-%E2%80%94-the-hummer