As that grand Zepplin of Corporations, General Motors, sinks like a deflating airship, it has begun to pitch everything overboard in a vain effort to stay afloat. It was inevitable then than underperforming assets would be unceremoniously dropped from service like a lame mule or an Oldsmobile.
Back in 1993 while living in South Bend, Indiana, I struck up a conversation with an elderly neighbor in my apartment complex. Turns out she was one of the last two employees of the Studebaker company. She and a coworker managed retirement benefits for Studebaker employees in a small office in South Bend for 17 years after the plant closed. On the last day, as she told the story, she and her colleague simultaneously walked out of the office and that was it for Studebaker.
And so it goes with Saturn. If the dealers cannot find a buyer for the manufacturing operation, they too will one day sell the last Saturn and close up the shop. Parts manufacturers will continue to make parts for many years, but the Saturn will become synonymous with the dinosaur and the Dodo bird.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Why Saturn? At least their cars were OK. Pontiac, Buick, they could die, but why kill the one branch of your company that makes OK cars (and, oh, used to have a higher profit margin as well)? In addition, they actually had a cooperative union contract (though I suspect the preferred business model is one that involves employees as fodder, or furniture).
I wonder if making better cars is actually a part of their plan for success.
is a shame that a once proud company like GMC will do something like this
Management is about process not product. GM had the very best – and most – management in the world! Failure is the workers’ fault and they must pay. Robert McNamara was Harvard B-School and President of Ford. He brought those formidable skills to DoD and the Vietnam war, but his soldiers failed him. (North Vietnamese should have played by French management’s scenarios re Diem Bien Phu.)
It is mathematically impossible for a complex problem to be centrally administered to a useful conclusion. Solutions only appear in the trenches where choices are few with rapid and honest communication. Management jealously accrues power by disenfranchising workers. Professional management is viscous and stupid in real time – Detroit taking private jets to beg money in Washington.
Detroit died because the future is insubordination where casebooks and power lunches rule. The Model-T looked like a buggy. Detroit’s first task is to desgn a conveyance that looks like a car as much as an HP-35 looked like a K&E slide rule.
With or without bailout, Detroit 3 will die sooner or later. Why? My answer:
1.Workers do not have freedom to join or not join the labor unions.
2.Unions are allowed to strike.
3.Companies are harrased by the unions when companies automate.
The partial list of a strike cost:
a.) One striking workers affects 2 other workers outside the company,
b.) For $1 gained on benefits by workers thru strikes, $10 worth on company viability is lost
c.)Investors, intrepreneurs of the company would divest.
Remember Studebaker, International Harvester, US Textile Companies and US Steel Companies?