New GM: Kind of like the old GM

Well the New GM is off to a roaring start. They've announced their new plans and , more importantly, are running weird ads featuring prosthetic legged runners, random stock footage of hockey players lying injured on the ice, Joe Lewis, a butterfly, random footage from sporting events relative to Pennsylvanians, lists all the general ways in which their actions over the past decade were stupid, and uses a slogan that is basically "yeah, we fucked up horrifically, so give us a second chance already." Also: New GM's New CEO is admitting he's ill prepared to run GM. That's the classic GM we all remember, glad they remembered to keep that.

The 6-foot-4-inch Texan nicknamed “Big Ed” said steering the nation’s largest automaker after bankruptcy is “a public service.” People who know him say he can meet GM’s need for the type of transformation he orchestrated at Dallas-based AT&T.

“I don’t know anything about cars,” Whitacre, 67, said yesterday in an interview after his appointment. “A business is a business, and I think I can learn about cars. I’m not that old, and I think the business principles are the same.”

I'm no business expert, but from the looks of things it seemed like GM's problem was that no one wanted to buy their cars. A large part of that seemed to be because nobody liked the cars GM was making, because no one at GM seemed to know enough about cars to actually know what a normal human being would want. But then again the people supposedly running Gm and other American car companies were "auto experts", so really how much worse can a guy who knows nothing do? On second thought, how hard is it to tell everyone to "do what Toyota does".

So there is the new GM: weirdly terrible "my bad" ads and a CEO who admits he is completely clueless when it comes to the failing industry he has been tasked to completely revamp and overhaul. Doesn't it make you wish we had put more taxpayer money into GM?