GM disbands high performance vehicle operations

[comp-spec]

Bombshell! GM Performance Dead (For Now) By Brian Lohnes Posted 02/18/09
Automotive News is reporting that General Motors has killed off the GM Performance Division. This is crushing news to fans of domestic performance vehicles and the decision appears to have been made in order to appease the government.

Quoting directly from the AN piece by Jamie LaReau, “All high-performance projects are on indefinite hold," GM spokesman Vince Muniga said. "The engineers are moving into different areas of the organization, and they will work on Cadillacs, Buicks, Chevrolets and Pontiacs."

Outside of the obvious implications regarding the desirability of the GM product line, we think that this means no SS Camaro. This truly is a shocking and frightening development for everyone involved in the automotive hobby, whether you are a GM fan or not.

Again, quoting from the story in Automotive News, “Muniga said there are no plans for high-performance versions of upcoming cars.The move is in the spirit of GM's viability plan delivered to the U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday. In the plan, GM said its future-product focus is on fuel- efficient cars and crossovers. It also pledged to increase its current offering of six hybrids to 14 by 2012 and to 26 by 2014. GM also boosted its request for federal aid by as much as $16.6 billion.”

‘The High Performance Vehicle Operations unit could be reinstated once GM regains its financial health, GM's Muniga said.’

We’re out of words

[conekiller13]

The overall feeling over at GM inside news is that this is a bit of smoke and mirrors given the bail out situation. The thought is that once the smoke clears the halo car programs will return. Let's hope.

[Diognes56]

http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do...ticleId=142386

There will be SS Camaro's atleast for this generation. From what I have read (which means nothing) CTS-V coupe is questionable, as is the Z28 . It sucks that they are putting the division "on hiatus", but from what I have read (again WMN) they are keeping all of the engineers and having them work with specific brands. So maybe *hoping* they are killing off the official division for show, for now, but not necessarily killing performance cars (maybe just delaying them) and will bring back the division ASAP. I hope Stielow is ok and will still be build bad a$$ cars, for work and pleasure .

David