I work for an automotive electronic supplier. We were told "Winter is Coming" last month and all travel was cancelled, followed by general orders to reduce spending to a minimum. Our company is gearing up for the downturn right now.
GM is a big chunk of our sales. I hope I/we are not affected, but I feel no sympathy for GM. If it were not for all the collateral damage that would have occurred, I would have been happy seeing them go away permanently rather than get bailed out.
After the "New GM" emerged from bankruptcy, the first thing they did was go to all of their suppliers and demand 15% quick-savings on all existing contracts. Failure to comply resulted in blacklisting from all future quotations. They are a terrible company to do business with for a lot of reasons.
There is an article I read somewhere online about GM purposely allowing a single source supplier for a strategic component, something which is usually never allowed. Then they loaded this single supplier with way more volume than they could handle. When the supplier indicated that they needed to raise the price or go bankrupt, GM refused to pay more. The company went bankrupt, and GM was awarded the tooling for the component via the bankruptcy court. Probably was the plan all along.
Where I sit, I see no infrastructure being built for electrification. The few companies that installed charging stations for employees have since removed them. Our electrical grid here in the US is not capable of any significant electrification. I know only one person who has a Chevy Bolt and has solar panels on his house.
Seems to me GM is gearing up for a future that does not exist. Gas is going to go back up, peak oil is real. I think they are going to continue scaling back and just sell fewer vehicles overall.
Young people today are not interested in cars like previous generations. Even if they were, I don't know how they could afford them. Everybody I know leases vehicles, at some point those vehicle compete with the new vehicles. I could never figure out who these OEMs thought they were going to keep selling all of these cars to.
I do pretty well, but I'm also a bit of a gearhead. I do all my own repairs and have not bought a new car in 20 years. When you go a long time without pricing vehicles and then see what they want for new ones, it seems unreal. Especially when they have been pretty successful at busting the unions and shedding costs by squeezing suppliers to death.
Every time I have finally had it with my existing vehicle, I go looking around and get renewed vigor for fixing my old clunker. I take the money saved and put it toward pinball machines instead. Something that doesn't get destroyed by driving while texting. Four of my work buddies have had vehicles totaled this year by distracted drivers. I could care less about having a nice car on our crappy roads with all the distracted drivers anywhere.