PETER BRUCE: GM rides off into the sunset
I’m not saying the departure of GM from our shores is the end of car manufacturing here. But it could be
Try as I might, there’s just no way I can be sanguine about the decision by General Motors to leave SA after producing cars here, in one form or another, since about 1927. Obviously it is part of a wider strategy. The company is pulling out of Australia, India and has even sold its top European brand, Opel, to Peugeot. I know all that. And I know GM in SA wasn’t meeting the sales and export targets required of it by the expensive motor industry plan whereby we pay the carmakers billions of rand to stay here and manufacture. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that the end of car manufacturing in SA would amount to an industrial extinction event if it were ever to happen. Of course, to listen to trade & industry minister Rob Davies respond to the GM announcement, it wasn’t even a surprise, because of all the targets they’d been missing. He sounded a lot like the following Australian writer back in 2013, when Ford first announced it was stopping production in the country: “I...
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