6/9/2009  General Motors Drops Midrange Trucks as Bankruptcy Throes Continue
By Tom Berg, Senior Editor

General Motors, continuing to swing its financial ax since declaring bankruptcy a week ago, announced Monday that it will drop its medium-duty truck line by the end of July.

In a terse statement, the company said it will cease production of the Chevrolet Kodiak and GMC TopKick conventional-cab trucks, partly because it couldn't sell the products to "multiple potential buyers," which last year included Navistar International.

"We're in bankruptcy," commented Mike Eaves, a product planner at GM Commercial Truck. "When you're in bankruptcy you can do a lot of things that you otherwise couldn't do.... The speed at which stuff is being done now is just unbelievable, " he added. The midrange plant in Flint, Mich., will build out remaining orders for 2009-model trucks and will not go into the 2010 model year, which it would've done after a summer vacation shutdown.

Affected are about 400 production and office workers at Flint, scores of GM commercial truck dealers and, indirectly or otherwise, countless users of GM Class 4 to 8 trucks. GM will continue to build and sell light-duty pickup trucks, and will move some of that production from a plant in Pontiac, Mich., to Flint.

Also to be discontinued are low-cab-forward medium- and light-duty trucks that GM assembles for Isuzu Commercial Truck, its Japanese affiliate. These are sold as GM's T and W series and Isuzu's F and N series. GM assembled Class 3 and 4 gasoline-powered NPR Gas and W series clones until late April, when the its plant in Janesville, Wis., shut down.

Isuzu makes the diesel-powered N and W series in Japan and ships them here for sale by its own dealers and GM's, and they will continue in production, according to Todd Bloom, an Isuzu marketing vice president. Isuzu will have to determine how to replace the heavier Flint-made F series, which uses Isuzu cabs and diesels on a GM chassis. One option is to begin importing similar trucks now built in Asia.

Isuzu must also find another plant to make the NPR Gas and its Chevy and GMC clones, if a reorganized GM still wants them and if it agrees to continue supplying its gasoline V-8 and automatic transmissions. Enough NPR Gas models have been built to last into next year at current slow market conditions, Bloom said.

GM's abandoning of the medium-duty truck market leaves five domestic nameplates - Ford, Freightliner, International, Kenworth and Peterbilt - as Sterling ceased business in early March. Hino, owned by Toyota of Japan and Penske Automotive, assembles conventional-cab midrange trucks in West Virginia. Like Isuzu, Mitsubishi Fuso and Nissan UD sell low-cab-forward trucks. All brands have seen precipitous drops in sales since the onset of the recession last year.




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