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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWith healthy sales and an upcoming IPO, General Motors has risen from the ashes of Chapter 11\u2014and given us hope for a nice return on our tax dollars. But what's in store going forward? We talked to Mark Reuss, President of GM North America, about the Volt, its gas powered counterpart, the Cruze, the modern car-buyer and the company's unlikely resuscitation.\n\nWe said in our Volt test drive and our interview with Eddie Alterman that the Volt is more of a PR effort than a profitable product. Would you agree?\n\n For us, it's really a technology and innovation platform. We're going to be committed to it for the long-term, too: the battery technology can be charged by a gasoline, diesel, or alternative engine, or a fuel cell, so we have a platform that can last a long time.\n\nWe have a profitable company again, but the image that some people have of GM varies from not being sure what cars we actually make, to just knowing that the company went bankrupt. So we're treating the Volt as our first investment in a new image. It's not a savior for the company, it's getting people to believe by action that we have the best technology and the best engineers, and that we're going to demonstrate it.\n\nDo Americans really have an appetite for smaller cars?\n\n It's not so much that Americans want small cars, but that they're getting more specific about the products they want. Take trucks, for instance: some people earn a living with them, some just want nice vehicles, but you pay for that because they're not terribly fuel-efficient. That's why you see crossovers\u2014they're full-size SUVs made into something smaller, more fuel-efficient and more specific. There's going to be more and more product fragmentation in the future. When you look at something like the Cruze, which is bigger than most compacts but getting 40mpg on the highway, that's an opportunity for us.\n\nWhat about classic marques like Oldsmobile and Pontiac, any chance of a resurgence?\n\n It's a shame, the last vehicles out of those brands were pretty intriguing; you could argue that Saturn's lineup was one of the best. The last GTO, the G8, the Solstice, those were probably the cars Pontiac should have been for the last twenty years, and we didn't quite get there. There's been no discussion yet, they are where they are. But from an emotional standpoint, when we become a public, profitable company over a long period of time, nothing's forever. But we have to focus now on the four core brands; we're making more money with four brands now than we were with eight!\n\nTo summarize, what's the \"new\" GM all about?\n\n In the end, this is a revenue-based business. The secret to unlocking sales is doing great cars that people understand and pay for. So you can make all sorts of generalizations that we did or didn't do that in the past, and you'd probably be right. Our mission statement now is to design, build, and sell the world's best vehicles. That doesn't just mean going in and finding the lowest structural cost, which is a pretty big change from the past."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/cruze-in-usa-four-questions-for-gm-president-mark-reuss>