Car Trouble |
General Motors emerged from bankruptcy last summer leaner and meaner. The overhaul has left several Alberta dealerships, and the communities they serve, on a rough road to an uncertain future
by Scott Messenger
Classic Car Photo GalleryInstead of decorating his office walls with family photographs or framed diplomas, Dave Weidner proudly displays images of classic cars. Some of them are specimens from the family collection: 40-some cars and trucks he shares with his brother Robert and which include everything from a 1905 Oldsmobile “autobuggy,” to a ’31 Cord L29 owned by Lady Eaton, to the youngest of the bunch, a beefy-looking, burgundy Olds Toronado from 1966. There’s a 1950 cherry-red MG convertible in the collection, too, and it’s featured in his office gallery as his first car, purchased in 1957 for about $600 by his dad, Lou, who bought into Lacombe’s downtown General Motors dealership the year before. It’s a vacant lot today, but it was MacTaggart-Weidner Motors back then, and Dave swept the floors as a kid. He’s 68 now and, like his brother, who’s 65, he’s been selling cars pretty much all his life.
“We don’t really know much else to do,” says Weidner of his and Robert’s relationship to the business. “We grew up with it and we like it.”
But like more than 700 independently owned and operated GM dealerships across Canada, this May saw the Weidners contemplate life beyond automotive retail. Dave, general manager at the store just off the QE2 highway since 2002, knew of a coming “realignment of dealerships” as far back as February. GM representatives travelling across the country invited regional dealers to a meeting in Calgary to explain the need for reductions of store numbers in “overdealered” areas (mostly in Quebec and Ontario), springtime cuts that would slim the Canadian GM dealer body by about 40%, to roughly 400 outlets.
“I felt we were reasonably safe here because of our sales rate over the past few years,” says Dave. Besides that, he’d been notified that Weidner Motors Limited had just been awarded GM’s Triple Crown award for outstanding performance. “But then you also get afraid when you get looking at our proximity to Red Deer, to Ponoka, to Stettler, to Rocky, and they’re all in the same business we are, so you wonder.”
And even now, after an email arrived May 20 and exempted Weidner Motors from the list of more than a dozen Alberta dealerships with which GM Canada is terminating retail licences, neither Weidner brother is seeing an end to the uncertainty. As Robert points out – the sales manager joining us only briefly before being called away by his duties – “there may be some conditions” associated with the reprieve.
What’s certain, however, is that decision-makers in Oshawa and Detroit have changed a major Alberta industry so profoundly as to have disrupted decades-old businesses and left towns and cities with economic scars that will take months, perhaps years, to heal. It’s hard proof that, even with a 100-year history like GM’s, nothing lasts forever. For the sake of dealers set to carry on, the same applies, one would hope, to any damage done to the household brand they’ve been left to sell.
Until recently, GM would have seemed a good company for a dealer to stake its future upon. And that’s not just because of the boom years, when Alberta was setting monthly sales records, like in December 2006, when dealers moved 22,079 vehicles. Until 2008 the company was the world’s biggest automaker, a title now belonging to Toyota. But Canadian sales as of July, when GM emerged from 40 days of bankruptcy protection, were down nearly 42% from the same time last year. As reported in The Economist in June, to merely break even in the North American market, GM will need to move 10 million new models a year.
