GM auctions off historic cars
January 18 2009 marks the final day of a weeklong auction in which auto giant General Motors (GM) sells off historic cars from its Heritage Collection.GM sold around 200 vehicles at the Scottsdale Arizona auction including a 1996 Buick Blackhawk concept car for 522500 a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro ZL-1 COPO Coupe for 319000 and a 1959 Chevrolet Corvette convertible for 220000.Other items included a 1998 Cadillac Brougham which was built for the pope.
(That vehicle was blessed by the pope but never used because of safety issues it sold for more than 57000.) Most were preproduction development concept or prototype cars.The vehicles came from GMs Heritage Center an 81000 square foot facility in Sterling Michigan that houses hundreds of cars and trucks from GMs past along with documents chronicling the companys history and other artifacts and automobilia.Rumors spread that the financially troubled GM was selling off its entire fleet of historic vehicles but that was not the case.As The New York Times reported shortly after the January auction Much has been made of the timing of the sale coinciding with G.M.s current situation but G.M.
is simply doing the same thing that many large-scale collectors and museums regularly do in culling certain pieces from their collections.This was hardly a wholesale dumping of G.M.s heritage.Nevertheless at the time of the January 2009 auto auction GM was facing enormous financial difficulties.In June of that same year the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
At the time the automaker reported liabilities of 172.8 billion and assets of 82.3 billion making it the fourth-biggest U.S.bankruptcy in history.Bankruptcy was a move once considered unthinkable for GM which was founded in 1908 and became a giant of the U.S.
economy in the 20th century.GM pursued a strategy of selling a vehicle for every purse and purpose in the words of Alfred Sloan who became president of the company in 1923 and resigned as chairman in 1956.By its peak in 1962 GM produced 51 percent of all the cars in the U.S.
However by the late 1960s GM had begun a slow decades-long decline that critics charged was due in part to the companys failure to innovate quickly enough.In 2008 GM was surpassed by Japan-based Toyota as the worlds top-selling maker of cars and trucks a title the American automaker had held since the early 1930s.
