Update: GM won't disclose dealers targeted for closure
1:44 PM Fri, May 15, 2009 | Permalink
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General Motors executives said Friday they wouldn't release the names of the 1,100 dealers that the struggling automaker is abandoning. GM dealerships around the country, included seven in Rhode Island, waited Friday morning for word, delivered either by telephone or FedEx courier, that their franchise agreements will not be renewed. At least two, which own four car franchises between them, told The Journal on Friday that they escaped the cut. Paul Masse said his three franchises were spared, as did Jim Newcombe, manager of Simon Chevrolet in Woonsocket. Other GM dealers in the state, thus far, have declined to comment or not returned phone calls. But Mark LaNeve, GM's vice president of sales service and marketing, declined to confirm any of the names of the affected dealers, during a media conference call. "The process of its quite different," LaNeve said, from the situation at Chrysler LLC. Chrysler on Thursday disclosed a list of 789 dealers nationwide that it planned to eliminate, including one from Rhode Island and three from nearby Massachusetts.
Chrysler, another of the three troubled Big Three carmakers in Detroit, on Thursday disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan a list of the 789 dealers nationwide it wants eliminate as part of its plan to return to profitability. In notifying some dealers it won't renew their franchise agreements at the end of 2010, GM hopes to create "a more gradual, orderly, wind down" of those businesses. In doing so, the automaker also hopes to avoid taking back the roughly 65,000 vehicles now on the los of those dealerships and minimize legal fights. GM's plan is to reduce its dealership network to 2,600 by 2010. 
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