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GM’s Opel Sale Crashes


Posted Wednesday, November 4, 2009 - 12:11am

What once looked liked a done deal now suddenly isn’t. General Motors’ board has decided against selling Opel, it main European division, to Magna, a Canadian part supplier, which had partnered with Sbrebank, a Kremlin-backed bank, along with GAZ, a Russian carmaker, and the Opel union. Germany wanted this deal, but GM’s new board increasingly didn’t.

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  • Matthew DeBord has written about the auto industry for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post. Follow him on Twitter.

GM’s Delphic Albatross


Posted Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - 2:20pm

At one time, Delphi was just another component of the vast vertically integrated manufacturing, management, and marketing colossus that was the Big Old General Motors. But in the early 1990s, GM decided to de-integrate and created the Automotive Components Group as a separate entity. About a decade later, this entity became Delphi. By 2005, Delphi was bankrupt. The bankruptcy gobbled up four years, with Delphi only emerging recently.

  • Matthew DeBord has written about the auto industry for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post. Follow him on Twitter.