New GM about to roll off the line

DETROIT (AP) — The new General Motors is about to roll off the assembly line as a leaner, greener model, maybe even a profitable one, too.

Once the world’s largest and most powerful automaker, the troubled company was expected to emerge from bankruptcy protection by early today cleansed of massive debt and burdensome contracts that would have sunk it without federal loans.

The new company, 61 percent owned by the U.S. government, will clear bankruptcy in record time to face a brutally competitive global automotive market in the middle of the worst sales slump in a quarter-century.

Yet despite massive cost reductions, experts say GM must produce vehicles that people want to buy, and change its image from a lumbering bureaucracy that makes gas guzzlers to one on the cutting edge of efficiency and quality.

“It is the smaller, leaner, tougher, better cost-focused GM,” said George Magliano, an automotive analyst with the consulting firm IHS Global Insight. “But they still have to deal with the problems that they faced longer-term.”

Rep. Gary Peters, whose Michigan district is home to three GM factories, said the company’s emergence signals a new era for the domestic auto industry and the thousands of people it employs.

“With bankruptcy in the rearview mirror, U.S. auto companies will even more aggressively pursue new technologies, become more globally competitive,” he said. “Decades from now, our nation will be glad we did not let a global credit crisis put an end to the American automobile.”

On Thursday, a bankruptcy court order allowing GM to sell most of its assets to a new company went into effect.

Under plans that CEO Fritz Henderson will announce today, GM will cut another 4,000 white-collar jobs, including 450 top executives. The company still employs 88,000 people in the U.S. and 235,000 worldwide.

Henderson also is expected to describe how GM will streamline its bureaucratic management structure to become profitable again. GM has said it will be able to make money even if the U.S. auto market stays at a depressed level of 10 million to 10.5 million vehicles sold.

For the first half of this year, sales have remained just under 10 million, after hitting more than 16 million as recently as 2007.