DETROIT — For a year, General Motors has been singing the praises of the new Chevrolet Malibu, voted by auto writers as the 2008 North American Car of the Year. To promote its launch, GM spent nearly $250 million on advertising, dubbing it “the car you can’t ignore.”
Meanwhile, GM has been quietly making and selling a similarly sized and priced sedan: the Chevrolet Impala. GM hasn’t run a national ad for the full-size Impala in three years, scarcely mentions it in news releases or conference calls with Wall Street analysts and made little hay about its winning the Fleet Car of the Year award three years running.
Yet last year, for every two Malibus that GM sold, it delivered three Impalas. The Impala finished the year with 265,840 sales, making it the best-selling American sedan.
Today, GM will submit a restructuring plan to the Treasury Department, a document that is supposed to explain how it intends to reduce debt and cut costs and prove it merits further government financial support beyond the $9.4 billion in federal loans it already has received.
The Impala and the Malibu provide a window into how difficult saving GM really might be.
“If they want to change the way they do business, the Impala may have to go away. But how do you turn your back on a car that sells so well with so little effort?” said Jesse Top rak, senior analyst at .
