Harley Earl's declarations, written over fifty nine years ago and shown below, points to the heart of the matter on why General Motors lost 29 big points of market share over a 27 year period (1982 to 2009) and ultimately went bankrupt. Now that GM is in it's rebirth, hopefully they will regain a winning status. 

Earl was a great champion of diversifying his company away from building large cars, and he and others had originally planned to take this company down a much more harmonic path going into the 1960s...building millions of small cars to meet the demand of the market place. Putting it mildly though, Earl (being a long winning quarterback inside GM with his team) had a formidable collision with opposites and this battle ultimately cost him his career. In any event, this pioneer's remarkably clear vision is seen in this March 1950 GM Folks magazine article; circulation exceeded 480,000 copies.

Earl's quote, "poor styling and improperly timed styling has proved financially disastrous..." cuts through all the fog of claims and counter claims and succinctly explains why GM and Detroit's other major automakers lost so much market share all the way into the twenty-first century. 

The following two 2008 WSJ articles, detailed below, pinpoint the decades-long slide of the U.S. auto scene. America's (and the world's largest company of the 20th century) is now below the market share level [under 25%]; GM hasn't experienced this low level of market share since prior to 1925! 

 Although the stats and charts presented below are dated, they clearly detail a strong downward trend.

GM's history includes 35 million Buicks built and sold in the 20th century, hopefully this brand will not be tragically eliminated. 

Peruse the following historic records from nearly forty and fifty years ago:

The statistical performance detailed inside Tom Krisher's AP articcle on June 9, 2007 fleshed out a tragic story on one of the greatest power dives in the history of big business, "Gradual deceleration of the Big Three --- The combined U.S. market share of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler declined from 73.8 percent in 1980 to 37.6 percent through the first five months of 2007."