It was hospital routine for GM's top leaders between 1959-2009 to hide and deceive the entire auto journalistic community, and everyone else, on any pivotal facts relating to how Harley Earl's DESIGN/STYLING legacy at GM was the central figure behind cementing this corporation near a fifty percent market share level for decades of time. After the silent coup that ousted Harley Earl in the later part of 1958, all GM's financial based CEOs started steering America's largest corporation in the wrong direction! That's why it was dangerous to take GM on when all their leaders acted like Stalin during the communistic Russian regime. These very CEOs loathed what came about before them inside GM and any other thinking in Detroit was heresy. Regardless, Earl's written declarations, see red arrows below, over fifty nine years ago point to the heart of the matter on General Motors going bankrupt and how 29 big points of market share were lost by GM during the last 27 years (1982 to 2009); GM's market share is approximately 20.3 percent in mid-2009. 

Examine this evidence on how Earl was a great champion of diversifying General Motors away from building large cars, and how he 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, Harley Earl 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.

No doubt, this one Harley Earl quote "poor styling and improperly timed styling has proved financially disastrous..."is going to help him rise back up in notoriety once the giant U.S. auto industry forest fire finally burns out. Earl's story cuts through all the fog of claims and counter claims and succinctly explains why GM and Detroit's other major automakers have lost so much so fast (and why GM's leaders continue making the same giant mistakes...relating to product designs, over and over again) moving forward. 

The following two 2008 WSJ articles, detailed below, pinpoint the decades-long slide of the U.S. auto scene. GM was precariously hovering at a 24% level heading into its centennial year of 2008, now just 12 months later, the company's market share has plummeted well below this point. America needs a leverage point to kick out the entire management team of the GM CEO, Rick Wagoner and the horrific board of directors who blindly have supported him, that are responsible for this titanic loss of wealth and jobs. These auto leaders never thought reform and re-instituting good design principles (in the decade leading up to this debacle) would save this great American institution from quickly going out of business! In December, 2008 GM is on the brink of going POOF. Again, just look at the facts; GM has already surrendered the No 1. position to Toyota (this story began unfolding in April, 2007) and now America's largest company of the 20th century is now well below a market share level [being well under 25%]; levels not seen since prior to 1925! 

It's important to note that none of GM's current leading auto execs even worked for this corporation while it sustained an upward move in market share and sustained profitability...those days ended back in the late 1960s. Although the stats and charts presented below are dated, they clearly detail the strong downward trend.

With a history that includes 35 million Buicks built in the 20th century, it will be tragic to see this valuable brand go away. 

Want more proof exposing how all GM's CEOs of the last fifty years knowingly participated in a vast deception and clearly never wanted anyone to find out about how it would affect the corporation's bottom line; peruse the following historic records from exactly forty and fifty years ago:

Look at the horrendous statistical performance detailed inside Tom Krisher's AP newspaper story written on June 9, 2007. Notice what's fleshed out in this story, "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."