The GM Bankruptcy - And How I Love My Buick

I don’t quite understand how this bailout of GM and the subsequent bankruptcy is supposed to work. This is a little over my head, and I only hope the Great Minds know what they’re doing on this. All I know is, I find myself a little bit fearful—kind of a free-floating anxiety—about where I’ll be able to get my cars in the future.

It’s not that I object to getting cars from overseas manufacturers. I’ve had cars from them before, and they’ve been okay cars—not the fabulous bargains of staggering quality they are sometimes portrayed—but okay cars. During the decades that these foreign car producers were making their big gains in the U.S., we took to ‘buying American’ without thinking too much about it. It just seemed right to support American industry. Well, that worked out well. We must have been the only ones supporting it.

Anyway, the reason we kept buying American was because of our Buicks. We bought the first Buick because it offered 0% financing or some fool thing, and cars seemed so expensive at the time that a break in the interest rate was very attractive.

We grew to love our Buick. It was solid, attractive, and reliable—and had that smooth Buick ride on road trips. And I dearly love road trips. A smooth ride is very important when you’re trying to balance a McDonald’s coffee cup and Egg McMuffin early in the morning as you try to beat the rush hour traffic on the way to some pleasant, far-off destination.

We rode that Buick into the ground. And it was very good to us all along they way, with few repairs, and almost no breakdowns along the side of the road that I can remember. The gas gauge did go out—which made road-tripping a matter of intense calculation. And it did cost an enormous amount of money to have it repaired. They had to remove the entire gas tank to get at the gauge mechanism to replace it.

No matter. We bought our second Buick, regardless. And, again, it is being very good to us. I don’t know what surprises it may have for us in the future—a relationship with a car is much like a relationship with a person, you go in with great hope and optimism, and learn to deal with the all the quirks and breakdowns along the way. And as with a relationship, you mourn when you must part. And as with a relationship, some new, flashy item catches your eye and takes your mind off your grief. Ah, the patterns of human existence continue on and on, don’t they?

So for the moment, I love my Buick. I worry that the GM bankruptcy will hamper my purchases in the future. However, I also see that if they could take the quality and reliability of my Buick and graft it onto a hybrid’s environmental benefits, they would really have something. So I’ll wait. With fingers crossed. Hoping the American auto industry will remember to take what they are good at and blend it to what they have been negligent in incorporating.
This could be the start of something big.