Hummer deal due before April

GM's CEO, Rick Wagoner is close to announcing a buyer for bespoke offroad marque, Hummer. Asked by international journalists at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit about plans for offloading the offroading vehicle manufacturer, Wagoner advised that negotiations were well advanced.

"There is interest..." he said.

"The people who had said 'we're interested' are looking at the financials and talking about their ability to support it, so hopefully we can bring this to a conclusion by the end of this quarter -- at the latest."

Wagoner refused to confirm or deny that at least one Chinese company is being courted by GM as the new owners of Hummer. The situation is a little more dire for Swedish marque Saab, the other brand that GM must divest to remain financially buoyant.

"We've been working on [Hummer] a bit longer [than Saab], so that process will come to [an end] sooner," he said.

"Saab, we really just started that work -- more like over the past couple of weeks -- so the track is not quite as far as we've gone with Hummer," says Wagoner.

"There has been some interest expressed in Saab... I can't rule out any options, but hopefully we'll come up with something that structures it in a viable way..."

GM has attempted to expand Saab's demographic over the years and improve the Swedish company's public standing, through mostly product-related initiatives. With a lot of GM DNA in Saab's products, the company could not be sold as a self-supporting entity, says Wagoner.

"We need to have a plan for transition, where it could be standalone," he says.

"I understand, for example, in Tata's purchase of Jaguar, they have a lot of agreements where, for some period of time, Ford will continue to provide support in many areas until Jaguar makes the decision to either do something itself or work with Tata -- or something like that.

"This has been done in other places [too]; it's 'do-able'."

For it to be "do-able" though, there needs to be a party willing to take a chance on the Swedish brand. If nobody can be found to purchase Saab, would GM just close it down altogether and transfer its assets to Opel or another overseas division of GM?

"You know, I understand the interest, but I'd rather not go beyond what I've said right now," says Wagoner on that point.

"It does not help the Saab dealers or people making Saabs to speculate on downsize scenarios. On the other hand, it wouldn't be truthful to say 'hey, don't worry, everything's going to be great, no matter what'."

Would Saab leave a gap in GM's brand strategy if it were to disappear off the face of the map? The company is iconic and notable, but isn't an especially old marque. Being entirely pragmatic, many would miss the quirky car company -- born from the Swedish aerospace industry -- but would those ardent supporters actually buy the company's products to keep it alive?

Certainly Wagoner doesn't see much fallout in the US, from closing Saab's doors.

"We don't have that many Saab dealers in the US..." he informed journalists -- and presumably at least some of those dealers would happily relinquish the Saab franchise for one that offers more throughput.