GM GETS SET TO HIT THE ROAD

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After a calamitous decade of billion-dollar losses and misdirected diversification, General Motors Corp. is attempting to reinvent the wheel. In the 1920s, its chairman and creator, Alfred P. Sloan, decreed, "General Motors will be known for building cars for every purse and purpose." As part of a stunning, perhaps even desperate, act of corporate rebirth, GM is spending a suitably giant-size $6 billion this year to launch a fleet of 16 new vehicles. The goal is to occupy rediscovered market niches, and begin the next decade's equally awesome mission--reclaiming its lost automotive empire.

This year Mr. Sloan would have been pleased. From Chevrolet there is the powerful silhouette of the first new Corvette in 13 years and the return of the once popular Malibu family sedan with both headroom and horsepower to spare. From Oldsmobile there is the Intrigue, a new nameplate for an elegantly tailored four-door sedan that, its chief designer says, "looks like a car dressed in a Chanel suit." From Pontiac, there is a two-tone macho minivan for suburbanites who still lust for the fast lane. From Saturn, the EV1, a noiseless, all-aluminum electric vehicle. From Cadillac, Catera, GM's first Euro-American entry, designed to take on such young luxury imports as the BMW-3s and Lexus ES300.

Having sold or put up for sale such subsidiaries as Electronic Data Systems, Hughes Aerospace and a part of its Delphi parts division, GM is betting its future solely on its ability to sell automobiles at reasonable profit, something it has not done in North America since Cadillacs had fins. Says Rick Wagoner, president of GM's North American operations: "It's a watershed year for us to show that we can do great products. It's the freshman class of a new generation."

To which a generation of GM investors, analysts and observers might say, "Again?" GM has had more turnarounds than a buck private on guard duty, all of them leading nowhere. In the swift and ravaging decline of a single decade, GM's car sales dropped off by nearly 2 million vehicles, or 40% of its 1985 volume, a loss that was only partly cushioned by a 21% rise in truck sales. Management made poor, even inexplicable, choices. For instance, in 1983 the company suspended production of the Chevrolet Malibu, the country's favorite family car and one of its all-time best sellers, totaling more than 6.5 million cars in a 20-year run. A year later, Ford claimed that turf with the Taurus. In the next 10 years, Chevrolet and Pontiac sales slid 37%, Cadillac's 42%, Buick's 49%. Oldsmobile's crashed 71%. The company lost a total of $30 billion from 1990 through 1992, a cash drain that amounted to nearly $50 million for every working day every year for three years, before the GM board finally staged the 1992 coup that installed the present management team under chairman Jack Smith.

GM senior executives now openly admit what was stonewalled at the time, that the giant company's steady roll toward the precipice finally came to a halt only a few feet from the edge. Says vice chairman Harry Pearce, then GM's general counsel: "We came perilously close to declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We were almost too far down the hill. The first act was simply to survive."