General Zombie Motors

The automobile blog The Truth About Cars is, of course, all over the bankruptcy of General Motors (keep scrolling and scrolling). According to Paul Niedermeyer, GM has been among the walking dead for 17 years:

How do you write an obituary for an entity that’s been dead for seventeen years? Like that high-school Biology frog-leg experiment, GM’s twitching since 1992 was due to externally administered stimuli. Yes, I would have much preferred to write GM’s obit in ’92. Back then, the guilty party was merely GM’s brain-dead management. It would have been easy just to rag on about all the lame cars they built. But it’s become a lot more complicated and uglier. Now we all have blood (and red ink) on our hands. And it’s not going to wash out easily.

Not to drive a cliche into the ground (with a car cliche!), but there's a lot to suggest that GM's management felt they were "too big to fail." These guys were stuck in a different age of three-martini lunches while the floor mats shifted under their feet.