Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Car Culture - 6.17.10

The United Auto Workers Union has a new president, but Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks they need something more: a new marketing strategy.

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America used to be about manufacturing --especially the industrial Midwest. We made stuff here in Michigan, primarily cars and trucks. Well, we still do, although not as many.

Increasingly, we’ve become a service economy, which is a shorthand way of saying we sell words, not stuff, and that life is more about marketing than making things.

Take the United Auto Workers union, for example, in the news this week because of their convention. Here’s what the stories all said: The UAW is struggling to survive, much like the industry it organized. The union has lost more than three-quarters of its peak membership, and is struggling to reinvent itself.

They elected a new president at this convention, which is always a great opportunity to get some buzz. So whom did they choose? Some exciting, dramatic new leader? A dark horse who rose from the ranks and presented the union with a new vision?

Not even close. They took Bob King, the UAW vice president who was next in line, and had been handpicked by the existing leadership. King is a worker who went to law school and became a lawyer, and is highly respected for his bargaining skills.

However, this was anything but a democratic process. My sneaking sympathies went out to a fellow named Gary Walkowicz from a Dearborn truck plant. He had the guts to challenge the establishment. Walkowicz thought the union had given away too much in concessions, which may be dead wrong.

But it is probably how a whole lot of workers feel. The woman who was brave enough to nominate the challenger was booed by the delegates, who then gave Walkowicz a mere three percent of the vote, in what was a totally rigged election.

That’s not to say I wanted Walkowicz to win. But I think not really having to fight for the job isn’t likely to be good for Bob King or the union’s image. The UAW desperately needs some favorable buzz, and for the public to see it as something more than a dying old economy labor union waiting for 1937 to come back.

They need some marketing advice, and here’s some, free of charge. General Motors showed them how last week with a move they claimed was an accidental blunder.

Eight days ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story claiming GM had told employees to stop using the nickname “Chevy.” From now on, an internal memo said, it would be just Chevrolet. They were doing this for “brand consistency.”

This was, obviously, stupid, since the term Chevy is as much a part of the American language as Coke.

Everybody in the nation jumped on the story. The Times even disapproved, tut-tutting in a stuffy editorial, and soon the company was saying, we didn’t do it, we didn’t mean it, we’ll stop doing it, we won’t do it no more, and you can still call your car a Chevy!

Everyone thought GM had screwed up. Actually, I suspect they did it on purpose. For a week, everybody talked about Chevys. Waxed nostalgic about Chevys. It was the biggest free advertising coup that I can remember.

Watch for Chevy sales to soar, temporarily at least.

So, Bob King, new United Auto Workers union president: I hope you were paying attention. Now - it‘s your turn.

Essay: Cleaning Up After a Century - 5.20.10

This week, the federal government announced a massive program to clean up former abandoned and contaminated General Motors sites. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is wondering… why stop there?

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There are a few differences between people and most other animals, and here‘s one:

Animals, by and large, don‘t make messes in their own nests. We do, and we have made bigger and more costly messes in industrial states like Michigan than just about anywhere else. P> And as a result, we have vast amounts of severely contaminated land. Partly, this was because we didn‘t know any better, back in the early industrial days of the automotive industry.

Even in my misspent youth in the 1960s, guys would go to a vacant lot, change the oil in their hot rods, and pour the old stuff onto the ground. Nobody knew quite how terrible that was.

Now think of the pollution produced by all those automotive plants, some of which are now a century old, places where the ground is full of nickel and lead and cadmium. There are many places that have essentially been unusable because the expense of cleaning them up was more than the value of the land.

However, we got some good news about all this this week. President Obama and General Motors are establishing a huge, $836 million-dollar trust fund for environmental cleanup at now-closed GM sites. Not surprisingly, more of this money is going to be spent in Michigan than anywhere else. This involves more than fifty sites in Detroit, Pontiac, Saginaw, Willow Run, and of course Flint.

They hope to get this all going by the end of the year.

By the way, the General Motors in this project isn’t the one that builds cars, but its unlovely twin, Motors Liquidation, Inc, the corporation the government established to sell off and liquidate the unwanted and bad parts of the old GM.

In another bit of good news, we’re told that this shouldn’t cost any new taxpayer dollars. When it was established as part of last year’s government-sponsored bankruptcy, Motors Liquidation was given $1.2 billion to close up shop, and this money would be the lion’s share of that. This should be especially good news for Flint.

The very first cleanup site scheduled is the sprawling and now-abandoned Buick City complex, which includes hundreds of acres.

In many cases, cleanup will include not only treating and removing contaminated soil, but demolishing abandoned factories themselves. This is essential, of course, if Flint or any of the other cities involved hope to lure new development there.

There has been talk of building a so-called intermodal transportation and distribution center at what was Buick City.

Governor Jennifer Granholm wants to see the areas being cleaned up become clean energy manufacturing sites.

That’s a worthy goal, but right now I’d guess most cities would be content with anybody reputable who would open a business and put some of their citizens back to work.

Initially, I was doubtful that this $800 million would be enough money to clean up all the polluted GM sites, but they say it’s more than enough. If that turns out to be so, I have an idea.

This is taxpayer money anyway, and I would like to see the rest of it used to start cleaning up old Ford Motor Company sites.

Pollution is pollution. The more we get rid of, the better off we will be. Not to mention all the unborn generations to come.

Essay: General Motors Makes Money - 5.18.10

General Motors announced yesterday that it had made money in the first three months of this year. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at what those numbers really mean…

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By now, you’ve probably heard that General Motors made money in the first quarter of this year. In a way, this was like hearing that Sandy Koufax had emerged from retirement to pitch a shutout.

Actually, it’s been only three years since what was once the world’s biggest corporation turned a profit, though it seems like much longer. Since then, ownership has passed from the stockholders to the U.S. government. Taxpayers have spent more than $50 billion - that’s billion with a “B” - to keep GM from going out of business.

Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer have joined Oldsmobile and Tyrannosaurus Rex on the extinct species list, and Saab was given up for adoption. The company which sold more than half the cars and trucks Americans bought in the early 1960s now sells fewer than one out of every five vehicles, and that’s unlikely to change.

But the news of profitability seems to have been more than a fluke. No, General Motors is not out of the woods yet.

No, they haven‘t yet proven the wisdom of bailing them out. Nor are they ready to return to the private sector. But the company’s net quarterly profit of almost a billion dollars is encouraging in a lot of subtle ways. Best of all, General Motors actually made money in North America, made more than a billion from selling cars and trucks in its core market. That has often not been the case in recent years, even when the giant automaker was profitable.

GM also made money in Asia. The one dark cloud was a half-a-billion dollar loss in Europe, where the economy and the euro look increasingly shaky. Don’t look for those numbers to improve soon.

Nor should anyone assume that General Motors itself is out of the woods. One quarter does not prove much of anything. This is a company that lost $88 billion dollars in the last five years.

This is a company that would not exist today without government bailouts. There is, as yet, no long-term plan to get to the point where the company is stable and profitable enough for the government to sell it back to the public and thereby recover as much as possible of the taxpayers’ huge involuntary investment in GM.

Yet the most encouraging thing may be that GM executives seem to understand this. Their profit announcement was free of the braggadocio you would have seen in the bad old days.

There are other good signs too. Inventories have fallen dramatically, and the company is offering fewer incentives. That’s because there is more legitimate demand for GM vehicles, and a few hot sellers like the Equinox and the Camaro.

As Winston Churchill once said in a different context, this is not the end of General Motors’ troubles. Nor is it even the beginning of the end. However, it may be the end of the beginning.

These first quarter figures seem to show that the public is willing to give GM a chance. New chairman Ed Whitacre Jr, and his team seem focused on their core business: Making and selling cars. However you feel about the bailout, and whatever kind of car you drive, it’s hard not to hope that GM succeeds.

We the people need it to. After all, it is our money at stake.

Essay: Sic Transit Volvo - 3.29.10

Ford announced yesterday that it is selling Volvo to a Chinese company. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry wonders what it all means…

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You’ve probably heard that Ford Motor Company signed a deal yesterday to sell its Volvo division to a Chinese firm.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. Volvo was a money loser for Ford, and actually was an unpleasant reminder that our domestic automakers have sometimes done their worst when times were best.

Hard to remember now, but a mere eleven years ago we were rolling in dough. The United States government was regularly taking in more money than it was spending for the first time since the 1920s, and Ford was doing exceptionally well too.

You might have thought this would have meant that Ford would have plowed money into improving quality at home.

You might have thought Ford would have invested some of its profits shrewdly, to give the company a cushion against a rainy day.

Nah.

What then-Ford CEO Jacques Nasser did instead was to spend money like a cosmic drunken sailor on steroids. His goal was to assemble a stable of exotic and luxury brands all over the world. So he bought Jaguar and International Harvester and Volvo.

Ford overpaid for them and then spent billions trying to improve and fix them, and then lost billions more.

Eventually they began dumping these brands. Volvo had done better than the others, but still was a giant money-sucking hole in the corporation‘s side. Suffice it to say that Ford spent six and a half billion dollars to buy Volvo, and sold it yesterday for $1.8 billion. I like to think I could have done that without ever going to business school.

To the limited degree I understand automotive economics, selling Volvo seems like a good idea for Ford. The company, the only one of our big three not to go through bankruptcy, is overburdened with debt, and needs to concentrate on its core brands.

The new owner, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, is led by an enthusiastic 47-year-old named Li Shufu who is widely regarded as the business whiz of China. He is pledging to keep Volvo independent, intact, and said he was committed “to preserve the distinct identity of the Volvo brand.”

Hopefully that will happen. But these events leave thousands of consumers with a dilemma. As true sons and daughters of Detroit who wanted to rally around our core industry in its hour of need, we were able to justify buying Volvos.

We bought them because they were comfortable, reliable and safe, and they were also owned by Ford. We were contributing to hometown profits by buying them, or actually, cutting their losses.

But now we no longer have that excuse. And I have another problem. I like station wagons. And I suspect I am not alone. You need a way to haul stuff around, and my vehicle of choice is a station wagon. I don’t like minivans, recreational vehicles, or any of the truck and bus-like things now sold instead of station wagons.

Volvo makes good station wagons. I have had three. I would buy a Ford Fusion wagon in a heartbeat, but they don’t make them.

Ford does make a spiffy new Focus wagon, but doesn’t plan to sell it in America. So I’d like to pose the same question to the domestic auto industry that Americans usually ask their politicians:

“What are you going to do for me?”

Essay: The Agony of Alfred Sloan - 3.4.10

For the first time in many years, Ford overtook General Motors last month in total monthly sales. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about how that happened.

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It would be a cliché to say that old Alfred P. Sloan is rolling in his grave today, but I do know this much is true. If Sloan got a look at the latest auto sales figures, he would be very upset.

Sloan was the guy responsible for building General Motors into the biggest and most powerful corporation in the world, which it was for a long, long time. But before he could get there, he first had to find a way to overtake Ford, which was once the industry leader.

In fact, Ford completely dominated the field in the early years of the auto industry. That was thanks both to old Henry Model T, the first car aimed at a truly mass-market audience, and Ford’s cost-effective assembly-line method of producing his cars.

However, after successfully conducting his revolution, Ford, like many stubborn old revolutionaries in power, refused to change.

Sloan, who reached the top at General Motors in the early 1920s, had a better idea. He realized consumer tastes were changing. A basic cheap and functional car was no longer enough. More affluent customers wanted power, prestige and style.

So he came up with a concept he called “a car for every purse and purpose.“ The idea was to have five distinctive brands which did not compete with each other - Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. Customers would move from brand to brand as they moved up what Sloan called “the ladder of success.”

To make sure they kept buying new cars, Sloan also planned for frequent styling changes, so that anyone who kept their GM car too long would feel out of date. This was what came to be called “planned obsolescence.” Was this wasteful? Well, yes.

Was it environmentally friendly? Not so much. But it made General Motors the most successful industrial corporation in history. Eventually, the GM system became ossified. The differences between the brands were blurred. Quality declined, and foreign competition began eroding market share.

Last year, as the world knows, GM filed for bankruptcy protection. Today, they are out of receivership, but many of the brands that made GM famous are gone forever, including Pontiac, and Oldsmobile, which died a few years ago.

Then last month, Ford actually overtook GM in terms of total monthly sales. The margin was so close that if this had been Florida, they would do a recount. Ford outsold GM by less than 500 cars out of a combined 284,000 sold in February.

But outsell them they did, for the first time since the 1920s, except for a month or two over the years when GM was on strike and Ford was not. Now, General Motors is still ahead on total sales for the year, and probably will sell more vehicles than Ford in 2010.

But Global Insight, the independent industry analyst, predicts Ford will overtake General Motors within two years, as GM sales shrink further with the loss of Saab, Hummer, and other brands.

This doesn’t mean things can’t change once again. Ford has its own problems; it is saddled with huge debts GM got rid of by going through bankruptcy. But Ford seems to have better cars right now.

And I can tell you that somewhere, on some celestial plane, Mr. Sloan and Harley Earl don’t like that one bit.

Essay: Toyota Gives Detroit a Chance - 2.25.10

Toyota's accelerator problems have resulted in a public relations nightmare for the automaker. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry wonders how the Big Three will respond.

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Toyota has just given Detroit's big three automakers their best chance ever at winning back the hearts, minds and wallets of the American consumer. We ought to know within the next few months whether Ford, Chrysler and General Motors are up to the job.

Japanese automakers have been systematically beating Detroit since the 1970s, and they've been doing so largely because of one main feature: quality.

Twenty years ago, when I was living in another state, I bought a Honda Accord. The reliability of that car was so far superior to the Buick and Oldsmobile I had previously owned, it was hard for me to even consider a domestic vehicle after that. Multiply that experience a million times, and you'll see why the Big Three landed on the rocks.

But now it is Toyota's turn to have their cars suffer from one of the most frightening safety issues imaginable. Cars which accelerate out of control without warning, threatening to kill the drivers.

Worse, Toyota's handling of this has been a PR disaster of almost unbelievable proportions. Corporate headquarters in Tokyo has alternated between stonewalling, denials, and confusion.

This week, Jim Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales in America testified before Congress in what was the worst such performance I can ever remember. Barely a year ago, the press attacked the heads of the Big Three for their clumsy performance testifying before Congress when they were close to bankruptcy.

Toyota's main man in this country made GM's Rick Wagoner look like a combination of Einstein and Shakespeare.

Over and over again, Lentz displayed appalling ignorance of things he had to have known he'd be asked. When did Toyota first hear about the sudden acceleration problem? John Dingell asked him. "I don't know the answer to that," Lentz said. Well, when was the first recall? He didn't know that either.

How many complaints had Toyota gotten?

You guessed it. He didn't know. But what everyone will remember most is an exchange that belongs in a textbook of how NOT to do public relations. Toyota's man was asked if the recalls the company has finally issued, to fix sticky accelerator pedals and floor mats, would fix the problem. "Not totally," he said.

That ought to inspire consumer confidence. One can just see the comedy routines coming, featuring men lining up to buy new Toyotas -- as gifts for their mothers-in-law.

Toyota executives used to say their fear was that they would expand so fast they would become General Motors, by which they meant an unresponsive company with serious quality control issues.

Now, that seems to have happened.

The real question for Detroit's automakers, however, is how they will use this enormous gift that has been dropped in their lap.

Will they find a way to capitalize on it, to inform consumers across the country of their vastly improved safety and reliability records? Will they be able to persuade millions of Californians who long ago stopped buying American to give Detroit iron another try?

Clearly, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who may now have second thoughts about buying a Toyota Camry or Corolla. But will they buy Chevy Impalas or Ford Fusions instead?

Or will they switch to Honda Accords? The answer may tell us a lot about our automakers' ability to compete in the 21st century.

Essay: New Year - 1.4.10

As the state prepares for another challenging year… Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at what a difference a decade can make…

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We’re already one percent into the year, so, Happy New Decade, everybody. Let’s think for a moment about what a difference a decade can make. Hard to believe now, but ten years ago we were all congratulating ourselves on having come through what some thought would be the biggest crisis of the decade, Y2K.

If you don’t remember, that was the nickname for what was seen as a potentially catastrophic worldwide computer problem.

Early computers only used two digits to indicate the year. Then one day, the experts started worrying about what would happen when the millennium flipped over, and we reached the year double-zero.

What if all our computer-operated institutions broke down? What if the robots in our auto factories went haywire, and Lansing dated all the state tax refunds 1900? We managed to scare ourselves half to death, with a giant assist from the media. In the end, nothing much happened, apart from a few tiny glitches.

Everyone had long since forgotten about Y2K by the time the real defining moment of the decade occurred less than two years later. Nobody predicted Sept. 11, 2001. Nobody now can predict when we will finally move beyond its aftereffects.

Yet it is worthwhile going back ten years, a period of time that can seem like both the blink of an eye and an eternity, to look at what has become of the State of Michigan in the decade gone by.

Ten years ago, our unemployment rate was an astonishingly low 4.1 percent - below the national average. Today, that figure is 14.7 percent, more than three times as high. Michigan has the highest jobless rate in the nation, as it has had for months.

Ford Motor Company was rolling in dough. So much cash, in fact, that it bought Jaguar, Volvo and Land Rover for what turned out to be far more than those franchises were worth. General Motors was also swimming in profits; it had more revenues than any other company in the world. For awhile in 1999, it was viewed as the hottest stock on Wall Street.

Today, all that seems hard to believe, thanks to the near collapse of the domestic auto industry. Ten years ago, Michigan was the 18th highest state in terms of per capita income.

We’ve fallen to 37th now, meaning we are poorer than exactly two-thirds of the other states. We’re facing another grim year in Lansing, though things seem to have stabilized for the moment.

There’s general agreement that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. Our core industry has shriveled, and our state government has two major problems. First, it doesn’t seem to work very well, as last year’s year-long squabbles over the state budget show. Second, our present system doesn’t generate enough money to pay for what we want government to do.

What this means is that we need major structural reform, and we need it now. This is an election year, and we’ll be voting to fill every political job in Lansing. You’ll see a lot of campaign rhetoric, and more bickering over this year’s budget.

But what we need most is for our leaders to try to fix the deep-seated flaws in our system, if we have any hope for a prosperous future. I’ll be watching all year to see if they actually do this.

And most of all, I hope you will be watching too.

Essay: The Magic Truck - 12.24.09

Christmas arrives tomorrow after what has been a rough year for the auto companies, especially Chrysler. But senior political analyst Jack Lessenberry once knew a man for whom the words Dodge and Detroit were pure magic.

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Christmas is almost here, after a bruising year which may have been the worst ever for General Motors and Chrysler.

Chrysler, the smallest of what used to be the Big Three, had perhaps the toughest time. Not only did it go through bankruptcy, it was pretty much ordered by the government to sell itself to Fiat.

How much of a Chrysler identity will remain in a few years is a real question. Whether any of our car companies will be around in a generation is also a question. But we sometimes forget how much they made the world a better place. Not just America, the world. And at Christmas, I often think of one of the most unlikely of these stories.

Twenty-two years ago, I was reporting in Bulgaria, back when it was still a Communist dictatorship. Late one afternoon, with the help of an interpreter, I found a cab. The driver was burly, prematurely aged, with a flushed face and a fisherman's cap slouched on his head. But he was boomed out a big hello.

"You are from America," he asked.

Yes, I said. Detroit. He swiveled sharply and stared at me. His eyes filled with tears. "All my life, I have wanted to meet someone from Detroit. Because of Detroit, I am alive today." His name was Dimitar Assenov Dimolianov, and he took me back to 1939, when his father, Asen Mitsev, a sturdy farmer, realized his life's dream. A truck.

The best truck he could possibly find. So he took all the money he had saved in his life, went to Sofia, found a representative of the Dodge Motor Car company, and ordered a truck.

When it arrived months later, it was the best truck anyone had ever seen. Soon after, war arrived too. The Dimolianovs survived because of the truck, hauling food and firewood long distances. It got so battered the Germans didn't take it.

When Communism came after the war, it was so worn out they were allowed to keep it. Asen Mitsev told his boy: Everything depends on the truck. It has to be kept running, no matter what.

They used chicken wire, twine, anything. They kept it running. When the old man died, Dimi took the job over. He kept it going for twenty-four years and half a million miles. "No one else had such a truck. Without that truck, we might not be alive today."

We got to my hotel. He wouldn't let me pay. I insisted. "I could not possibly accept money. It is an honor to give a ride to someone from the city of the Dodge Motor Car Co."

But he did have a request. If I ever met anybody from Dodge, he wanted me to thank them. I wrote about this that Christmas.

Chrysler saw the story, and wanted to give Dimi another truck. They contacted me, and then the Bulgarian embassy. But nothing ever came of it. The new spirit of openness hadn't spread to Bulgaria yet. I have no idea whether the cabbie is still alive; he was a battered man with a bottle of spirits shoved under his parking brake.

But I do know this. He would be happy that the Dodge Motor Car Company didn't die this year. He felt he owed his and his family's life to Dodge, and that magical land called Detroit.

Let's hope that a little of that magic is left.

Essay: Deja vu at GM - 12.3.09

This week’s sudden ouster of General Motors’ chairman sent shock waves through the auto industry. But Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry remembers something very similar that happened once before...

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For those with reasonably long memories, this week’s ouster of Fritz Henderson as General Motors CEO is an interesting and perhaps unsettling case of “déjà vu all over again.”

I am not talking, by the way, about President Obama’s decision to fire his predecessor, Rick Wagoner, in March. That was a once-in-history sort of thing. If nothing else, somebody had to take the fall in return for an emergency transfusion of $50 billion taxpayer dollars to a mismanaged and soon-to-be bankrupt corporation.

Sports fans will tell you that the odds are that if the Detroit Tigers once again blow the chance to get into the playoffs next year, manager Jim Leyland is likely to be gone.

But Fritz Henderson‘s sudden departure is something else entirely. By the way, though nobody is talking on the record, it is reasonable to assume this was not a voluntary resignation.

Voluntary resignations are not announced at hastily called press conferences a day before the person quitting is supposed to give a major speech. No. Henderson was made to walk the plank. But think about this: General Motors was in financial crisis and needed to do big things - quickly and dramatically.

The CEO was new at the top job, but had spent his entire career at GM. He was having trouble making changes fast enough.

General Motors was like a family. The CEO was surrounded by men who had been hired at around the same time he was. They had come up through the ranks together.

It was tough for him to fire or demote men - and they were virtually all men - with whom he had worked for decades.

Eventually, he was painfully ousted by a board chairman who was an outsider who knew a lot about business but nothing about cars. You may think I have just described what happened to Fritz Henderson, and it fits. But I was actually thinking of another situation almost eighteen years ago. Then, the chairman was Bob Stempel.

The board chairman who ousted him was John Smale, of Procter and Gamble. And those events were even more sensational in Detroit than what happened this week.

Back when I was growing up, being CEO of General Motors was sort of like being Pope. The College of Cardinals doesn’t call Popes in and fire them when things look shaky.

Popes leave office when they die. The men who led the world’s biggest car corporation eventually retired, but they did so on their own timetable. GM chairmen left when they felt like it.

That is, until Bob Stempel. This year, Rick Wagoner and Fritz Henderson shared his fate. But there is one big difference.

When Stempel was forced out, John Smale didn’t try to run the company himself. The board elevated Jack Smith, another GM lifer, a man similar to Fritz Henderson in many ways.

That’s not likely this time. Board chairman Edward Whitacre, a tough-as-nails phone company executive, is going to run GM himself for a while, and then look for someone in his own image to change the nature of the insular and failed culture at General Motors.

America’s taxpayers need to hope he succeeds. Michigan’s economy partly depends on it, for one thing. For another, the taxpayers have bet fifty billion that GM can make it.

This is one gamble we really can’t afford to lose.

Essay: Pay Back - 11.16.09

General Motors announced this morning that it intends to start paying its taxpayer loans back early. But Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks there’s more to this deal than there seems…

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We have become so used to bad news from the automotive industry that any good news these days comes as a shock.

Today, there is bound to be considerable excitement. General Motors intends to start paying its government loans back ahead of schedule. In fact, they plan to give Uncle Sam a check for a billion dollars on New Year’s Eve.

Now, as your mama might have said, never count your money before it is in your wallet. But it looks pretty certain that GM will make that first payment. If they keep it up, tossing a billion back to us every quarter, they will end up free and clear of their obligations to the taxpayers less than two years from now.

That’s far earlier than the payoff date originally agreed to, July 2015. Additionally, GM sales were up last month for the first time in a long time. This is all legitimately good news.

For old timers, it is bound to evoke good memories of the nation’s first auto bailout, Chrysler in 1979. That time, the automaker completely repaid its loans ahead of schedule, and returned to profitability faster than anyone imagined.

However, the situation is far different today. For one thing, the government never really lent Chrysler a dime, way back when.

What Washington did was promise to guarantee loans for the automakers, so that Chrysler could get credit. The total amount of those loan guarantees was less than two billion dollars.

Even with inflation, that‘s far less than the $50 billion in direct aid the government has given General Motors. That‘s not the only difference. Here’s another: GM is never going to pay back the vast majority of that money. They don‘t have to.

For one thing, you may have forgotten, but we bought them. You and me and all of us now technically own more than 60 percent of General Motors. The hope is that someday the government can sell the stock in the private sector and get our money back.

We may have to wait a long time. Steven Rattner, the former White House auto czar, thinks the taxpayers already have lost something like $25 billion dollars on GM.

And General Motors only has to repay $6.7 billion of the money we gave them. Now, when they cut us a check for that first billion next month, where do you suppose it’s going to come from?

Would you guess from new profits they now are making? Not at all. General Motors is going to use some taxpayer loan money they hadn’t spent yet. There are no profits. GM is still losing money, especially in the key North American market. Now it is true that some signs have gotten better. Economists are a bit more hopeful.

Still, while the symbolism of paying us off earlier is nice, I’m not sure they should. That’s because GM has almost $13 billion in underfunded pension obligations. Earlier, GM’s chief financial officer suggested the company pay some of those off first.

But appearing to pay the taxpayers back may be better public relations. We all need to hope GM’s recovery continues. We’ve got a lot of cash tied up in this baby. If you think I’ve been too pessimistic, remember that it is always better to keep your eyes on the road.

And whenever you are offered a deal, pause to kick the tires.