GM vows it will be leaner, greener

Once the world’s largest and most powerful automaker, the troubled company was expected to emerge from bankruptcy protection by early today, cleansed of massive debt and burdensome contracts that would have sunk it without federal loans.

The new company, 61 percent owned by the US government, will clear bankruptcy in record time to face a brutally competitive global automotive market in the middle of the worst sales slump in a quarter-century.

Specialists say GM must change its image from a lumbering bureaucracy that makes gas guzzlers to one on the cutting edge of efficiency and quality.

“It is the smaller, leaner, tougher, better cost-focused GM,’’ said George Magliano, with the consulting firm IHS Global Insight. “But they still have to deal with the problems that they faced longer-term.’’

“Decades from now, our nation will be glad we did not let a global credit crisis put an end to the American automobile,’’ said Democratic US Representative Gary Peters, whose Michigan district has three GM factories.

Yesterday, a court order allowing GM to sell most of its assets to a new company took effect.

Under plans that chief executive Fritz Henderson will announce today, GM will cut another 4,000 white-collar jobs, including 450 top executives. The company still employs 88,000 people in the United States and 235,000 worldwide.

Henderson also is expected to describe how GM will streamline its bureaucratic management structure. GM has said it will be able to make money even if the US auto market stays at a depressed level of 10 million to 10.5 million vehicles sold. For the first half of this year, sales have remained just under 10 million, after hitting more than 16 million as recently as 2007.

GM ranked as the top global automaker, in terms of sales, for 77 years before Toyota Motor Corp. snatched its crown in 2008. The company sold nearly 8.4 million cars and trucks around the world in 2008, falling short of Toyota’s nearly 9 million.

Specialists say GM’s future will depend largely on its ability to persuade consumers it’s a different company, one that builds cars that will equal or outlast Japanese models. To illustrate the change, GM is considering a new name.

GM lost more than $80 billion in the past four years and survives only because it expects to receive $50 billion in US government loans. Without the loans, its executives have said, the company would have been sold off.

The Obama administration says it won’t interfere with day-to-day operations, though it ousted former CEO Rick Wagoner and has been involved in picking a new board.

The United Auto Workers union gets a 17.5 percent stake of the company through its retiree healthcare trust, and the Canadian government will control 11.7 percent. The remaining shares go to bondholders.

Almost immediately, GM will try to show it has changed, perhaps by changing its familiar logo from blue to green, to reflect its environmental focus.

That “could well be a smart move,’’ said Tony Spaeth, of Tony Spaeth/Identity, a Rye, N.Y., firm that helps companies craft identities. “It lends a little bit more reality and sincerity of intention to ‘We want to change the way we do things.’ ’’