You'll have to forgive the exclamation mark, but after several years of turbulent (in the same way that a light aircraft caught in a tornado is turbulent) financial crises, General Motors seems to have turned the corner and actually posted a sales increase in the American market in February.
GM's sales rose 3.7%, which looks a bit pale next to Toyota's 12% gain for the same period, but it's better than Honda's 3.2% rise and Nissan' 1.2%. And it's a huge, awful, fantastic lot better than Ford and Chrysler, which remain deep in crisis, posting sales losses of 14% and 8.3% respectively.
GM still has some restructuring to do to finally close the book on the dark days when it was losing several billion dollars a year, laying off 34,000 workers and closing no less than 14 factories, but things certainly look brighter for the Detroit giant now than they have done in a long time, and a recent decision to start selling European-designed and engineered Opels as Chevrolets and Saturns in the US should pay dividends in a market that, at last, is showing signs of moving into smaller, more efficient, higher-quality cars.
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