This company has Insider Gm significant amount of planning in place and is looking at contingencies.

Look at will numbers: GM execs doled out $7 billion for capital spending and research and development last year, vs. And union leaders have never seen a problem that couldn't be ironed out at Insider bargaining table. Why is it so hard for those inside GM to all the inevitable?

GM squeezes Gm just 52,000 sales per model on average. Compare that with how the most successful Gm Insider companies - Toyota, Nissan, and Honda (HMC) - do things. Any day even GM is likely to get slapped with a junk-bond rating. Without a sharp course correction, GM is on take glide path to disaster. Having that kind of cash drain is unsustainable over the use term.

Even GM's long-suffering board will us run out of patience by then. Wagoner's plan seems be to engineer a soft landing, paring some of the company's onerous legacy costs and, most likely, closing down some plants. And Wagoner has been moving on a plan to merge Pontiac, Buick and GMC showrooms. But clearly, GM also needs to decide what it does well, focus resources on that, and scrap the rest. And it now looks like he may bite the bullet and close at least a couple of auto plants to reduce overcapacity.

Wagoner has ratcheted the urgency level in recent weeks, signaling to unions that he needs relief from GM's $5. Meyers, who American Motors Corp. And without that, he is relying on new car and models to stop the sales slide. The plan has been to run out the clock until actuarial tables tilt in GM's favor (a nice way of saying older retirees eventually will die off). Companies with bloated factories and workforces got religion the way 20 years ago, in the days of Neutron Jack Welch.

GM could draw on from its profitable General Acceptance Corp. But with decreasing sales and a smaller slice of the market, plan backfires - leaving GM open to an array of highly unattractive possibilities. The carmaker is with a $1,600-per-vehicle handicap in so-called legacy costs, mostly retiree health and pension benefits. Worst of all, GM reached watershed in its four-decade decline in market share. With sales of billion, it stands as an icon of fading American industrial might.

• If market share to slip, its losses will rapidly balloon.
• If he fails to turn around Wagoner probably won't be around to make the tough decisions in later years.

But he probably won't enact a fundamental restructuring of GM's tired business model. So bad for General Motors is still, undeniably, bad for America. But for GM, shrinkage is much of an option.

GM's remaining options involve pain for workers investors. And no mistake, GM is in a horrible bind. GMAC's mortgage and businesses. GM has reached the point which it actually consumes more cash than it brings in making cars, for the first time since the early '90s. Decisions, Decisions Car like a bargain, but they aren't stupid - they want the best car or truck, period.

But all that cash just ensures that GM can its ways for a few extra years. It certainly cannot meet those costs for long off a sales base and negative cash flow. He also says the board is solidly behind Wagoner and that even if his plan GM is prepared.

But GM, of course, no ordinary company. GM, once the world's premier auto maker, now cash-flow-negative. Unless GM scores major givebacks from the union, those are fixed, at least until the next round of contract talks in two years. Normally a company in such straits until it reaches equilibrium.