[Xenon]

Long post, and sorry in advance for picking on Pontiac. Here goes:

When you look at that chart, Saturn isn't doing all that bad. It's selling half as much cars as Pontiac....and it only has 1/6 of the dealerships that Pontiac has, and it has fewer cars as well. Personally I think that GM should look at a few things before going "gung-ho" and axing brands left and right. For example:

Look not just at the sales numbers, but the number of sales per dealership.
Pontiac is doing very poorly in this regard, since it has the most dealerships aside from Chevrolet.... but it has less than 1/4 of the sales volume that Chevrolet has. GMC also isn't doing well in this regard, but I believe some of those outlets sell only commercial grade trucks (read: TopKick)

Exactly how much sales of each brand are going to fleet?
As I remember G6 has around 40% fleet sales. There's little profit to be had in fleet sales, it hurts the brand perception, and it wrecks havoc on resale value. The Grand Prix is even worse in this regard.

Global Recognition:
Which brands have the most recognition worldwide? Because of this it wold be a very poor idea to fold Buick in the US, also Buick is the brand from which the rest of GM sprouted from, so killing Buick, in my opinion, would be jumping the shark for GM. Also Saab is pretty well routed in Europe, so folding Saab wouldn't be a wise decision either, and I believe that GM could use some of Saab's resources so they are also useful in the long run.

So that leaves us with Saturn, Hummer, GMC and Pontiac. Saturn would be an easy kill, since all the cars offered can be rolled into Pontiac, and there are few dealerships to deal with. Pontiac is an even easier kill since most of the dealerships are not stand alone, and Pontiac offers few unique cars that can't be carried over to other brands like say Chevrolet. Really this is a decision that GM needs to strongly think about for a while ( since it cannot be reversed), but at the same time, they cant afford to sit on this dilemma forever.