• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 10, 2011

The new reality in Detroit has bred a new business mantra: As General Motors goes, so goes General Motors.

"All of the things we need to do are, by and large, in our control," CFO Dan Ammann told analysts at GM's second-annual business conference in Warren, Mich., yesterday. "We're not relying on heroic market-share gains. We're not relying on substantial economic recovery."

It is, instead, relying on a new austerity that, depending on what you're reading this morning, means:

• Keeping product-development spending constant despite economic troubles. "The start-stop, herky-jerky, on-again, off-again product development was grossly inefficient," said CEO Daniel F. Akerson, as Nick Bunkley reports in the New York Times, "and it resulted in poor product."

• Decrease by 25% the number of engineers it has working on non-vehicle projects. Mary Barra, GM's product chief, says they will be reassigned to "essential work," Chrissie Thompson reports in the Detroit Free Press.

• Cut the number of vehicle architectures, or platforms, by more than half -- from 30 to 14 by 2018 -- and consolidate the number of engines from 20 to 10 over the next decade. This will "help get products to the market faster, and reduce duplicate engineering and design for cars sold across the globe," Barra said, according to the Detroit News' Christina Rogers.
  

"It's the course a lot of manufacturers are taking," Edmunds.com senior editor Michelle Krebs tells Rogers. "Everyone is trying to get to greater economies of scale."

Indeed, "while it has shed jobs, brands and debt during bankruptcy, GM's executives admit the automaker continues to have an inefficient manufacturing network, weak supplier relations and too many variations in the types of engines and vehicle underpinnings it uses to build cars and trucks globally," Rogers writes.

"I got the distinct impression that this was a report card, and they're nowhere near to scoring an A+," Edmunds' Krebs tells her. As CFO Ammann put it, "We're doing okay, but not great."

There was not a lot of mention of marketing chief Joel Ewanick in the stories. He did say that GM plans to manufacture Cadillacs in China in the third quarter of 2012, where "almost as many people are willing to consider buying a Cadillac as a Mercedes, Audi or BMW in China," Rogers reports. And GM will take its German Adam Opel brands slightly upscale to differentiate it from Chevrolet.

The company forecasts GM's 13 million new-vehicle sales in 2011, including medium- and heavy-duty trucks, but is wary of its own projections given the ups and (mostly, of late) downs of the financial markets.

"There's a lot of turmoil in the business and turmoil means uncertainty, so we're a little unsure of these numbers," Akerson said and Bloomberg's Craig Trudell reports. "Consumer confidence is pretty fragile right now," U.S. sales vp Don Johnson said. "With the recent volatility in the stock market, we know that's a concern we really have to watch closely."

All of this fits in nicely with a piece Sharon Terlep wrote for the Wall Street Journal last week that ripped a headline from one of the Seven (now Six) Sisters: "The Secrets of the GM Diet: How Auto Maker Transformed From Bloated Government Ward; 47 Plants to 32."  

But the slashing hasn't been confined to bricks and mortar, as the caption of under an almost surrealistic picture of the Chevy Cruze production line at the plant in Lordstown, Ohio, reveals: It pays some new workers about half the hourly wage of veterans. And no workers at all are visible in the photograph. Contrasting that photo with this one speaks dollars, if not volumes. In fact, Terlep reports, employees worldwide have fallen from 263,000 to 208,000 in three years, and United Auto Workers in the U.S. from 62,000 to 49,000.

"At the old GM, it was more about, 'How do we get to next year?' not 'What do we do next year?,'" Ammann told Terlep, adding that a stronger balance sheet "allows us to look forward three to five years and make sure we're taking the actions we need to take to drive profitability and success."

GM last week reported that sales rose 19% to $39.4 billion in the second quarter. Profit was $2.52 billion, or $1.54 a share, topping the $1.20 a share average estimate of 13 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Although this new austerity seems to be paying off for GM, it's no doubt premature to say, "so goes the nation" in light of the recent budget cuts -- whatever they turn out to be, exactly.