Friday Free-for-All: GM Stays Body-on-Frame Edition

They're getting a bit stale at this stage, but let's take a fresh peek at the October auto sales for a moment, specifically those of GM's body-on-frame trucks and SUVs.

Looking at monthly sales and sales increases, the Cadillac Escalade (and Escalade ESV) found 2,726 customers, a 30.4 percent increase over October last year; Chevrolet Suburban, 4,231 sales, up 71.7 percent; Chevrolet Tahoe, 7,738 sales, up 110.6 percent (no, that's not an error); GMC Yukon, 3,388 sales, up 84.5 percent; and GMC Yukon XL, 2,037 sales, up 54.8 percent. Plus, for the calendar year through October, these five nameplates have racked up a not-insignificant 146,597 sales.

Those are some pretty robust numbers on vehicles known for providing GM with some pretty robust profits, but I was still a bit surprised to learn that the General will continue building its next-gen SUVs using body-on-frame technology. After all, the Blue Oval is moving the archetype of the family SUV — the Ford Explorer — to unibody construction for its next iteration.

I'm not saying that just because Ford is going one way that that's the right way, but let's remember that the General's current lineup of body-on-frame SUVs was nearly DOA when first launched in 2006, courtesy of a sudden spike in gas prices. One actually has to consider that GM (and Ford and Chrysler and Toyota) have been relatively lucky in recent years with big SUVs; I mean, yes, there was the complete and total meltdown of the entire global auto industry, but just imagine how much worse things would have been with $4-a-gallon gas.

Now, there's still, obviously, a market for body-on-frame products, and it will certainly continue even if/when fuel prices reach that level. And a healthier OEM than GM (or Ford or Chrysler or Toyota) could probably find success supporting a full lineup of both "real" SUVs and crossovers. The problem is, that company no longer exists.

The result is that we will almost certainly see GM overextend itself again, and this time using taxpayer money. The old company would come out with a pretty good new product, like a Chevrolet Malibu, and then, instead of reinvesting in that product, it would have to divert resources to supporting another, very similar vehicle, like a Saturn Aura.

Today, GM has come out with an impressive, successful lineup of big crossovers, namely, the Chevrolet Traverse, Buick Enclave and GMC Acadia. The October numbers for these, while not up to those of GM's big SUVs, are nonetheless worth noting: Traverse was up 596 percent to 9,459 sale; Acadia saw a more modest bump of 6.9 percent, reaching 3,282 sales; and the Enclave was up to 3,073 sales, a leap of 37.9 percent. True, they lack the towing capabilities of their body-on-frame brethren, but they can still pull around some 5,200 lbs. worth of personal watercraft, etc.

These are class-leading vehicles, and the winning strategy here, IMHO, is to pile on the resources to make dead sure they stay that way. The General, though, disagrees, and will be effectively taking resources away from these vehicles to develop the next-gen body-on-frame SUVs.

Of course, that analysis does leave out a rather large piece of the puzzle: The second-best-selling vehicle in the U.S. happens to be the Chevrolet Silverado, and that happens to be built on the same platform underpinning GM's body-on-frame SUVs. GM has sold a whopping 261,142 units of the Silverado through October, while the results for its pickup platform-mates were GMC Sierra, 91,327 sales; Chevrolet Avalanche, 12,939 sales; and Cadillac Escalade EXT, 2,015 sales.

These are numbers you just can't walk away from, and I'm sure GM views the overall situation as making an investment primarily in its full-size pickups, with any incremental costs to develop SUV versions as being relatively minimal.

But it's that "relatively" bit that has me worried. For example, the fact of the matter is that GM will end up with a product portfolio that includes six body-on-frame SUVs that will be relatively similar to six of its unibody crossovers, all at a time when the market is moving inexorably to the latter and GM also is trying to rejuvenate its car offerings.

The real kicker in all this? The company building the frames for these body-on-frame vehicles will be none other than Magna, the global supplier that had been about to purchase Opel from GM before the latter reneged on the deal. I know the company also developed the frames for the past two generations of GM pickups and SUVs, and the one situation shouldn't affect the other, but it sure looks like the General is asking for trouble here.

In other words, there are a lot of risks to investing so much money in body-on-frame SUVs, and GM's choice of supplier can only Magna-fy them.