GM will launch sale across all brands this week

General Motors will launch a big incentive program on each of its four brands starting Nov. 18.

Chevrolet will go with the “Red Tag Sale,” Buick-GMC with the “Holiday Event” and Cadillac with the “Season's Best” sale.

Details about the incentives were not immediately available this morning.

“All of our efforts will be to sell down our remaining 2009 inventory,” Susan Docherty, GM's vice president of U.S. sales, said today at a press event. “We'll have a little bit of carryover of that into the first quarter of 2010, but the objective is to keep our inventory somewhere between 425,000 to 450,000 units.”

Docherty said she is confident that GM will clear out the 2009-model-year inventory by January.

Meanwhile, the company likely will shutter its Pontiac and Saturn brands by the end of the first quarter, Docherty said. GM has only about 10,000 Pontiac vehicles left and 8,000 Saturns, she said.

“We're actually winding down those products quicker than we had anticipated,” he said.

GM is holding its U.S. market share at 19.5 percent. October sales for the company rose 5 percent compared with October 2008. Docherty said GM's retail sales rose 15 percent in October, and fleet sales fell by 27 percent compared with a year earlier.

“I'd rather have very slow, incremental movement up [in market share] than the peaks and valleys we saw all over 2008 and of course in the first six months of the 2009 calendar year,” she said.

Docherty said GM's incentives remain high this year, mostly because a greater portion of its product mix was 2009 pickup trucks and SUVs. About 47 percent of GM's sales in October were 2010 models, the remainder were 2009s.

GM expects the U.S. auto industry to sell 11 million to 12 million vehicles in 2010.

“It's nothing to write home about,” Docherty said. “We're seeing some improvement and lift from the 2009 calendar year, but I don't think 2010 will be a stellar year. It's going to be a year for some stabilization.”

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