GM's past and present collide in sibling rivalry

For a year, General Motors Corp. has been singing the praises of the new Chevrolet Malibu, voted the 2008 North American Car of the Year by auto writers and billed by GM Chairman Rick Wagoner as "the finest midsized car this country offers." To promote its launch, GM spent nearly $250 million on advertising, dubbing it "the car you can't ignore."

Meanwhile, GM has been quietly making and selling a similarly sized and priced sedan: the Chevrolet Impala. GM hasn't run a national ad for the full-size Impala in three years, scarcely mentions it in news releases or conference calls with Wall Street analysts, and made little hay about its winning Fleet Car of the Year three years running.

Yet last year, for every two Malibus that GM sold, it delivered three Impalas. Unpromoted, hardly noticed, the humble Impala finished the year with 265,840 sales, making it the best-selling U.S. sedan and the No. 8 vehicle by volume in the country, outselling even the Dodge Ram pickup by a wide margin.

On Tuesday, GM will submit a restructuring plan to the Treasury Department, a document that is supposed to explain how it intends to reduce debt and cut costs and prove it merits further government financial support beyond the $9.4 billion in federal loans it has already received.

Exactly how the federal government will assess plans offered by GM and Chrysler remains uncertain. But Sunday, Obama administration insiders said there no longer were plans for a "car czar" to oversee restructuring. Instead, an interagency task force was in the works that would include two senior presidential advisors.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and National Economic Council Director Lawrence H. Summers will oversee the across-the-government panel, a senior administration official told the Associated Press on Sunday on condition of anonymity.

Even with more help from Washington, industry experts question whether cost-cutting and debt reduction will be enough to save GM. They say the outsize company has deep-rooted structural problems, with too many dealers, too much production capacity and too many models, leading to cost problems that destroy any chance of making a profit.

The Impala and the Malibu, which sit next to each other in many Chevy showrooms, provide a window into those problems and how difficult saving GM really might be.