Back in the early 1970, late 60's Unionized Detroit took 13.5 hours to make a car. Japan made the same comparable car in 7.4 hours. The Union would NOT allow the use of Robots unless all the displaced workers were remployed / reassigned. The benefits they were collecting were also outrageous. Sure – good for the worker – a disaster for the industry. The wages were also higher than even the highest wage paid in the construction industry.
The Union did the same thing to the Steel Industy back in the 60's In the Gary – Hammond Indiana are 30 – 35,000 steelworkers once worked there. Today it is somewhat above 5,000. The Union fought robots use there. In one smeller over 4,000 people used to work. Today it is about a dozen. It is almost all computerized. Most of the work was picked up by overseas interests because of the Union.
Today the Unions are still infiltrated by a large MAFIA presence and the leaders are very strong Socialist and even Communist. The Head of the SEIU was once the head of the Democrat Socialist Party. M any are active and some are active in the Communist Party.

Obviously the dealers themselves are talking their own positions: whether or not they are profitable has no impact on the auto company’s bottom line. Of course any franchise agreements in place should be respected (unless nixed by the bankruptcy court). A friend’s father was a long-time Ford dealer paid to go away. I’m dubious of the conspiracy theories about politically-motivated closings, as like most such theories they assume a “hyper-competent” government. Such an entity exists only in fiction.

So what’s going on here? Are there costs to GM that I’m missing?

If GM had to build 16 million cars to satisfy American and to keep Honda and Toyota from shipping cars to this country why wouldn’t new auto manufacturing plants open up to build the 16 million cars America wants? Does it matter whether the plant is GM or Chrysler or Roger Penske’s? Just because GM liquidates that doesn’t mean America won’t build the cars. It does mean there would be an interruption — a very significant interruption. However, it seems to me that the auto manufacturing jobs would just grow again because Americans like to drive and shipping an automobile from Japan to the US costs about $5,000. [At least that is the cost of a contain which is roughly the same size as a car.] What am I missing?