GM, holding 20 percent stakes of Fuji Heavy Industries (the maker of Subaru brand cars) since year 2000, is going to sell off the shares. 8.7 percent of which has been sold to Toyota while the remaining will be to other investors in the stock market. In the 5 years partnership, Subaru has little common interest with GM. Because of its unique boxer engine / 4WD system, its cars can hardly integrate into GM's global platforms, thus result in no savings of production cost. The only collaboration is selling a version of Impreza as Saab 9-2X in the US market, but seeing the car never take off in sales, now GM admits it is a wrong decision. GM said it sell off Subaru because the two companies have not enough common projects to sustain the alliance.
GM originally planned to derive Saab 9-6X from the Subaru B9 Tribeca. Now the plan is scrapped and GM will continue turning to the future Opel offroader platform which has been previewed as Antara GTC concept car in Frankfurt.
Getting Subaru under its wing, which produced 557,000 cars last year, Toyota will strengthen its domination in home market as well as its challenge against GM as the world number one car maker.
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