General Motors in a surprise move today announced that beginning tomorrow June 24th it will begin a 0% financing drive, offering most 2008 GM models at 0%.

According to Autonews.com CitiBank in conjunction with GM, will offer 0% financing for 72 months on most 2008 models.

Mark LaNeve GM’s vice president of sales expressed that the 72 months no interest deal is designed to boost sales in June and will expire on June 30^th. He also mentioned that the special offer is not available on the Lambda chassis SUV’s being, the Enclave, Acadia and Outlook.

Customers are also given $500 in cashback if they purchase rather then lease.

To counter the dip in sales and rising production costs due to increases in raw material costs, GM has announced a 3.5% increase in MSRP costs for 2009. According to LaNeve, some vehicles will be adjusted to be higher then a 3.5% increase, some lower.

According to a Missouri dealer, even with the current promotion, he still expects to be down 10% or more from last years sales numbers.

In a separate call, GM has announced it is cutting truck production for the second half of the year by 170,000 units. At the same time, they will be increasing production of regular vehicles and crossovers by 47,000 units.

LaNeve also announced General Motors has put CitiBank in charge of studying it’s operation of Hummer and is looking at all possibilities regarding the brand.

According to Friday’s issue of the Wall-Street Journal, the new Chief Operating Officer Fritz has kept careful eye of the product mix of General Motors. In the past 60-90 days, these reviews have been taken extremely seriously, as everyone knows sale are down. Everything is forgiven in the auto industry, except dropping sales and lack of profit.

GM is launching 18 new cars and crossovers within the next 2-3 years along with several special interest vehicles, one of them being the Volt. While doing this, they are looking over their alliances in Asia to look for any possible models of small vehicles they could seamlessly integrate into North America.

Introduction of small vehicles is very important, as truck sales and sales of SUV’s have hit record lows. Toyota has come within 1 percentage point of hitting the same market share as GM, largely due to it’s flourishing business in the small vehicle segment.

It has been confirmed that GM will not be updating the current H3 models, due to cutbacks on new product development in the Hummer line. It will also stop current efforts to develop the H4, which was to battle the Jeep Wrangler. Rumors are running wild as to whom exactly will be the lucky company to purchase Hummer, as it goes on the sale block…

Word around Detroit is that GM would love to offload Hummer, it’s gas guzzler brand.  Numbers thrown around are in the 500-700 million dollar range, but whose counting?  Some think, since the Hummer is still a very popular brand in Russia, it might be good enough to be brought up by the same gentleman that bought a portion of Magna last year.
Of course, lets not count out Mahindra Mahindra, who is already in the business of SUV’s so this would be a deal more along the lines of it then Tata.  Lets look at Tata.  Has anyone heard of Tata prior to their announcement of making an extra small car that was to retail for $2500?  Didn’t think so.  So what is the logic behind it to buy Hummer, which is on exactly the opposite end of the spectrum.  Luxurious and expensive.  Time will tell, but it should be an interesting summer…