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Ahead of the curve: Germany's Opel has been GM's leading engineering innovator for years.

Outside a small group of nihilists and committed free marketeers who'd have let General Motors go under, no matter the price, few question the necessity of the Obama administration's plan for the once great American company's reorganization in bankruptcy. But as a U.S. taxpayer, and therefore one of GM's brand-new owners, I have my doubts about our ability to manage this new property. Yes, GM's previous owners proved unable to run a competitive car company in a global marketplace, but is the U.S. government really the best one to transform it? Already, the particulars of the Chapter 11 arrangement lead me to fear that the same sort of internal politics, unthinking nationalism, and generalized aversion to engineering risk that have hobbled GM for decades will continue to haunt its new incarnation.

One place where you won't hear for-attribution criticism of the "new" General Motors these days is GM headquarters. Perforce they are obligated to display their gratitude with the unfailing enthusiasm that a $50 billion-plus investment in a failing business minimally entitles its benefactors to expect in return. Although the collegial tone of the new rapprochement comes 50 years late, it is heartening nonetheless to see American industry finally welcome Washington's involvement in matters like safety, fuel economy, and emissions regulation.

Even Robert "Maximum Bob" Lutz, GM's outgoing product czar and vice chairman, and a fierce critic of government meddling from the "give me back my bullets" wing of Detroit's old school, has experienced an astonishing change of heart, at the ripe age of 77. Speaking to a gathering of journalists in Motor City the other week, Lutz unhinged every jaw in the house when he shared his thoughts on how the White House automotive task force ought to become a permanent fixture. Of the unprecedented government-industry collaboration the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies begat, Lutz, an ex-Marine attack pilot and near-libertarian known for making his daily commute in a decommissioned Czech jet fighter, quipped: "Jeez, it only took 30 years for somebody to finally figure [government-industry partnership] out."

Er, right. Thirty years and a couple of epochal bankruptcies.

Questions about the government's intentions for the new GM Lite already abound. Notably, what will and what should the company's policies be, now that it is controlled (in theory) by and for the benefit of U.S. taxpayers, who own 60 percent of its shares?

Will GM be underwritten so as to lead the market in the direction of fuel saving and new technologies? Or will it trim its sails and attempt to get by on its sometimes-profitable religion of pickup trucks and SUVs, perhaps ones that get slightly better mileage? GM is still tooled up to build them.

Ever since the 1920s, when GM's Alfred P. Sloan introduced the precepts of what came to be known as Sloanism -- a car for every purse and purpose -- a good day at a car dealership was one when you sold someone "more car than they need." Automobile marketing often appeals to man's baser emotions. Greed, lust, and envy come to mind, as do excessive horsepower and other costly and unnecessary options that have been larded on to new cars to boost profits for longer than any of us have been alive. So, you can't help wondering, has the U.S. government entered the business of encouraging people to live out their most insane automotive dreams? Will it labor to create demand for automobiles when and where there is no need, as generations of car companies have done before it?

And where do GM's new taxpayer/shareholders stand on the matter of outsourcing work to Mexico or South Korea or China or anywhere else, as the old GM did whenever it got the chance? Will Chevy production lines in places like Toluca and Silao, Mexico, come home to the USA? The old GM went in for cheap overseas labor. Has the government now entered the business of using taxpayer money to export jobs? Is this the change we need?

Myriad practical and philosophical quandaries aside, one vital series of questions about the "new" GM -- which brands will be kept, sold, or terminated -- has already been answered. Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, GMC, Australia's Holden, and South Korea's Daewoo are to be spared. To be sold: Saturn, Hummer, and Sweden's Saab are available outright, and operating control of GM's German division, Opel, is to be sacrificed in a deal brokered by the German government outside U.S. bankruptcy proceedings. For the scrap heap: Pontiac, the venerable division that once claimed to "build excitement." In limbo: Opel's English sister brand, Vauxhall.

There's no doubt that General Motors' current sales won't sustain all these brands along with the factories, dealerships, and personnel that go with them. At 13 percent and falling, GM's share of the American market has declined meteorically from the 50 percent the company actively aimed not to exceed, as recently as the 1980s, lest it incur antitrust activity.

The brand-winnowing process is critical, yet it has been misguided, informed not by the urgent need for innovation but by the corporation's newfound poverty -- which fosters subpar long-term thinking in the world of business as surely as it does in housing projects -- as well as by a new, federal brand of GM's trademark shortsighted decision-making.

The choice to jettison Saturn -- GM's only great, post-Vietnam marketing success -- was certainly questionable, but the decision to relinquish control of Opel, though understandable in terms of American politics (sending U.S. taxpayer money to Germany is never a big applause line), seems most regrettable of all.

Purchased in 1929, Opel is one of GM's bestselling, best-respected divisions and easily its most technically proficient. Indeed, Opel designs and engineers GM's finest small and medium-sized cars, the sort of machines a new and responsible GM ought to spend more time thinking about: smaller and lighter than those most Americans drive today, and by virtue of this, more fuel efficient, more agile, and more responsive.

Opel has similarly been in the driver's seat for much of GM's forward-thinking engineering in the area of alternative -- hybrid, hydrogen fuel cell, and battery electric -- powertrains. Indeed, America's love affair with GM's awesome Corvettes and fast Cadillacs notwithstanding, Opel and its engineering team, forged in the crucible of the hypercompetitive European market, which has long placed a premium on efficiency, is today overall the best, most exciting part of GM. So why give it up? (Although GM does hope to retain 35 percent of the company, Canadian parts supplier Magna and Russia's Sberbank's combined 55 percent interest will severely limit its role.)

Excise the Opel-derived Chevrolet Malibu and much of the suddenly excellent Saturn range (Opels in all but name), and you've deleted the best mainstream cars GM offers in the United States. Take Opel out of the mix and you've suddenly charged its North American engineering team with building the cars of the future. Arguably the least relevant of all GM's engineering outposts, these are the people who -- when they weren't building big pickups and leviathan SUVs -- gave us the TrailBlazer and the execrable Pontiac Aztek. Handing them the keys to our company's future could well make success unattainable.

True, Opel has fallen in and out of profit and is losing money as we speak. But car-selling is the classic boom-and-bust business, and Opel has actually been more profitable lately than any of the surviving U.S. divisions, selling almost 1.5 million cars in Europe last year (plus another 350,000 Opel-clone Vauxhalls), and setting sales records in 2009 in Central and Eastern Europe, where it grew 41 percent, or a rate four times faster than the rest of the industry. Sales in Russia were up 49 percent, while Vauxhall's British market share actually grew to a very healthy 17.2 percent. The greatest measure of Opel's worth is that knowledgeable people want to buy it.

So, my fellow GM shareholders, why are we getting rid of it? And more importantly, what kind of car company are we trying to build?