What do you do upon discovering a car company that, instead of having cash, name recognition, or a future, features a car lineup mediocre enough to have driven them to bankruptcy within three years? If your name's General Motors, you buy it. But you neglect to buy the whole thing, leaving its American operations excluded from the deal (oops). So to sell those cars in America, you instead slap familiar Chevy bow-ties or Suzuki "S" badges on them, nevermind the consequences to brand reputations or the cannibalization of existing cars.
Such is the complicated story of GM-Daewoo, the new entity named after the merger that recently rocked South Korea's business world. Because any company touched by the General's hand gets dragged kicking-and-screaming into its big, happy family, the car once known as the Daewoo Nubira was thrust upon GM's right-hand man in Japan, Suzuki. Then they had an Italian guy named Pininfarina shape the shell. You could call it globalization at its messiest; Suzuki calls it the Forenza.
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