Well it probably took years to bring the quality up to par, so in the meantime, there wasn't much else they could do to fight that perception.
Now they suffer from a branding issue (on top of their other problems). It's like when the original AT&T was split up, and one of the companies to come out of it was GTE. GTE had horrible service and customers hated it. It perennially ranked at the bottom of the baby bells for customer satisfaction, etc. So GTE went and rebuilt it's whole network and suddenly had the best service and support. But when people heard 'GTE' they still thought 'crappy and unreliable'. The solution? They changed their name to Verizon.
So building high quality cars that are stylish and true technical leaders might not be enough. (Especially now that the public associates 'GM' and 'Chrysler' with 'bailout'.) In all this bailing out they might have to change their brand name as well.
According to Wikipedia, GTE was independent even during the AT&T monopoly. It wasn't until the Bell Atlantic merger that they changed names to Verizon.
Now they suffer from a branding issue (on top of their other problems). It's like when the original AT&T was split up, and one of the companies to come out of it was GTE. GTE had horrible service and customers hated it. It perennially ranked at the bottom of the baby bells for customer satisfaction, etc. So GTE went and rebuilt it's whole network and suddenly had the best service and support. But when people heard 'GTE' they still thought 'crappy and unreliable'. The solution? They changed their name to Verizon.
So building high quality cars that are stylish and true technical leaders might not be enough. (Especially now that the public associates 'GM' and 'Chrysler' with 'bailout'.) In all this bailing out they might have to change their brand name as well.