General Motors' decision to stop publicly disclosing monthly production numbers has touched off concern among industry analysts and economists, as well as suppliers that rely on the data for their production plans. For decades, GM and nearly all other major automakers have reported the number of cars and trucks produced at their North American plants each month, broken out by nameplate. The data get folded into numerous economic indicators, including ones published by the Federal Reserve, and are a benchmark for industry insiders to forecast GM's future production.
But this month GM notified several research providers that publish production data -- including IHS Automotive, the Automotive News Data Center and Autodata Corp. -- that it will no longer give them those figures, providing instead only the number of wholesale deliveries.
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