The drastic move follows more than a decade during which advertising for Oldsmobile failed to provide potential customers with a convincing reason to buy the cars - despite a major modernisation over the past few years. Under mounting pressure, Oldsmobile last month hired a new ad director in a last-ditch effort to energise the brand.

But Oldsmobile's attempts to remake the image of one of America's oldest car lines, which dates to the dawn of the automotive age in the late 1890s, actually go back decades. In the 1960s, well aware that its very name gave the car a dated image, GM began calling it the "Youngmobile" in a long-running ad campaign. Then in 1988, the company switched its advertising tagline to "It's Not Your Father's Oldsmobile." Still, a fuddy-duddy image dogged the brand, keeping it from attracting younger buyers.

"Oldsmobile was never grounded in what kind of car it was. A product has to have a point of view," says Mr Bob Kuperman, president and chief executive of ad agency TBWA Worldwide. Adds Mr Allen Adamson, a managing director at the corporate identity firm Landor Associates: "What Oldsmobile ran into was an advertising problem. It failed to clearly define what is different about the brand."

But Oldsmobile's slide wasn't entirely the fault of ineffective advertising. Muddled product strategy was as big - or bigger - a culprit.

In the GM hierarchy of brands, Olds is supposed to be the sporty, upper-middle-priced division, a touch less expensive and less conservative than Buick, a bit pricier and more sophisticated than Pontiac. Such marketing gradations were more effective when the US car market was less competitive decades ago.

While Olds has had a dowdy image of late, it once was an innovator. It was Olds, for instance, that GM used to launch the US market's first automatic transmission, on the 1940 Series 60 sedan. From the late 1940s into the 1950s its high-compression "rocket" engines gained fame. The 1966 Olds Toronado was the industry's first high-volume front-wheel-drive car.

In the early 1970s, during Detroit's pre-gas crisis, pre-Japanese invasion heyday, Olds offered some of the burliest muscle cars around. The Oldsmobile 4-4-2 had a massive 455 cubic-inch engine, a four-barrel carburetor, four-speed transmission and dual exhaust. Long and low, the 4-4-2 convertible was a hot-rodding baby boomer's dream.

But Olds began heading for trouble after the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s buried the muscle cars. In the 1980s, GM embarked on a campaign to shrink its cars to match what the company's leaders envisioned would be an era of $3-a-gallon gas and diminished expectations. The Olds division's reputation for innovative engineering took hits from quality problems with diesel engines, and from clumsily handled product decisions such as putting Chevrolet engines in certain Olds models.

Although Olds had banner years in 1985 and 1986, selling one million cars each year as the auto market zoomed to records, the division's vehicles were by 1987 mostly thinly disguised variations of Chevrolet, Pontiac and Buick models.

During the past several years GM pruned back the Olds line as it tried to reposition it as a competitor to near-luxury Asian and European brands such as Honda Motor Co's Acura division. It introduced a slick new logo as well as new models. Oldsmobile's lowest-price car, the Alero, starts at about $17,000 and is designed to compete with Honda's Civic and Accord and Toyota Motor Co's Camry and Corolla. The sleek, top-of-the-line Aurora fights with BMW, Audi, Acura, Lexus and Infiniti in the $30,000 to $35,000 segment.