It’s been a slow news week, possibly because of preparations for Passover and Easter. And perhaps because much of the press corps is on holiday with the President of the United States.

So yesterday, the people who manage PR for General Motors managed to slip a pretty good story in. If you pay attention to mainstream news, you can’t have missed the adorable PUMA, which had a beta-test in New York yesterday. Now the techniques of pre-launching new products are time-tested, and GM does this sort of thing as well as anyone. But the marketing here strikes me as strange.

The PUMA is a two-wheeled, battery-powered scooter that can carry two people (and very little else), at a rumored top speed of 35 miles per hour. It was engineered by the Segway company, which appears to have re-incarnated as a technology partner for GM, without founder Dean Kamen.

The history of America’s postwar economic and social development, as much as anything else, is the story of the automobile. Not for nothing, and with substantial justification, did GM’s then-president tell Congress in 1954 that “What’s good for GM is what’s good for America.” But is the PUMA good for GM? And is it good for America?

I was originally thinking of comparing the PUMA to the “Smart,” which is Mercedes’s pug-nosed “city car,” or perhaps Tata Motors’s Nano. But it’s probably best to think of the PUMA as a rickshaw. Except that it’s pulled by an electric motor, rather than by a graduate student.

I want to be wary of stretching the point of this little initiative, which may or may not turn into a revenue producer for GM someday. Segway’s post-Kamen CEO was quoted yesterday as calling it a “labor of love” for GM, which is code for “we don’t have high expectations for this.”

And don’t make the mistake of supposing they worked on it in response to the imminent nationalization of GM. The managers of any large automaker spend a year deciding which direction to face whenever they have to fart. The timing of the announcement may have been influenced by the need to suck up to incoming board chairman Barack Obama, but they’ve been working on the project itself for quite a while now.

Let’s also note that the mini-launch took place where I live, in New York. If it makes sense anywhere (which I don’t necessarily grant), a battery-powered rickshaw makes sense here. It surely doesn’t make any sense in suburban America, except possibly as a way of getting from point A to point B on the palatial estates of people like John Edwards.

And that’s what led me to several questions about the marketing of this device.

First off, look what it says about GM’s revenue model. GM has always been a company built for size and for cash flow, rather than for profitability. They can make on the order of six million vehicles a year in North America, expecting an average price of $26,000 or so.

For GM to even consider making a product that would sell for the PUMA’s anticipated price of $6,000 is a challenge to the whole architecture of the company. And GM has no demonstrated history of reinventing itself (the last time they tried was Saturn, which probably has never turned a profit).

But the challenge facing GM, if they’re to stay in business at all, is precisely to adjust to a market in which they should hope to make not six, but only three million vehicles a year here, and to sell each of them for a lot less money than they’re used to.

It’s not to be dismissed out of hand that GM can operate in permanent bankruptcy as a government-controlled entity. But I don’t believe for a minute that they can significantly reduce their labor costs, because Congress and the Administration owe too much to the UAW.

The whole point of bureaucratic management is to prevent wholesale change and adaptation to changed conditions. And GM’s management is one of the largest bureaucracies in America. That’s why they’ll find it entirely congenial to become a member of the US Government Family of Companies™. A government takeover will do far less to change GM than a Chapter-11 bankruptcy administered by an independent judge.

But market realities will still impose themselves on GM. They can’t return to the revenue-size of the past, so it’s a near-certainty that as a government-controlled entity, they will lose huge amounts of money year after year. Those losses will be made up by the taxpayers.

So if anything like the PUMA ever makes it to market, look for it to be heavily subsidized. The same expectation is already in place for the Chevrolet Volt, scheduled for launch in the 2010 model year. This is a lithium-battery powered compact car that will run for 40 miles on a charge, probably will cost about $40,000 to make, and will have to compete in a market segment where the average selling price is more like $15,000. Because of its limited range, the Volt is only credible as a second car, perhaps for short commutes, or for city use as a government fleet car.

Now Barack Obama will be the rich, powerful plutocrat at the top of GM. (Imagine him with a silk top hat, diamond studs, a fat cigar, a private jet, and a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket.) Meanwhile, the rest of us will be making up the company’s losses. Ask youself: how badly do you want to be purchasing Volts and PUMAs for people who live in places like New York City?

But this leads to the next question: how should GM be deciding which vehicles to build in the first place?

During its heyday, GM was one of the most powerful drivers [sic] of the transformation of America. They quietly but energetically boosted the model of “One Man, One Vehicle.” (Which later became “One Woman, Several Vehicles.”) In the process, they pushed the redesign of Manhattan’s traffic patterns, with high-speed motorways on the eastern and western edges, expressways on Long Island, and expansive, auto-friendly public parks and recreation areas.

The basic exercise in marketing is to figure out what your customer wants to buy, how much she’s willing to pay for it, and then fit your available technology into the equation so that you make a profit. GM at mid-century was smart enough to figure out that America was ready to stop walking and start driving.

And when our grandparents started driving everywhere, they spread out from America’s cities and created a vast suburban landscape, complete with mortgages that are now a lot harder to afford.

Is GM calculating that the long cycle of suburbanization is ending? Does America’s desire to be green translate into a desire to become more urban and less mobile again?

But wait. We’ve heard this story before. It’s long been a dream of left-leaning urban planners to move people out of their cars and large homes, and back into small city apartments. And elite fantasies almost by axiom don’t match what ordinary people want. For that reason, a GM that had to face the pressure of the marketplace would almost certainly fail miserably with such a strategy.

But what about a GM that no longer has to worry about market discipline? After all, in a government-supported bankruptcy, all they have to do to stay in business is to keep Barack Obama happy. They won’t have to worry about what makes their customers happy.

Look out. In a few more years, you might still want a big gasoline-powered SUV or pickup truck. But there might not be anyone left who’s willing to sell you one.