General Motors is accelerating its attempts to sell property and other non-manufacturing assets to try to raise badly needed cash.

The struggling American carmaker, which has given warning that it could run out of cash by the end of next month, has asked Jones Lang LaSalle, the estate agent, to find buyers for its European non-manufacturing property.

It has already taken the symbolic step of putting its headquarters in the United States up for sale, months after buying the Detroit skyscraper.

GM wants to sell all the properties that it can and then lease them back in an effort to raise $4billion through broader asset sales. The carmaker is also trying to sell its Hummer division, ACDelco, its global spare parts business, and a manufacturing centre in Strasbourg.

In Britain GM hopes to sell its Vauxhall headquarters and warehouse in Luton and its Millbrook engineering centre. Its Ellesmere Port factory on Merseyside and its van plant in Luton would be unaffected.

GM's move to sell property in an ailing property market underlines the desperation of the company to try to bring in cash. GM, Ford and Chrysler, and the other two big American carmakers, are waiting to see if they can get a $25billion bailout from the US Government to try to keep them afloat as they struggle with terrible sales around the world and a shortage of money. GM has also made direct approaches for help to all those European countries in which it has manufacturing operations, including Britain.

This week Spain gave GM a €200million loan to help to start production of the new Opel Meriva at its factory in Zaragoza, eastern Spain. The carmaker's European division has also asked Germany for €1billion to help to keep Opel going if GM in the United States was forced to file for bankruptcy. SolarWorld, the German solar power business, said yesterday that it remained seriously interested in buying Opel after making an approach last week. GM Europe insisted that Opel was not for sale.

In Britain, Rolls-Royce, the luxury brand owned by BMW, said yesterday that it was cutting 40 temporary jobs after a “softening” in sales. Until now the division, which employs 900 people in Goodwood, West Sussex, had said that it was fairly insulated from the downturn, unlike its direct competitors Bentley and Aston Martin.

Faurecia, the French car parts maker that is majority-owned by Peugeot, is expected to shut most of its 37 factories for nearly all of December because of falling demand. Faurecia employs 17,000 people.

Renault will halt production at its plant in Moscow for nearly a month because of plummeting demand. It will shut the factory from mid-December for two weeks, a period that will then run into the Russian Orthodox Christmas, when the factory will be closed for ten days anyway.

Suzuki, the Japanese manufacturer, is expected to lay off 1,179 of the 5,523 workers at its Hungarian factory from early next month when it takes production down to two shifts.

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