OSHAWA, ONT. -- General Motors of Canada Ltd., will begin offering potential customers a 24-hour test drive later this week as part of an aggressive fourth-quarter marketing blitz designed to win back market share.

"We need to share and demonstrate to customers that this is a new GM," company president Michael Grimaldi said in an interview at the auto maker's head office in Oshawa, Ont.

Potential customers will be allowed to choose from eight to 10 different models at a dealership to take home for 24 hours. Dealers said the program may include a $500 rebate on those models for any Canadians who end up buying them after the overnight test drive.

It coincides with what is considered to be the official beginning of the 2004 model year on Wednesday, although GM and other auto makers have been introducing 2004 model-year vehicles throughout the first nine months of 2003.

"We want to get bums in seats," said GM spokesman Stew Low, who added that the test drive program will be backed up by national print and media advertising.

This latest GM program comes amid a fierce incentive war in the Canadian market, which includes interest-free loans of up to six years from some auto makers and GM's own program, which offers five-year interest-free loans, plus $1,000 in rebates.

That program ends later this week, although dealers said they expect GM to retain some type of incentive package along with the test drive promotion.

GM wants to get the message out to Canadians that it has great new models and that the quality of those vehicles has improved dramatically, as well as combat the perception among vehicle owners that GM's quality is not up to the level of other manufacturers, Mr. Grimaldi said.

"There's a lot of people out there who have yesterday's news or yesterday's perception and we need to convince them otherwise," he said.

"You give a customer a chance not just to drive it around the block, but take it home and feel it and experience it in their driveway or their neighbourhood."

Mr. Grimaldi said GM had hoped to use its strong performance in 2002 -- when market share topped 30 per cent -- as a springboard to an even better performance in 2003.

But the company did not perform as well as he had hoped during the first six months, he said, which means it will be difficult to match the market share level reached last year.

Changes made in July, however, began to turn things around, he said, and the company grabbed 32.2 per cent of the market share in August, a better performance than during the first six months of the year.

In addition, the fourth quarter is traditionally a strong quarter for GM, he said. It should be even stronger this year, he added, with new models such as the Chevrolet Malibu mid-sized sedan and several new cars arriving from the General Motors Daewoo Automotive Technology partnership of South Korea during the next few months.

GM's market share for the first eight months of 2003 stood at 27.9 per cent, compared with 29.7 per cent in the same period of 2002.

That was the largest decline among the big market players, although DaimlerChrysler Canada Inc.'s share slumped by 1.2 percentage points to 13.4 per cent.

The big winner among the major players has been Toyota Canada Inc., which captured 10.4 per cent of the Canadian market, compared with 9 per cent in the first eight months of 2003.

Each percentage point of market share represents 17,000 vehicles, based on annual sales of 1.7 million vehicles in Canada.