In my previous comment, I was referring to liquidation. This would have happened without government intervention, because it takes money to keep a company operating under bankruptcy restructuring. The money required for this was not forthcoming from the private market, which was paralyzed with fear. Counter-party risk alone was a huge concern.
The 2009 "bailouts" of GM and Chrysler involved each company entering bankruptcy, and having the desirable assets of those firms purchased in bankruptcy by new entities in which the US and Canadian governments were (together) major (in GM's case) or minor (in Chrysler's case) investors. So, any sentence that starts with "if we allowed a large automaker to go bankrupt..." that concludes with describing a result that didn't actually occur is demonstrably incorrect.