dlq04

It took our companies 30 years of bad management to get there. It only took Toyota one year! Mismanagement isn't limited to our guys.

BTW, when was the last time you heard of a US mfg'r building a plant in Japan. Never. But it wasn't from lack of trying. The game has not always been played fair.

Jet sitter

Read Ouchi's book Theory Z. It describes the difference between American and Japanese people. Car's that were exported from the US to Japan were so inferior Japanese would never buy them. They were literally disassembled and rebuilt to meet Japanese standards.

RC - Ryder

Hey, Ford and GM went/are overseas and have done well there for a very long time. Then, why did they fail so badly over here? Their demise here has been in the making for over ten years. A lot of mismanagement for sure, but that's not all of it. Over there, they built cars people wanted and quality-wise have had to compete against pretty good engineering titans. Over here, they built cars they wanted us to have - namely highly profitable ones - and needed only to compete against the mediocre engineering and masters of sheet metal screws of each other. It was an arrogance, with the handwriting on the wall a long time ago. Each year they lost market share, and even though they started building better cars, they never really entered into the competition. There was a lot of car sales volume out there ans seemingly enough to keep them happy. How many years do you have to build and sell various models at a loss, before a light goes off and you come to a conclusion that it is not sustainable? I don't feel sorry for management and surely not for the unions, but I do feel sorry for the millions of workers and shop keepers who were dependent on them.

dlq04

My point was not quality. Japan wins hands down; that's why I've driven their cars since the early 70s. My point was we welcomed their investments here, whereas they prevented ours there.

RC - Ryder

Dave: US car companies partially owned and made money on Mazdas, Mitsubishi, etc both in Japan and here. I've driven over there a number of times, and it's no place for cars with poor gas milage, excess HP, the size of highway boats, and a turning radius of 6 Japanese city blocks.

When I was in Moscow, the GM dealer had some Hummers, a couple of vettes, and a host of Tahoos. Talk about shooting low and targeting the Mafia. The Chrysler dealer had a row of PT cruisers and a few 300s. They call that low expectations.

Jet sitter

One of my neighbor's is helping out GM, he just bought a new Vette. Knowing him, I'm sure that he got an extremely good deal. He makes me look like Santa Claus. . .

tof

There have been several mentions of China in this thread already. They are obviously the 800 pound gorilla from a manufacturing point of view and I agree it is only a matter of time before they start doing to the Japanese auto industry what Honda, Toyota, Nissan, et.al. did to the Americans late in the 20th century.

But China is also the 800 pound gorilla in consumption. OK 350 pounds but gaining weight in a hurry! This market could be the salvation of GM and Ford. The overwhelming percentage of Chinese demand will probably be met by Chinese domestic production. But there may also be room in certain niches for outside competitors, ala VW in the 60s and Rover in the 90s here in the USA. And given the population of China that could be one hell of a big nich. (India may very well offer the same opportunities.)

On a side note, I believe GM dealers "floor plan" their inventory, in which case those cars are, in fact, on GM's books. By shrinking the pipeline I guess GM hopes to achieve economies of small scale.

And in regard to leases that people can't afford you can pick up some killer deals on a couple of Internet web sites that specialize in buying and selling leases. You can get some very low payments by taking over leases from folks who put down a big chunk up front. On leases that are upside down or close to it, you can take over the lease and get a check from the previous lessor. It was all in Car and Driver, iirc.

tof

Maybe labor costs are too high in Michigan but they seem to be doing fine in Alabama and Mississippi, where Hundai, Nissan, and Mercedes Benz, among others, find a ready work force at a reasonable cost. And nobody working in those plants is complaining. They make a very good wage and working conditions are among the best in the industry in these new state of the art plants.

And not ALL US corporate manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. And I could name other successful companies that have kept jobs in the US, including Reynolds Aluminum, Harley Davidson (a textbook turn-around case), IBM (sure a lot of their stuff comes from China but a lot of the engineering, design, and some fabrication is based in the US), Orik (although they are no longer in Long Beach, thanks to our high insurance rates since Katrina)...I could go on. Lots of jobs have moved overseas and most things you buy at WalMart are now made in China, but these companies demonstrate that good management can compete in global markets with production based here.

RedY2KS2k

From what I understand, floor plan financing is a loan from a lender (perhaps the automaker's finance arm); the proceeds of the loan are sent to the manufacturer and the lender has an interest in the inventory. As the inventory is sold, the lender is repaid.

If that is indeed how it works, then the auto manufacturers sold the inventory to the dealer and were paid by the lender.

Traveler

In IBM's case more and more of the product development is going overseas every year. They laid off 16,000 workers in January. In many cases their jobs weren't eliminated. They were moved to China, India, Brazil and the Czech Republic.