paS2K

Thanks for posting the link, Dave....will share w/some other friends.

I really like reading about the design development in the 40s/ 50s and into the 60s. Earle was quite a guy....along with Raymond Loewy (Studebaker of late 40s and 50s).

dlq04

[QUOTE=hecash,Aug 12 2008, 09:28 PM] If I never see a new GM, Ford or Chrysler car on the road in 2009, I will not shed one tear.

dlq04

The game is one of the hardest in the world to learn and it's taken down a lot gamblers.

cordycord

It's easy to blame the unions and the inefficient execs, mostly because it's true.

To be honest, I think Ford has a few nice products on their hands, as does GM, but when more money per car goes to funding pension plans than to the steel to make the car, something's wrong.

Auto plants in Tennessee, Alabama and other states have shown that American workers can be effecient and effective, and light on the unions. Too bad most of them are Toyota, Mercedes and Subaru plants.

dlq04

Let me list the American auto industries mistakes so we can stop beating this dead horse.

For at least a 15 to 20-year period Detroit built piss-poor vehicles that turned a sizable chunk of American consumers away from buying domestic-built cars and trucks, and for good too.

Its top management along with its embarrassing rubber-stamp board of directors sat back and watched that market share inexorably slip away over the last fifteen years as Asian and European competitors took huge chunks of its business away.

Management continuously postponed taking the steps necessary

triman54

If we bail out one or all of the domestic automakers, then it is hard to tell the average person on the street that the government shouldn't help out with his or her mortgage or help him or her out of financial problems. I am not saying that the government should help out the auto companies, but it does seem like the government is picking who will be the winners and losers in the market. Where would it end? Does the local florist or baker who is about to go bankrupt get federal help? What about the local mechanic? Gas subsidies for lower income families?

boltonblue

I think a HUGE component of Detroit's collapse has been the collective group think.
How do you get a fresh opinion to the surface to influence management when the entire region is drinking the Kool-aid?

The auto makers didn't recognize initial quality as a priority in the 60's and 70's.
If something failed they had a mechanism in place to rapidly repair any problems.
If something broke, no big deal they had a part in the shop or worst case next day. Maybe if it really was a problem you could bitch at the manager and get a loaner.
The Japanese weren't local and maintaining a cross oceanic parts pipeline would be ridiculously costly and weeks to gets parts.
So they designed things not to break.

and we all remember the seventies and the break came for the Japanese with the fuel crisis.
People flocked to these little cars for 30 mpg and found reliability thrown in.
After the crisis eased and they went back to their American cars they brought the expectation of reliability with them.
"Hey, this never happened with my Toyota".
That was the beginning of the end for the Detroit culture.

I had to help my kid with a flat the other day on one of my MB's.
Having owned many fine American cars, I brought a breaker bar with me to get the lug nuts off.
I found that the lug nuts came off easily with the 10 inch wrench in the car's tool kit.

no 3 ft extension to get the nut to bust free, no snapping of the bolt because of a fused lug nut, both memories of my domestic product days.

Nope!! The domestic automakers have lost generations of buyers.
Their best hope is to concentrate on young buyers who don't know any better and don't carry that baggage of having to deal with domestic crap.
Bailing them out is just putting a band-aid on a gunshot.

ajlafleche

How about looking at the $4600 an hour GM's chairrman made in 2006? Mayabe that had someting to do with their problems. ($9.57 million per year.) Source: USA Today 27 April 2007

Opinion: There wasn't a demand for big azz SUV's until Ford really started pushing bigger, BIGGEST is better with oversized monstronsities in themid-90's. Promote and create the demand, suggest the only safetly is in monstrous trucks, while poo-pooing the fact these new family vehicle/status symbolds were trucks and handled like trucks. Didn't Ford just about brag how the Expitdition was almost too big for the standard garage? Funny thing is, in that oh so slow to respond business, once Ford's SUV's started selling and making them money, GM found a way to make them and Chrysler started pushing pick up trucks as famliy vehicles.

dlq04

I know it

Warren J. Dew

I don't think the big three executives are as bad as people are making them out to be. They make a lot of bad decisions, but they've made some good ones, too. The original Taurus, which introduced aerodynamics to sedan with its accompanying fuel efficiency, was one; everyone has followed suit since. The minivan was a big improvement over the stationwagon. The issue is more that an original idea isn't enough - there needs to be more continuous follow through.

I'd also add one more thing to the blame list beyond management and labor: the dealer network. I bought a 1988 Pontiac GTA the same year a good friend of mine bought a Toyota MR2. Every time I ended up having to take mine in to the dealer for a problem, it turned out he recently had a problem too. The difference was that when I took mine in, it took two weeks to fix the problem, whereas his problems were generally fixed in two days.