Apropos of nothing, a memory of an article I read back in the Malaise Era just popped into my head the other day, and after 45 years, my subconscious had finally come up with what to think about it.
It must have been about 1974, when US cars were at their absolute nadir of non-desirability. I was reading a review of the latest Corvette, and the review mentioned that one of the rear axle universal joints had failed, because although the car had a manual transmission, the factory had somehow installed the (weaker) u-joints used on automatic tranny cars.
What my subconscious came up with, 45 years later: It’s so characteristic of General Motors at the time.
They: 1. nickel-and-dimed the design, doubtless saving a buck or two on the automatic-tranny cars by specifying a lesser u-joint, and then
2. Put the wrong one on the test car.
That sort of relentless penny-pinching (i.e, value elimination) and slapdash assembly is how GM destroyed their own reputation, and went from 44.7% of the market in 1971 to 17% in 2016.
There’s no excuse for installing the wrong part. But if an automatic transmission puts less stress on the U-joint, then it absolutely makes sense to use a weaker one if it saves weight and/or cost. Engineering is all about making compromises between conflicting factors, and making something good enough. If car makers didn’t do that, every car would weigh 3 tons and cost $100,000.
There are lots of reasons why GM’s market share went down. Quality control is one. Engineering is another. Styling, yet another. But the big reason is simply that in 1965 the only competition was domestic, with Volkswagen making inroads but not yet a threat, though it was an indicator that their long-held dominance was weakening. By 1970 Japan had moved in, they cemented their toehold in the US during the 1973 oil embargo, strengthened it in 1979, and then they did the smartest thing they could have done: accepted the voluntary import restrictions in 1981. Rather than fight it, they built factories in the US that exempted the cars made there from the restrictions. By the time the domestic car makers realized it they were under siege by modern cars from modern factories run with labor forces not shackled by legacy costs and union representation.
Combine that with Roger Smith’s disastrous reorganization, millions spent on automation that didn’t work in plants that were outdated the moment they opened, the creation of the Saturn division, and the GM10/W-body debacle, and it was only a matter of time.
As always, bad management combined with aggressive and competent competition wrecked a company that was seen as invincible. See also: US Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Sears, Montgomery Ward, etc.