It’s not quite the same- Mazda made a sizeable profit on the MX-5/Miata more or less from the get-go. It wasn’t as though they said, “Well, we’re losing money on it, but if we stick with it, maybe it will work out.”
:: nods ::
I never had the impression that GM Engineering was incapable of good things. But GM Management has an irritating habit of killing off models just as the bugs are finally being worked out. The first couple of years of a GM model will have problems, but as a result of feedback from customers, the model will gradually be improved, and just when it looks like the model is over its teething problems, it gets killed as ‘uneconomic’.
You watch. If they release the Volt, the first year will have bugs and shorts and people being rescued by tow trucks. There will be recalls. Sales volume will decrease after the early adopters buy theirs. A year or two later, the Volt will be more reliable, but sales will be at their bottom, and Management will kill the project. Just as the improvements gained from experience would have started a sales upswing.
Good point. While there are examples of Japanese companies plugging away at unproffitable vehicles until they win (Previa and Prius are two examples that come to mind), I shouldn’t have suggested that the Miata was one of them.
I don’t think their actual technology is that bad, it’s just the focus and application of that technlogy. For example, they have systems like OnStar, the windshields that project the speed or other data onto the windshield, and the Tahoe Hybrid. All decent technology.
But they’re very slow to respond to market changes, such as needing more hybrids for a decent cost. And try to get a 4-door, 6-cylinder, manual transmission car from GM (or Ford.) I keep hearing that the US engineers don’t know how to design a manual transmission any more. And up until recent years I thought all GM cars had really ugly interiors.
GM, Daimler, and BMW are cooperating on hybrid technology, so Daimler and BMW think GM has a contribution to make, whether this is R&D or money I’m not sure.
Auto makers have very rigorous testing on new models. GM has a huge proving ground in minnesota 9winter conditions0, and in Arizona 9summer conditions). You would think they would uncover the bugs, after al that testing!
Perhaps that’s just my cynicism from my memories from growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, during the eighties, at the low point of GM’s quality standards. Certainly that linked article about the Volt development effort is very hopeful. But my major memories of GM are of cars that people bought because they were cheap or because they knew people who worked to build them, not because they were inherently great. They were just good enough to get out the factory door and survive the warranty period.
Now, I read that Oshawa has improved quality greatly. I hope I’m wrong about what I said upthread; I hope that GM’s management is letting the engineers iron the bugs out before releasing new models. And letting the production staff fix problems as they occur. But when I worked on the line at Oshawa in 1983, I was told, “Don’t worry about making mistakes. Quality Control will catch it down the line.”
It’s been 40 years since I paid much attention to this, but certainly things like this much contribution to Detroit’s reputation for stodginess. As far as I know, Detroit would still be using drum brakes and bias ply tires if European cars hadn’t introduced disk brakes and radial tires. From these two things alone, Detroit got the reputation of being uninterested in innovation. They still have the reputation; the reality might be different, I don’t know.
Still sorta proves my point though. At a point in the economic cycle where they were awash with lovely folding cash money, they went on a shopping spree for luxury brands, most of which turned out to be at death’s door. Then they spent years pouring money into them to get their manufacturing capabilities up to modern standards. Just as it looks like they might start getting some serious return on their investment, what happens? A firesale necessitated by a desperate need for cash. If they manage to get through their current travails, guess who they will be struggling to sell against in the upscale luxury segment? It’s a sort of perverse genius, I tell you. Mind you, it’s not like other nations are immune. I still cant think of the whole VW/BMW/Rolls-Royce/Bentley clusterfuck without a chuckle.
There you touch on a huge issue that is at the core of the problem. Management of the big three, except on bells and whistles, has fought change every step of the way. They refused to address the issues of safety, emissions and fuel economy. The government has had to force their hands on those issues and whenever there is new legislation they unleash their lobbyists to fight it instead of unleashing their engineers to adapt to it.
Ralph Nadar’s book “Unsafe at Any Speed” was right on. Detroit was unnecessarily building death traps but their reaction was to try to trash Nadar. The big three said that limiting emissions was going to bankrupt them. They have done everything possible to circumvent fuel economy standards. Meanwhile, they were generating wads of cash. Now the tables have turned and it’s not a pretty picture. They are so poorly positioned in the marketplace that they are hemorrhaging cash. When you are doing engineering you should be designing ahead of the curve, not looking for ways to repackage defective crap.
I could never figure out why FORD bought Jaguar. Not only was jaguar moribund, the whole product line needed substantial cash investment. Of course, TATA (India) now has that problem-and I don’t think the Indians realize just how costly funding a boutique automaker is. There are little if any economies of scale-and all kinds of headaches (making complicated cars, with all manner of accessories(and high failure rates).
What about A-M? it is now owned by an arab investor-probably a hobby for him.
In that respect cars are just like anything else- early adopters are essentially going to be beta testers. The difference is that the material cost of a car is much higher than that of a computer game or an iPhone, so GM will be much more likely to pull the trigger and kill it if they perceive at any time that the car will not sell. And who can blame them? Lots of companies have died that way. GM had the resources to make that kind of decision and survive.
Not sure what originally prompted Ford to buy Jaguar but, back to slaphead’s point, Ford’s investment in Jag was starting to see results but Ford had to unload it just to raise cash. Jaguar was turning the corner. The XK and XKR are sensational cars with very advanced chassis technology (all aluminum). The XF is said to be a really fine car. The quality ratings have risen dramatically. Tata may have made a fine purchase. At least they will get access to some cutting edge technology.
In this day and age aluminium car technology is probably worth a good bit of money, since extras add lard and lard is bad for performance/economy. If Jaguar basically came with everything GM knows about aluminium fabrication :eek:, that’s quite an extra. If nothing else, Tata can just flog that technology to every other car maker in Asia.
The Kuwaiti portion of the ownership is two investment consortia, not a single guy. One of the other owners is a long-time collector.
The company’s operations are now overseen by the third partner, Dave Richards, owner of Prodrive (the company that runs the Subaru World Rally Championship team and Aston’s endurance racing team). Prodrive is/was on the cutting edge of automotive engineering in their own right, although they’ve had little involvement in production cars except in a consultancy role.
Jaguar was not as big a disaster for Ford as it appears to have been. The company’s original vision for Jag was as a sort of giant technology testbed- want to see how those new ceramic brakes work out before putting them on the Mondeo? Stick them in a Jag!- and in that capacity it worked rather well.
But this is all from events 25 years ago and more. Back then, safety didn’t sell. Emissions didn’t sell. Except for Volvo and certain small segment vehicles, that added cost wasn’t absorbed by any manufacturer unless there was a government regulation or public demand, regardless of any technical superiority. That’s competition, and that’s how it works. A perfect analogue for today is diesel engines. I want a diesel engine, and there are a lot of internet geeks that want diesel engines, but the buying public at large in the United States today is not willing to pay the premium price, support the lack of filling stations, or deal with the perceived smell. Technically superior? Yes. Manufacturable? Yes. A true market demand? None at all. Consequently, all you can get is a VW, and you sacrifice initial quality and long term reliability with that option (i.e., the cost of ownership greatly exceeds any fuel savings). Sure, it’s hot amongst a small set of geeks on the internet, but the mass market buying public doesn’t want it, so it’s not offered by the Americans or the Asians in any quantity.
Of course you mean Ford rather than GM, and we have a pretty good degree of expertise in aluminum body construction. The biggest challenge to aluminum is the lack of availability of long term supplier contracts. Aluminum supplies are tight, and there’s too much money to be made for them on the spot market rather than being tied to any long term pricing contracts. Besides that, there are more and more advanced high strength steels that are lighter and stronger than conventional steels, and can offer a lot of the same benefits as aluminium, including a high degree of mass reduction.