Without reading the balance of the OP or any of the above posts, the answer is unambiguously UNIONS. When unskilled and uneducated peeps start running the show, Toyota happens, suckas. To explain, would be a 6-week course. Save up and go to college.
Maybe next time you SHOULD read the above posts first. The answer is NOT unambigiously UNIONS. That is a grossly simplistic explanation. I’d explain why, but that would be a 6-week course. :rolleyes:
By the way, stomping into a thread and declaring the answer while telling the rest of the participants that they are too stupid and/or uneducated to understand it is pretty damned rude. Especially when your ‘answer’ indicates that you don’t really know what you are talking about. IF you bothered to read the thread, you’d find that there are some participants here who have pretty good educations on these subjects.
BTW, I’m no fan of unions. I’m a hard-core capitalist. Unions played a part in the downfall of the American auto industry, but only a part. It’s a big, complex problem.
If you had bothered to read anything else in the rest of the thread you’d realize what an ass that comment makes you look like.
I’m not suggesting moving the assembly plants, Michigan and the surrounding areas have tons of good, trained workers. I’d like to see the design departments and much of the management get out of Detroit however. When I visit my relatives back there (my brother-in-law works on the line at GM) you see almost all American cars. The executives and senior people drive cars made at their company as well. I just don’t think that is the right environment for innovation. And it’s not just apealing to my demographic that I want, it’s looking into the future and seeing the trends. Gas is more expensive almost every place else in the world, so when gas prices went up the imports became more attractive. You think Detroit would have learned from that, but instead they started building SUVs. California air quality standards will start to become more wide spread as states like Oregon look at adopting them. Likewise, cities on the coasts and in other countries are much denser than midwest cities, so having smaller cars that make more efficient use of space and have tight turning radii are more important as well. It’s a case of shooting ahead of the duck rather than trying to convince the govt to reduce the speed of birds.
The only way you can maintain that lvel of certainty in your opinions is to be willing to ignore any facts to the contrary.
Well, my personal observation is this: GM and FORD executives are too insulated from the real world. Which is odd, because both firms make and sell excellent small cars in Europe and South America. Take GM: its German (OPEL) division has good small cars. One was the luxury model Opel “Senator” GM brought it over to sell as the Cadillac “Catera”. What did they do? They took this good design, and changed the suspension (from a crisp, German-style suspension), to a mush, marshmallow-style. Then they added 450 lbs of junk (extra body claddings, insulation, etc.). Then they modified the transmission, so the engine would shift at lower RPMs-they thought the German shift points were too crisp.
So they wound up butchering a good design. The Chevrolet made in Brazil (Opel Vectra-bsed) is excellent-you can get it with a good 6-speed transmission and a 1.8 liter high-revving 4 cylinder engine-it gets 36 MPG on the highway-why don’t they sell the same car here? 
Hey, what the fuck is YOUR problem? I’ve been interested in reading this thread. It’s been very enlightening, and then all of a sudden some jackass comes along and tries to shit all over it without having read the well-thought input from the rest of the posters? I don’t have an opinion about whose fault it is, but I sure as hell know that it’s worth reading the contents of this thread before posting. Look, sometimes you can barge into a thread and post without having read anything. This is not such a thread.
I’m only certain in my opinion insofar as I know he’s a dumbass for coming in here and saying that he hasn’t read anything, yet already has his answer for us. It’s a totally useless post and does make him look like an ass. About the state of that American auto industry I don’t pretend to know.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was referring to Operation Ripper’s post not yours. The fact that he said he didn’t even bother reading the entire OP was particularly telling. I wonder how many words he needed before he knew the answer?
“Cars…”
“Okay, the subject is cars. I know this.”
“…are…”
“Focus. Wait for it.”
“…too…”
“Too big? Too small? Too metallic?”
“…expensive.”
“UNIONS!!! THE ANSWER IS UNIONS!!!”
It is everything wrong. They have huge union contracts. They have always overpaid their executives. They have a dealership network that has been an insult to buyers. Getting a car fixed at a dealer has been a nightmare for decades. Arrogance ,to blindly go ahead with large cars when the small car trend was clear to everybody else, has been repeated in the past. To stop electric cars, turbine cars and fight increases in mileage is the hallmark of ivory tower executives. They have fought safety standards, mileage standards and pollution standards. They have exemplified the uncaring selfish arrogant corporation for half a century.
Bolding mine. They did it for short-term profits, pure and simple.
Thanks for clearing it up, though.
and THAT sounds like an accurate description of a US Auto company! :eek:
As an employee of The World’s Second-Best-Selling Commercial Jet Airplane Company, I have no trouble whatsoever believing the story. The amount of time it takes to get even the most trivial things done in a large corporation is simply staggering.
Sometimes I think the president should have gathered the US auto company CEOs together in private and said: “In 18 months I’m going to propose new, strict CAFE standards and emissions controls. I’m letting you know this without telling the foreign auto companies, so get ready”. I know it’s probably illegal, but it might have helped save the industry.
The notion that CAFE and emissions standards killed Detroit is a fallacy. Any industry that produces a consumer product has to be flexible enough to accomodate changing customer demand, safety standards, style trends, et cetera. The Japanese were (mostly) capably of doing this with aplumb. Certainly they had something of an advantage when it came to fuel economy, having traditionally built small, economical cars due to their domestic market and cost of fuel, but the American automakers lumbered on for years after 1973 producing outmoded, inefficient, low quality, poor handling vehicles.
Even the fact that Japanese (and other import) cars were small, funny looking, and had limited ammenities didn’t prevent Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and the other Japanese automakers from making a killing filling an increasing niche that Detroit was too pugnacious and apathetic to make more than facile gestures toward. The attitude of the American companies is that there was no significant market in small, efficient automobiles or in advances in safety, despite the success of compact vehicles like the Ford Falcon back in the 'Sixties when there was no pressure of a gas crisis.
The American automakers are a victim of their own “faith-based community” of concepts on what the market wanted. “They can have it in any color, as long as they want it in black” was a deeply entrenched philosophy, while other automakers were offering what the market really wanted. And even by the time they got around to realizing that they were coming up short, they were so wrapped up in their on mispreceptions that they thought they could stick a few Cadillac badges on a Cavilier and sell it for $5000 more. 18 months of foreknowledge would have just given them more time to spin webs of self-delusion.
Stranger
You could actually argue that CAFE standards helped American companies, because CAFE had the effect of killing the station wagon and creating the SUV. Station wagons are classified as cars; SUVs as light trucks with a higher CAFE standard. The Station wagon had to have less power and/or smaller size to meet the standards, giving SUVs the advantage.
And the domestic manufacturers owned the SUV market for a long time, and made fabulous profits.
Interesting point, but whether or not it helped (because of the birth and death of the SUV) is debatable.
I agree, I was just suggesting that a little “inside information” could convince the US auto industry to do something that they might not do by themselves.