Wow. . .you work for Ford Land?
They ain’t hirin’ lawyers by any chance, are they? 
My church recently replaced its central air conditioning system.
An AirTemp, made by Chrysler.
slight hijack i once had a chance to buy a pretty decent S600 honda for only$500.00. I was in college and that seemed like a big hunk of change better spent towards booze. damn, the regrets i have i can count on one hand and this is one of them.
General Motors owns EDS Datasystems, and they owned DirectTV before selling it a couple of years ago. GM also makes diesel locomotives.
General Motors has also built fight aircraft (The WWII Wildcat among others). The ‘coyote’ light armored vehicle that Canada loves and the U.S. just bought (as the ‘Stryker’) is built by General Motors Diesel Division.
Well, Ford makes chewing gum and supermodels.
::d&r:::
Man, I’d love to visit the supermodel factory.
[slight diversion] The name stands for “Advanced Step in Innovative MObility.” In Japanese the five vowel sounds can stand on their own, but consonants are almost always paired with a vowel, thus: A-SI-MO. It’s possible that they chose a phrase that could be made into this particular acronym as a tribute, but there’s nothing to indicate that. [/slight diversion]
I think ASIMO is a pun on ashi (“leg”). The Asimov connection never occurred to me, and isn’t mentioned in their FAQ. (Although I did learn from the FAQ that you can rent an ASIMO for $200,000 a year.)
Anyway, I read somewhere that GM was the biggest seller of pornography in the US. I guess that was a reference to DirecTV, but does anyone know if it was true?
Toyota invented the Lexus brand 'cos people wouldn’t have bought the idea of a luxury Toyota - given it’s success I’m surpised other Asian car makers haven’t followed suit in having niche brands
???
What do you think Acura and Infinity are… luxurious Hondas and Nissans…
And the Daewoo auto concern is now owned by GM.
Similarly, SAAB was/is an aircraft maker first (I’ve flown in their planes multiple times) and in the 90s sold their car business (to GM, too!).
Besides the US companies wanting to stick to what they do best, they do also want to avoid diluting their brand – so they do not give everything up, down, and across the corporate family tree the same brand name.
Well, for whatever it’s worth, the famous mutual fund manager Peter Lynch has said in his books that when a company gets involved in businesses unrelated to its core, it usually does badly. He calls it “de-worse-ification.”
Ed
Dang, I was reading this thread like it was new until I saw I replied to it almost two years ago!
I was around in the 1980s when Ford started divesting themselves of non-automotive businesses. At that time the company was manufacturing steel, glass, tractors and had several other businesses beyond automobiles and trucks.
They had several reasons, but they were all pretty easy to understand.
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Some businesses, like tractors and construction equipment were very capital-intensive and the investment necessary to stay modern wouldn’t be worth it unless the company was #1 in its market. In tractors, for example, Ford had been a second-tier competitor for decades.
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Some of the businesses, like steel manufacturing, were too expensive to remain profitable, particularly in the wake of global competition. The old business model of controlling costs and quality by owning every step of the process didn’t work anymore. It was much easier to tell a supplier what you needed, and let them figure out how to deliver it.
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Home electronics (Philco, which by then was only active in South America) required different marketing strategies than went beyond taking a car stereo, putting it in a case, and putting it in stores. Ditto with the glass business, which required reaching the construction market, as well as just windshields.
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Each of the industries required top-notch management, design/engineering, quality control, etc. hat’s an awful lot of gold stars to expect one company (even a big one) to earn consistently.
I bought an '87 Saab. It was their 50th anniversary, and they sent me a coffee table book on the corporate history, which had a few interesting details in it. They decided to make small cars after WWII because they figured the military aircraft business was going to be horribly depressed for a while, and they had better do something else with their plant capacity in Trollhatten[sup]1[/sup]. They also made computers at one point, eventually selling their “Datasaab” division to Sperry-Univac in 1975:
http://www.ctrl-c.liu.se/misc/datasaab/om-eng.html
They still do make avionics / space / weapons system stuff, but not general purpose computing hardware.
[sup]1[/sup] - one of the more charming anecdotes was that they painted all of their first year’s production green because they got a good deal on green paint from the Swedish Army. It was supposed camouflage paint, only the army found that everything they painted with it stuck out worse than before. So they unloaded it to Saab, cheap.
Oops! - Actually I had vaguely heard of Infinity (prob in a US film) but neither are imported in the UK (- I think - though it wouldn’t surprise me to be told I’m wrong about that too!)
Nah, I think the high end Honda’s were still Honda Legends last time I checked.
Now I think about it the only place I heard about the high spec Honda’s was on Gran Turismo, so maybe they’re the Interga’s and Prelude’s we see over here.
Oh, for the love of…
Okay, 2-year old thread.
Honda = Acura
Nissan = Infiniti (notice the spelling)
Toyota = Lexus
All very nice cars, and some have interchangable (compatible) parts between badges. The antenna mast, for example.
For the record, you can insert the word ‘Datsun’ in the Nissan space.
Honda cares so little about your knowing the connection to Acura that my 89 Acura Integra had “Honda” right on the valve covers.
GMAC is really big in mortgages. Big, I tell you.
The auto companies are also involved in making the big rig tractors. I’ve taken liberties with some text from this site:
http://www.thecarconnection.com/index.asp?n=156,192&sid=192&article=1617
From 1999:
"The pre-merger Daimler-Benz owns two big-rig nameplates. The largest is Freightliner, and Freightliner alone accounted for nearly 72,000 sales in the first seven months, nearly 32 percent of the total. The second Daimler-owned nameplate is Sterling, a new one. Daimler bought out Ford’s big-rig business in 1998 and put the Sterling name on what used to be the Ford big rigs.
Another foreign-owned company is Mack. Yes, the Mack bulldog is owned by French Renault. And Volvo trucks are Swedish-owned, of course. But Volvo includes the big-rig business that it bought from General Motors.
Daimler, through Freightliner and Sterling, is the No. 1 big-rig seller in this country. PACCAR, an American-owned company, headquartered on the West Coast, is No. 2. Its two nameplates are Kenworth and Peterbilt. Navistar, another American company, headquartered in Illinois, is No. 3, though its sales have been slowing recently. "