Nah, your foolin yourself. Nobody laments outsourcing. They lament the jobs lost, yes. But offer them a computer at $500 vs $1000, a 3-pack of T-shirts for $4 vs $9, a happy meal toy for free vs, $2.99 and they’ll pick the cheap way out every time.
I think there MAY be a single US tire manufacturer, the rest have all gone overseas. Why do you think that is? Because labor over there is cheap. Cheap enough to overshadow not inconsequential shipping costs.
This is an important point to make.
It’s too easy for conservatives to blame the unions without looking at what I consider the overarching management errors here. Management made extravagant commitments that they couldn’t keep because they assumed that good times were permanent. For God’s sake, any first year MBA student should know better than that yet they didn’t. It should have been an utter firing offense to sign those contracts.
Except that the unions kept striking and shutting down the domestic auto industry! The management of those companies was put between a real rock and a hard place by a very militant, very powerful union.
A Related Thread
Perhaps I shouldn’t stick my nose in here–I don’t know much about cars.
But I am a buyer of them (a process that I hate, btw).
I will never buy another American car–by that, I mean one that is manufactured by an American company–I don’t care whose soil it’s made on. There was a time when I thought that was important, but the lack of quality has cured me of that.
A few years back, we tried the whole mini-van thing. First, an Aerostar–it drove like a truck, handled like a truck; I hated driving it. We traded that in for a Honda wagon–loved that car. But with 2 car seats etc, we needed more room.
So, we bought (like most of America) the Dodge Grand Caravan. This was the straw that broke my back.
–to be told be the dealer that I am “imagining the back wiper going off intermittenly” was BS.
–to have to have the dashboard computer fixed, not once, not twice, but three times and then be told that they disconnected(?) the ground fault wire so that the damned thing would stop shorting (this was after they called Detroit–their term, not mine, to find out the cause of the problem). My dash would just suddenly go black–I would lose speedometer, tachometer, all gauges, lights and the radio etc.
Nice, safe car. Then one of the two sliding side doors died–it would no longer open from the inside. By now the car is 6-7 years old.
There were other things wrong with it, but I won’t bore you. The lack of attention to detail and the shrug the shoulders approach to (I have to say this) a woman bringing in these problems did it for me.
I now drive a Volvo wagon and love the handling, the mileage, the low maintenance, the friendliness of the dealer.
I grew with a Chevy wagon, a Nova, several Rabbits and then a Datsun 200SX and a Honda Accord. I was also the child of the Energy crisis–and American car makers just don’t get it in my book.
I was burned by Ford. I owned a Ford Probe that was incredibly unreliable. Things were always going wrong. After that I decided to go Japanese.
My dad rented a Pontiac GrandAm when my folks came to visit and I drove it a bit. THe engine response was nice, but the interior felt cheap. I didn’t like the touch and feel of the knobs and the radio, and the fabric of the seats felt a bit cheap. I think that this is the kind of thing that turns a lot of people off. Most people really don’t know much about engine design, but everybody can tell what the interior looks like and if it feels cheap.
As others have said, finish is some of it - U.S. automakers have little idea how to finish the interior of a car. Inexpensive, entry level American models have interiors that look cheap compared to their foreign counterparts. Paying a little attention here will reap amazing benefits.
They refuse to innovate. We all saw a gas crunch coming - you can’t tell me they didn’t see how high gas prices would impact their sales. Yet they keep churning out SUVs like there’s no tomorrow. And they ignore hybrid technology (except Ford - I’ve bought their hybrid and am happy with it. So at least Ford is innovating.), or refuse to attempt to develop any sort of other alternative. They give lip service to it, but they don’t actually do anything. And it should be clear by now that hydrogen is not a good answer. But they do nothing.
That’s the big problem - the refusal to innovate, to move forward. I’m halfway to believing that GM deserves to go bankrupt.
And if you want to support the American worker, buy a Honda - they’re manufactured in Ohio. Where’s that American car built again? Oh yeah, Mexico. Lots of support for the American worker there.
That’s crap, Sam, and you know it.
Any reasonable senior management should have said ‘Those terms don’t work long term for reasons X, Y, and Z.’ and walked away from the table. If they were so damn anxious to make a deal that they’d make a BAD one then they deserve what they get.
For Christ’s sake, anyone who’s a serious negotiator should know enough that they’re ready to walk away from a bad deal. The fact that they didn’t implies one of two things:
They didn’t think it was a bad deal and therefore were showing a lack of long-term thinking (or a firm sense that the good times would always be there).
They knew it was a bad deal but took it anyway which shows incompetence in management.
And really, given the way the auto industry management has fucked up other things over the past I’d say the smart money is on #1 above. I think they weren’t bothered by the deals because they didn’t have the ability to see that planning for the future requires using worst-case scenarios and not best-case.
Really, you sound like you believe the UAW (and the non-union white collar folks) smacked senior management over the head and wrote their names on the contracts while they were unconsciounce. Blame no one but management for what they signed.
the cycle of bad business decisions when it comes to unions, the UAW’s super sweet deals, strikes, buying out of fetid multimillion dollar executive salaries, and overall high auto prices feeds into each other.
i heard somewhere that you spend 5000 bucks per GM car to pay for pensions and old white collar buyouts. (no cite, word of mouf)
It’s at about $3200 dollars. Though that’s a PR number more than anything. The cost is proportional to revenue not flat across units. $3200 on a Cobalt is absurd, $3200 on a Cadillac XLR is much less so.
Also people keep killing the UAW here, and the union did get some good deals, but they weren’t exactly extortion. The GM non-union labor force is getting paid $7 billion a year at a fraction of the head count in legacy costs while the union workers are getting 5.6 billion.
The UAW could use a cutback but to pretend they are the ones who put the GM management in this position is totally bogus.
It’s not about patriotism. It’s about the US economy. The auto industry makes up close to 5% of the national GDP. Outsourcing and foreign autosales does cut costs which is good, but it also lowers the value of the dollar. It’s a balancing act. We need to decrease prices without decreasing incomes to the point that inflation outpaces those savings. One car certainly is not the tipping point but all things being equal I’ll buy the American car in hopes that I’ll strengthen my dollar.
This just isn’t true. American automakers followed the market. They made SUVs, Vans and Trucks because that was what was selling. Toyota made the Pruis and has never made money on it, they did this intentionally as a PR move. If a US automaker intentionally made a car that lost money year after year their stockholders would be killing them.
It wasn’t stubbornness of collusion with oil companies, if you want to blame anyone for the products US makers churned out blame the US market for it.
I’m saying that technology and quality have normalized across all makers. Over the last 4 years Toyota has been the 7th ranked brand in terms of reliability. Buick, Cadillac, Ford, Chrysler are all better. The margins between all these rankings have narrowed to the point that year-to-year they all can change and no one would notice a difference. It reinforces the concept that perception overshadows reality.
I will flat out state that US cars are better than Japanese from a performance standpoint. US are designed and tuned to perform at the outer edge of the envelope (much like European cars) and Japanese cars are not. The only class of cars in which Japanese cars out perform US models is the small entry level largely to cater to the Tuner market, in every other segment US cars out perform Japanese.
I will offer my opinion that taken as a whole US cars are more attractive than Japanese cars. With a few exceptions, the Japanese cars are easily the most boring, bland and downright ugliest designs I’ve ever seen. Japanese sedans are non-descript cookie cutter styles. YMMV.
Lastly US cars are a better value than Japanese. All things being equal, Japanese cars cost 20% more than the comparable US models. So in the debate with yourself, you are making the choise that you’ll pay a premium for the import in order to spite the US makers for something they did 20 years ago. That might be a fair choice if you think that the current high quality standard of US cars is the excpetion not the rule, but if that high standard holds up you’re eventually going to have to admit you’re paying more based on bias alone.
Well, GM did make what was widely regarded as the best electric car ever. With legions of die-hard fans. Of course they did not market it, and they wouldn’t sell it to anyone. And when the leases ran out they took them all back and crushed them. But hey, at least they’re trying!
Reading between the lines there, it’s pretty obvious that GM couldn’t SELL the cars for the price they were offering and had no support structure for repairs and replacement of the batteries.
Sure, you get an ounce of good PR in making the bestest Electric Vehicle, then you get dose after dose of BAD PR when people find out the cars kill people in accidents (weight, battery acid), the batteries only last 60,000 miles, and cost half again the price of the car to replace.
The EV1 was always just a pilot project…it helped that it didn’t need to be profitable at the same time.
FWIW, the hybrid cars being manufactured today also cost more than they’re being sold for, but it’s in Toyota/Honda’s best interests to continue doing so. Most obviously because those companies take a longer term view of the world. I agree, american firms appear to be waay too short sighted.
Toyota and Honda can sell these cars because of the tax breaks they and the consumer get. GM decided to focus on fuel cells and alternate fuel instead of hybrids. Probably because they didn’t want to return to the fiasco that was the EV1.
If you really think about it, hybrids really aren’t terribly innovative. They are simply gas autos with back up batteries. I think that the problem is that American car companies were looking too far ahead, and wanted to get rid of gasoline as a fuel all together.
It’s not a matter of “punishing the U.S. automakers for something they did 20 years ago.” It’s the fact that what they did 20 years ago still colors our perceptions, whether we mean for it to or not.
Remember that consumer products companies expend huge amounts of money trying to woo kids and teenagers, even though they don’t necessarily have the buying power. People form their tastes and impressions when they’re young. If you make a teenager into a Coke drinker, then Pepsi has likely lost a customer for life.
Think about the people who were kids and teens in the '80s. I’m an example. I was born in 1971. The era when American cars were at their worst is exactly the time when I was at my most impressionable. I grew up hearing that American cars were junk. I observed that “poor” families were more likely to be driving American cars, and that families with greater means were likely to choose European, and then Japanese cars.
Now I’m 34. My peers and I have arrived at the stage where we have enough discretionary income to be more choosy about what we drive. And those perceptions formed 20 years ago are still in play. I just feel more confident in my Japanese car that I would in an American car. Even if the American cars are truly as good as some of you say, I still think of cars from GM, Chrysler, and Ford as “junk,” “hit or miss,” and “better than the others, but still not as good as Honda or Toyota” respectively.
Besides, it may well be true that new American cars are as reliable as their Japanese counterparts, but given a choice between something from Toyota, which has been producing reliable cars consistently for decades, and something from GM, which is only recently building supposedly reliable cars, I’d choose the one with the one with the long and consistent history.
See, I don’t see it. It may well be true that across the board, American cars are on par, if not superior to, foreign makes.
But.
My inlaws-got a Park ave a few years ago. Car never ran. Always in the shop–they sold it and got a Ford convertible instead. Car was ok, except that the dinging alarm that warns that a seat belt is off or a door open NEVER turned off.
Dealer couldn’t find the problem–after mulitple attempts. You drive a car that constantly dings and see if it doesn’t drive you crazy. They got it to be quieter, but it never did shut up. Inlaws sold it to their BIL, who kept it for another 5 years–still dinging. They now have a PT Cruiser, which they are happy with. 1 in 3 odds are not good for car buying, IMO.
My husband’s Chrysler LeBaron(?)–oh, never mind. We nicknamed it Christine because it seemed to have a life of its own or it was posessed. But his used SAAB ran like a champ, his Camry is on 280,000 miles and looks good.
Long story short: I have never had a worry free American car in my life. And since I won’t gamble with 20+ grand, I won’t give them another try.
IMO, Detroit doesn’t care about fuel economy and keeps pushing the sexiness of cars–who cares? Not this upper middle class, white female. Gimme a car that is reliable and cost effective. And not in weird colors. That I’ll buy-again and again.
I agree about the cheap interiors.
That’s what’s funny, I’ve only owned five cars. A ‘71 Chevy Impala, the only car in the neighborhood which started at -20F, and which is probably still running somewhere. A ’76 Buick Skyhawk which crapped out at ~100,000 miles, an 81 Pontiac T1000, which I gave away when I went to college (I don’t know how many miles it had), a ‘95 Corsica, which has 120,000 miles and I just gave to my niece, and my new ’05 Chevy Malibu Maxx, which I love.
On the other hand, my sister had a Datsun which ran so badly she left it unlocked in a parking lot with the title on the front seat. My husband had a Chevy Truck which he gave away with 200,000mi on it, and I still see it tooling around town, but he bought a used Acura when he was stationed briefly in CA, and it only had 110,000 miles on it. It had to get a rebuilt engine after about a month. He sold that piece of shit to an Acura Lover for $2000 and it died shortly after. He told the guy it was a piece of crap but was told “It’s an Acura, it’ll get a minimum of 200,000”. That guy shoulda got a Chevy.
I think maybe the reason I’ve had good luck with cars is because I know what the hell I’m doing. I think Asian cars are good for people who don’t know the dip stick from the brake pedal, but if you know what the hell you’re doing, American cars are much easier to work on and far more reliable.
Can I ask eleanorigby why the hell no one simply pulled the fuse on your dinging car?
all that would be fine and dandy, but how do you account for frequent breakdowns?
there have been lists compiled that shoe that american cars tend to need more trips to garages per year.
if this point can be shot to shit, then it seems to boil down to your opinion of how a car looks, which is different from person to person.
What break downs? When I mean work on, I mean that I can change my own oil, I know how to check it, and make sure it’s done regularly. I used to be able to check/fix the rest of the stuff (spark plugs, hoses, etc.) on the older cars, but now it’s all computerized.
In this century this is patently false. As has been repeated over and over in this thread every study done shows that American cars do not require more maintence than other brands.
The overwhelming perceptions color people’s judgements to a degree no one realizes. The article I quoted earlier illustrated the point by quoting a story by an Edmunds.com road test of a 2003 Honda Pilot. Editors contradicted themselves by praising it while also reporting constant mechanical problems, the most gratuitous of which was a broken timing belt which stranded the editor-in-chief and his family in Utah. Had this been a Chevy they’d have killed it.
People who have owned many dfferent brands often have rose colored memories of their favorites and the opposite of the others. Statistics could show that they had each vehicle in the shop an equal number of times and spent the same amount of money on upkeep but they’d swear up and down that their favorite was the more reliable.
It’s true that many minds will never be changed, but the goal is to remove the reputation of poor reliablity to gain the trust of new buyers not old ones.
well, i saw in the paper a while back about how a magazine (could be consumer reports, i don’t recall) charted the average number of breakdowns a car has in a year. japanese cars ranked higher on the list with fewer breakdowns than american cars did.