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Date Posted: 19:13:52 11/17/08 Mon
Author: Bill
Author Host/IP: 71.250.48.139
Subject: Re: If GM could only....
In reply to: Fred 's message, "If GM could only...." on 00:50:01 11/17/08 Mon

Fred there are a lot of things holding back US auto makers from doing what they should be doing to keep themselves afloat.
some are government required things that held or continue to hold them back and some are poor or bad decisions or buyer trends that left them hanging.

You cannot blame the big three for not building cars that the public wanted because that is not what happened. when the Government went ape shit over pollution they MANATED the cars that the auto makers were allowed to build. those post 69 cars with the wimpy engines, bad feedback carbs and other government mandated stuff were not what the public wanted to buy. when all that Air pollotion garbage was put on the cars and the engines choked out the public began buying trucks because they did not need to have all that government garbage. Housewives were all of a sudden driving pickups then asking for more car type luxuries which spawned the SUVs that followed.
Small fuel efficient cars when offered were usually poor sellers because the people wanted larger cars with more power and quality control and parts fit were not real issues until the cost cutting came along to both make those governemtn mandated cars affordable and to be able to compete with the imports that were stealing the market share.
US auto designers DID design small cars but they did not sell.
Imported cars had a long background of small car development
that began back in the post WWII recovery or were mandated by road regulations ( like all those small Jap cars which all looked the same and were the same size for a while because the Nippon government required them to fit into a size category.
When the Japanese began upping the price of their cars on a percentage per month increase the US makers followed the pattern which was good for a large cost increase in a year run instead of a once a year new model increase at introduction and maybe a mid year increase with new models or trims.
But the quality of the build is no longer an import monopoly. In fact the top quality cars as determined by those who do that are now US made cars but they still are not selling like the imports( many of which are made here of course but are foreign owned designs ).

Sure there was a fall off of US car quality which began when Chrysler decided to kill the R&D department to be able to continue paying the stock holders their share of the profits. That began in the seventies whehn the auditors took over chrysler and almost killed the company. Lee Iacocca and the government bailkout brought it back.
Ford had a lot of parts failures and some really bad design and execution which almost ruined them ( think those transmissions that slipped into gear if the motor was running , built for about fifteen years and only recalled for about eight of those, or the use of too much new steel in bocks that rusted away internally ) .
Gm had it's share of blunders from the rust in the showroom Vegas ( same new steel problem as more reclaimed steel helps to eliminate rusting tendencies ) bad fit and finish from bad parts and poor workmanship, the 8 6 4 ( or 8 6 nothing ) caddy engine and the really big mistake with the 3100 series that blew in more ways than one.
Having spent twenty years fixing cars though the main problem was production line sabotage from bad workmanship by those union guys who got payed three to five times as much as us non union guys who had to fix their mistakes. You would not believe some of the crap they did while they were negotiating for better pay and more benefits on purpose or just not caring when they were not.
The imports had their own set of problems and when a component on one of their cars went bad it usually meant replacing a complete uit at very high cost rather than just the part that failed.
heater fan failure :

US car fifteen to thirty bucks for the fan .

Japanese car one hundred to three hundred for the complete assembly available only from the dealership ( and they failed a lot )

US radiator failure remove and repair.
Audi replace the aluminum and plastic unit because it could not be repaired.

Now if we want to saev the big three let then sell the cars they make for non us sales like the diesels or the cars that do not need to be built to be idiot proof to comply with the so called safety regs.
who needs five mph bumpers and airbags all over the place / they are not required in most countries and they don't have any higher incidence of highway deaths than we do in fact probably fewer though that's one to check out.
why sell cars with all the bells and whistles they now put in them ? because people want that stuff so instead of making if optional a lot is built into all offerings to cut production costs and you pay for it.
Why build cars that are fifty percent more expensive than a basic transportation model ? because the government put so many requirements on them they increased the cost of production that much and the extras are where the builders recover the cost increase.

On redesigning cars it takes on average five years to design and bring to the market a new model. There are examples of doing it faster but most are actually longer duration in development than that.
But the big three sell cars outside of the US market that could be brought on line in months or at the very least less than a year if they were ALLOWED to do it which they are not by GOVERMENT REGULATIONS that prohibit the sale of those models here.

Hel it's no use talking about these things people just don't see it....

go ahead and kill the us auto makers off so we are all driving foreign cars and we loose three million jobs or so as well as whatever other colateral damage happens to occur.

When the US auto makers are gone ALL of those union guys will be out of a job. No one will be funding the pensions and benefits except maybe the government which means money out of OUR pockets to cover the expense.

I do not think the guys running these companies either deserve to get off scott free or should be making as much as they are but the fact is that the Auto companies for all of their faults are still the backbone of the us economy.

Cut all the costs from the top on down, restructure the operations, and for heavens sake let them sell the cars that people want not the ones that get designed by a comittee in the congress which can't even do their own job much less anyone elses...

b

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