[nascarnation]

the parts were made by others towards the end.

So those dozens of GM engine and transmission plants were just decoys for Russian bombers?

I can't believe some of the stuff on FR....

[muawiyah]

you ever work in an engine plant? most of them are assembly operations. typical of the Big Three they got into contracting out rods, caps, crankshafts, blocks, etc.

"PARTS".

decades ago. I worked on a line that made PARTS for all the Big Three. transmissions are different. for a very long time the Big Tree made their own transmissions, then gradually phased out of that. even Ford gave up machine screws and began buying them on the world market. I grew up about 3 miles from that factory. today the blocks are rough cast in Brazil and Argentina ~ since they are the world's low cost producer AND they seem to have no clean air laws so you can just blow dust all the time.

you need to keep up on this stuff.

[muawiyah]

BTW, ICBMs started coming on line in the 1960s ~ that was JFK's argument ~ that Eisenhower had allowed a missile gap to happen and we were dreadfully behind the USSR.

At that time there were still several transmission plants in Indianapolis. Chrysler, Allison, Ford ~ still all there and smokin' day and night, and then gradually through the 1970s and 1980s their operations were minimized, work farmed out to newer, smaller, more automated plants, and finally just terminated or REMOVED entirely from building devices used in cars.

Today those plants are targets for ICBMs, just like they were 30 and 40 years ago. More recently - June 2007 in fact —GM announced that it was selling Allison Transmission to private equity firms. Still, it'd been a good 25 years since they'd made anything other than top of the line heavy duty commercial transmissions ~ with what looks like a worldwide lock on bus transmissions. They quit making anything for automobiles ages back.

BTW, GM had built a new facility in Indianapolis for transmissions ~ but in the end there were only 2500 employees there. Used to be FAR MORE employees.

American manufacturing has shifted, in general, to top end stuff ~ with a lot more mechanization, automation, computerization and robotics than factories making similar products in other countries. We still have the stuff, but we don't make the more labor intensive small stuff, and we don't need to hire on the employees like the old days.

General Motors was gutted by its management and its value dissipated in dividends.