Posted on 03/16/2009 8:31:12 AM PDT by bs9021
King of the Roadkill
by: Alanna Hultz, March 16, 2009
In Joseph B. White’s article “How Detroit’s Automakers Went from Kings of the Road to Roadkill,” White explains five factors that contributed to the fall of Detroit’s big three, General Motors (GM), Chrysler and Ford. White is a senior editor in the Washington, D.C., bureau of The Wall Street Journal.
White says “first, Detroit underestimated the competition, second, GM mismanaged its relationship with United Auto Workers, third, GM, Chrysler and Ford handled failure better than success, fourth GM, Chrysler, and Ford relied too heavily on a few, gas hungry truck and SUV lines for all their profits and last, GM refused to accept that to survive it could no longer remain what it was in the 1950s and 1960s, with multiple brands and a dominant market share.”
Expanding on his first point, White said “the Detroit automakers believed the Japanese could be stopped by import quotas alone. They initially dismissed reports about the high quality of Japanese cars.” Detroit didn’t believe competition from overseas would hurt them, because “they assumed the Japanese could never replicate their low-cost manufacturing system in America.” White then explained a series of presentations executives gave on why Japanese cars were more superior. White said “at GM, an executive named Alex Mair gave detailed presentations on why Japanese cars were superior to GMs, lighter, more fuel-efficient and less costly to build.” White said “GM took too long to learn the lessons from these experiments.”
White then went on to explain how GM mismanaged its relationship with the UAW. White explained that Japanese automakers and others could build cars in the U.S. with young, non-union labor forces. White said that “being new has enormous advantages in a capital-intensive, technology-intensive business like automaking.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
They’re charging 20K and on up for dated technology.
Here is the actual article from Joseph White: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2204046/posts
—poor management, greedy, powerful unions, and government intervention in a marketplace will ruin any enterprise—
I don’t see why any of this is our problem. Elderly, slow, Bull Crapping GM, Fairy Ford, Loser Chrysler, importing Japanese engines, owned by who knows what vs Americans building Japanese cars with stock sold on the NYSE and owned by who knows who.
If the era of Japanese engineers, executives has delivered a better, cheaper product and been rewarded by individual Americans best able to judge for themselves what their needs and wants are, so be it.
GM/Ford/Chrysler have chosen badly. The best thing that could of happened would of been bankruptcy, and then consolidation or take over by a Japanese firm or even go out of business and open up profits and opportunity for other groups of engineers and executives that better deliver cars that more people want.
Instead, as usual, the good get punished/suppressed/de rewarded for losers. Welcome to auto-death of American meritocracy.
This is going to work out good. Yeah.
It’s=its.
lighter, more fuel-efficient and less costly to build.” Bull Sheit
Detroit’s supplier network was often “old friends” who provided shoddy-to-mediocre products and got a guaranteed profit in return. I have met some of these people (in a former career) and you would be surprised how stupid many of them are.
I knew one who made money off Ford for three generations. What kinds of cars do you think that he and his kids owned? Beamers! If I had the money I would probably do the same, but I would not shove it in my clients face.
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