Posted on 09/08/2009 8:15:00 PM PDT by wrrock
General Motors was not so long ago the largest motor company in the world, who would have thought one day would be taken over by the miniature Japanese autos. This documentary struggles to answer this very question.
(Excerpt) Read more at cardealerreviews.org ...
Unions.
Best I ever heard it explained:
GM is trying to make money. Toyota and Honda are trying to make good cars.
Uh, because they made (make?) bad vehicles. Our 2000 venture has had three replacement head gaskets, and probably wants another set.
If you drive down the road, and observe a call with peeling paint, chances are it is a GM. The Venture, and before it, the 1994 Corsica both had the same problem.
The Corsica had to have it’s engine rebuilt, and the transmission.
Meanwhile, the 1994 Mercury Villager (Nissan Quest, in disguise) just kept running and running and running.
Last two vehicle purchases for us: Ford Taurus, Ford Focus.
No more GM.
Make a good product and you have a customer for life. The executives at GM never had to worry about that, though. Once they signed their contracts they were guaranteed compensation no matter how far in the toilet the company went.
Although, people were buying SUV’s left-and-right, Honda and Toyota were selling small cars left-and-right. In the long term, with oil in crisis, who would most people see as the long term winner? That’s right, Honda, and Toyota. GM needed to have their designers creating world class small cars, even in the face of SUV popularity. Now they are playing catch-up.
“Now they are playing catch-up.”
If they build that small crap they will lose all their customers!
It wasn’t taken over by the miniature Japanese autos. It was taken over by the Communist Government of the United States.
It’s over. You can stick a fork in GM and Chrysler. Killed by the UAW, liberalism, Democrats, regulations etc.
Bob Lutz did a great job into turning Cadillac from a joke to making decent cars. Buick’s quality is high and Pontiac was improving. Forget it now.
I like Ford’s vehicles and the quality keeps improving. I am not sure if I will buy one in the future. I refuse to buy any UAW crap.
You’re nuts. SUVs was what people wanted. And GM gave them the best SUVs in the world.
So tell me, why is ford still around and going strong?
There's a problem. The Japanese introduced cars that were good, but small. GM just produced small crap in response.
They lost it because they had absolutely no vision whatsoever. They did what was easy, assuming they'd always have a consumer base loyal to them no matter what kind of crap they produced.
They were lazy. A good example was when they said it wasn't possible to meet emissions standards in the 70s without a catalytic converter, then along came Honda with the CVCC engine. Honda had the lower-emissions market and GM was playing catch-up.
GM and Chrysler fell because they refused to make products that people would by. It isn’t the fault of any competitor that they made the poor business decisions that led them into their current predicament.
It’s over and done.
Take your small jap crap and shove it!
Actually, no I am not nuts. You just failed to comprehend what I wrote. I stated GM was selling SUV’s and doing very well. The only caveat I offered was that GM should have had designers preparing for the day when SUV’s became yesterday’s fad. As far as Ford goes, they were smart enough to bring in Alan Mullaly from Boeing to run the show. He saw the writing on the wall and positioned Ford to weather the storm. Next he made the decision to NOT take fed bailout funds which was a good deal, but also a major marketing coup. People instantly thought that if I am going to buy a new car I will buy from the stable company and that is Ford.
Actually GM was first across the board with catalytic converters, a technology that everyone else adopted eventually because it gave the best compromise of emissions, performance, and fuel economy.
GM had saturn for small cars. It did very well and still is doing very well. Although no longer part of GM, iirc.
What are you talking about? Saturn was a good car. Still is. I never cared for their pricing system, but that’s a separate issue.
>“Now they are playing catch-up.”
>
>If they build that small crap they will lose all their customers!
I disagree. I happen to own a 1983 Oldsmobile Regency with a Diesel engine. It still runs acceptably well and has a lot of still-nice features - The care is still classified in the “boat” category but that is irrelevant.
GM could have ruled the small-car market by producing a good-quality Diesel-engined vehicle and pouncing on the naturally better mileage; that is where my Diesel Oldsmobile comes in, it gets upwards of 35 in-city MPG. (I calculated it to be about 37 w/ highway being 42~43 or thereabouts.) Now, 35 MPG was the advertised rate of one of the “big three” car companies a while back in a series of ads touting “The MVP Of MPG!” which given the facts I related to you about an 27 year-old car using a gasoline-engine Oldsmobile retrofitted to burn Diesel I found laughable. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_Diesel_V6_engine )
In a small car I’d expect there to be some increase in MPG due to the lessened mass required to accelerate/decelerate; that is assuming that you were holding the engine constant. If they were to a) design the engine for Diesel ground-up, b) drop down to 4-cylinders, and c) use a hydraulic drive-train {so designed to provide Infinitely Variable Transmission functionality}. I would expect the MPGs to shoot up even further.
I have other ideas, but those are more on the line of interface & implementation rather than just pointing out how they could effectively produce a small car.
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