Ours was in dark blue ink though, which looks a lot nicer
Posted on 06/04/2009 5:30:27 AM PDT by CSM
It might be a bad day for GM but it’s a much worse one for Toyota. Really. The days (decades, really) of weak domestic manufacturers shooting themselves in the foot with bad design, poor assembly, and non-existent customer satisfaction in passenger cars are coming to an end. Toyota didn’t have to outrun the bear, it just had to stay ahead of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Years of producing huge profits in North America hit the wall for Toyota in 2009, and they’re likely not to return. Ever. The game has now changed—and it’s not good for Toyota.
Thanks to US and Canadian taxpayer support, GM and Chrysler are about to get a new start. They’ll enjoy fresh balance sheets, with minimized legacy liabilities and serious money earmarked for new products. (The taxpayers are paying for Fiat to develop cars for North America; you didn’t really think that the Italians would take this risk on their own did you?) Ford, by dint of luck or smart management, borrowed what it needed years ago to make the transformation outside of court oversight.
By the end of this year, all three Detroit automakers will be restructured, resized to match production with demand, and re-energized. They will reenter the market as the lowest cost producers inside the U.S. market, with slimmer, trimmer product lines. These automakers are getting ever-closer to 100 percent capacity utilization.
Looking at product, Ford’s passenger car line up just keeps getting better. The 2010 Taurus looks hot, the Fiesta test drive campaign is generating good press with the Twitter/Facebook crowd, and a new Euro Focus will be here in a two years. Slowly but surely, more Americans are considering a Ford passenger vehicle. Its trucks still lead the category and will continue to do so. Better products, increasing quality, and slowly increasing market share is building FoMoCo momentum.
GM’s go forward brands—Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac—still have some vehicles that don’t cut the mustard with consumers. But the balance is starting to tip back towards the positive. The Malibu and Camaro represent some better efforts. The gorgeous new Buick Lacrosse might give the new Taurus a run for the money. Cadillac will extend the CTS line and bring a new SRX to the market shortly. The Corvette still leads the pack in dollar performance value. And maybe, just maybe, the Cruze and Viva will live up to GM hype machine.
GM’s perhaps two to three years behind Ford with its product development cycle. But it can now concentrate on fewer models. Recent successful launches suggest that GM just needs time to plug the holes for the weak sisters. It now has the money to do so and you can bet (if you’re taxpayer, you already have) that the efforts on fuel efficient passenger cars will receive the bulk of the dollar spend. GM won’t abandon trucks (no matter what Nancy Pelosi thinks) and volume wise, GM leads.
Chrysler can’t do anything under their new pasta-fed management until the re-tooled imports arrive here for production two years hence. Its cars still (mostly) suck, except for the higher-performance versions of its LX cars. But it isn’t going away and will still find some buyers for its products at the pace of the recent past. So this company will just hang on . . . and on . . . and on.
Now, stop and think about this. What has Toyota done for you lately? Is there one single passenger car from Toyota that excites you?
Let’s keep the new Prius out of this discussion for the moment; it’s not a car for drivers but techno-geeks and greens mostly with excitement provided by the fuel gauge, not vehicle dynamics. The Camry might lead the C/D class in sales for now, but will this continue? What happens when Americans actually consider a Malibu or Fusion-based product instead? In terms of design appeal, the Camry looks dowdy or boring (take your pick) and its reliability isn’t any better than the Fusion. Put a four-cylinder EcoBoost engine in that Fusion and Ford wins.
Go through the rest of Toyota’s passenger car line up and compare each vehicle to the current and near future offerings from GM and Ford. The question is: will Toyota customers do the same?
Toyota (or Honda) products have been the default choice. That “Easy Button” is starting to get harder to press for buyers. Yep, Americans will begin to come back to consider Detroit products (at least GM and Ford), and that’s not good for Toyota. And we’ve really never left Detroit for our big pickups and SUVs, whle the Japanese are still mostly playing catch up.
Yep, it’s a bad day for Toyota and a great day for America. You can look forward to a new Detroit that will be competitive, if not lead, in cars and trucks for mass market Americans. Count on it.
Ours was in dark blue ink though, which looks a lot nicer
That’s a Navistar engine, and Ford has been battling with them (including in court) over quality problems for years. They finally decided to develop a new engine in-house. If Toyota sold a diesel pickup in the U.S., more than likely, they’d also use an outside engine supplier.
no one take MY toyota away from me.......never happen.
Nahhh, that’s a $38,000 Acura TL.
That's what I wondered. He's still stuck in old Detroit thinking, that says what people see in the showroom is the only thing that determines what they will buy. He hopes that American consumers will continue to be blind when it comes to resale value, maintenance and repair costs, and general reliability.
That's how Detroit has hosed the American public for the last three, maybe four decades, and Elias thinks "happy days are here again" for that sort of moneymaking technique. He's in for a rude awakening.
But when he helped me move to NC from Arizona in my brand new Toyota Tacoma 4x4, the first thing he did when he got back home was sell his car and buy a Toyota Sienna. Mom was next and has had a Honda ever since. (My ultra-liberal sisters drive GM cars and SUVs.)
What a load of crap. This has to be satire.
How many people here who refuse to buy an American car, bitch about Walmart buying from China?
I’ll believe it when I see it. Sounds like some phenomenally wishful thinking. I highly doubt the big three emerge as the well oiled machines the author predicts. In fact i’m fairly confident that Toyota will still enjoy better management. It also is really hard to win back customers who have been driven off by decades of arrogance and inferior products when they have found companies that have met their needs well. If i’ve had Toyotas for the last fifteen years say and everyone of them has given me a positive ownership experience I really doubt it would be that easy to get me to switch from something that has worked so well for me.
Funny how those higher-end Japanese cars look very similar.
I've been out of the new car market for a long, long time (I don't even watch tv ads for them), but this has me kind of interested again.
“I understand a lot of car enthusiasts get excited about styling, horse power, etc. Perhaps Toyota has boring designs but in my opinion most Americans, especially families, want a reliable car to get from point A to point B with reasonable comfort. The styling and other superficial traits is icing on the cake. Toyota and Honda deliver that type of car while GM and Chrysler cannot even get that first step right and never will now they are part of Obama-UAW Inc. “
Exactly and therein lies part of the problem. Some of GMs best cars have been niche vehicles like the Corvette and the GTO. Awesome cars that are as good as anything in the world in their class but they compete in tiny segments. Where GM really has needed world beating quality and value is in the more mainstream classes. It won’t do for them to be close to as good as a Honda or even just as good. They have to be clearly better to start winning lots of people back and they just aren’t yet.
I don’t care at all about cars.
I’m going to ride the Unicorn that Barack promised me. It’s going to arrive any day now.
One of the most ludicrous articles I’ve ever started to read.
I’d say they’re both pretty boring, as is the Honda Accord, Nissan Altima, Chevy Malibu...pretty much everything in this front-drive mid-size family car segment, other than some niche players from (overpriced) european makes. That doesn’t seem to bother a lot of people all that much, for whom cars are basically just transportation pods, anyways.
Good one!
“GM is ‘dead to me’.”
LOL, I like it.
If we analyze the government systems that want to control economic processes, they divide into 3.(It’s actually a gradient with “bumps”.):
communism — all economic processes owned by the state
socialism — major economic processes owned by the state
fascism — economic processes CONTROLLED by the state, but privately owned (and profits allowed)
I would suggest that China is economically FASCIST and the U.S. is flirting with moving from economic fascism to socialism.
But, the elite in China don’t have suicidal Liberal instincts as the elite in the U.S. does.
With the Illegal,Unfair and Unbalanced treatment of the shareholders in the Faux Bankruptcy of General Motors and as A Union Man oif 50 years and as an Owner and Operator of a Union Mechanical Contracting and Engineering C. I will never buy a car from GM again.
About 15 years ago I owned 15 trucks and 5 Cars all American and mostly GM including 4 Cadillacs.
I was committed to American Cars.. “NEVER AGAIN”
“I believe the term for this article is “irrational exuberance”. “
It’s just an individual’s opinion. The only fact in it is that the Corvette gives more bang for your buck than either Porsche or Ferrari.
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