Did you guys see the latest thing with Bush Jr? Trying to save the auto industry? http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081001/AUTO01/810010350 Um, the whole reason the auto industry is doing poorly is because of the economy and price of gas. Why didn't bush do anything about the serious inflation of gas prices in June/July etc? ? Now its suddenly going down? Why didn't Bush negotiate with OPEC? With the latest scandals of CEO's spending money on vacations and other commodities after they were bailed out by the federal government Bush JR is making some really poor choices.
I think (at least for GM) a big reason why they're suffering is their health coverage they have to pay for retirees.
Drive a 3 year old Camry with 150 thousand miles and drive a 3 year old Taurus with 45 thousand miles and get back to me on WHAT is killing them. There may be different reasons for why they have sold shit cars in the recent past, but that is the reason. SHIT CARS. PS, I drive about 5 different cars a week just for fun..... I test drive cars that are repaired. Here is a good example... 2003 Ford Thunderbird, new car with old Tbird style. We have one at the shop, I had to put the top down to sit in it and I drove it around the lot looking over the windshield. I am six feet two and had the seat as far back and down as it could go. WHAT A JOKE! So, discount that they are ugly as hell and imagine the target market. A woman wants one, goes to look at it and her husband can't fit. That is fine for rich guys who won't drive it but how about regular people? American automakers have the worst management of any company.
American automakers pay the union members as if they are engineers. Do they even pay engineers anymore? Hello UAW!
$70 bucks an hour with benefits? Ridiculous. Bush has failed conservatives over and over and if he signs off on this, it will be the final nail in his legacy.
I totally agree with this, but then again, the Dems who demonized Bush never realized he was one of them at heart.
+1 Not only that but GM's biggest problem is product overlap. The F150 has been the best selling truck in America for 20+ years now, although the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra combined outsell the F150, and they are the same truck. Stop making me choose between a Chevy Cobalt or a Pontiac G5 cause they are the same vehicle, stop wasting money on producing the same 'parts bin' vehicles. Saturn Sky = Pontiac Solstice Cadillac Escalade = GMC Yukon Denali Chevy Suburban = Cadillac Escalade ESV GMC Canyon = Chevy Colorado Pontiac G6 = Chevy Impala Saturn Outlook = Chevy Equinox Thank God They Killed Oldsmobile Because Oldsmobile = Buick Look at Toyota, they have three brands (Lexus, Toyota, and Scion) and they are dramatically different in style and price. Each brand has a certain target audience and they tool each vehicle to meet that audience.
+ a million Sit in a fucking Scion Xb and then sit in a Ford Explorer. I could sleep in an Xb it is so roomy. I can't stand to sit in an Explorer it is soooo uncomfortable. My buddy has been working on a G5 and he calls it a Cobalt every time he talks about it. I have been working on a Cobalt and my boss asked me if my Cobalt would be ready to go home the other day. I still had a frame rail to weld in at the time, he was thinking about the G5! Most cars for the last million years have used phillips headed screws to hold the sun visors in place. I worked on a Chevy HHR a couple years ago and they had Safe-T torx headed screws holding the visors on. These screws are like what some bathroom stalls are screwed together with at the mall to deter vandalism. WHY THE FUCK WOULD THEY DO THIS AND WHAT ENGINEER DID THEY PAY A HUNDRED AND FIFTY GRAND TO FIGURE IT OUT? Oh yeah, on the new Chevy trucks the cheap version door handles are way down low by your thigh and the expensive ones have handles up top that are easy to use. Why couldn't they just make the one good one and save money? They have about the same number of parts? Then some people wouldn't have shit door handles.
Just wait and see what happens to the economy. It won't all be Obama's fault, and he is already postponing his "95% of people get tax cuts" line of crap that got people to vote for him, but the dominos have started to fall. Here is hoping that you are outside of the chain.
In Obama's interview on 60 minutes last night, he basically said that in normal circumstances GM would go into bankruptcy, get restructured, and come out the other end a much better company. Given the current financial disaster, though, if it went into bankruptcy it probably wouldn't survive, and millions of people would lose their jobs (including people very close to me!) That would prove to be an even greater disaster to our shitcan economy. So basically it's too big to fail while everything else is also failing. Sucks that it's come to this. Our auto industry is a massive embarassment. Crappy gas hog cars that take years to see any real innovation. It's a shame that GM can't be reconfigured to just do manufacturing and distribution, and let other more competent design companies come up with the engineering and marketing. Kind of like Nike's relationship with Taiwanese and Korean shoe manufacturers. Nike does the engineering/marketing, and they let the shoe manufacturers focus just on throughput. Imagine if Nike or Apple got into car engineering and marketing....
See that is the problem when you put out crappy cars for 20 years what do you expect? A failing car industry. I know many people who even though we are in tough times have went and bought new cars but not american because they can't be counted on past 100K miles if that and they are gas hogs. What does the American car industry expect? I know for all of us to bend over backwards and just take it.
