Originally posted by: Snatchface
Originally posted by: ElFenix
Originally posted by: Engineer
With Toyota planning on 5 new plants in the US and others opening plants quickly (Hyundai, Kia, Honda, etc), it won't be long before they outweigh the big 2 and Chrylser (who is now 4th). There's a reason that over 3 million net manufacturing jobs have been lost in the US since 2001.
because manufacturing as a means of creating wealth is going the way of the dinosaur. just like family farming.
No, because American auto makers just refused to learn how to compete. Probably because we idiot Americans decided to reward mediocrity and continue "supporting" them despite inferior quality and design. Now our beloved domestic auto manufacturers can't compete in the world - on design, quality or, most importantly, fuel economy. It's quite sad really. It's like a parent buying a reward for a child that consistently brings home D grades. Well...you're gonna keep getting D's then. I never really thought we were doing American car makers a favor by buying their crap. If as a society we hadn't, then they would have been forced to adapt sooner and not wither this prolonged death knell.
I do think that eventually the wheat will get separated from the chaff and America will start to make some competitive cars, but not until the situation has gotten dire and they are willing to take drastic measures to be competitive again.
I disagree with this completely. This is a typical American response, taking all of the blame somewhere else and having nothing to do with it.
I would put it more like this.
When the imports started coming over here, they were garbage. They were disposable, unreliable, cheap, rusty little compact cars with 1L, 55hp engines, and the only reason anybody gave them any attention was because of fuel and gas mileage concerns.
They were left scrambling to shrink their engines and constrict them with emission reducing technology, turning big block V8 sports cars with gobs of power into meager V6's or even I4 engines. They were at a natural disadvantage since they were suddenly playing against the imports at their own game, trying to be small and fuel efficient, when the consumers had been voting with their wallets for years and years for huge V8 land barges, and then turning away and rushing to another company when their needs suddenly changed in the face of an oil crisis.
The imports were much smaller and much more nimble companies with far fewer products, so it was incredibly easy for them to start fixing and updating their cars, constantly making improvements. The big three had been used to running the show and doing things the same way, so they started quickly falling behind the evolving import cars as they moved up into the 80's. Automotive sales dropped like a rock in the 70's, and a nice chunk of the sales shifted from domestics to imports for the high fuel economy. The domestics didn't help things by having some major reliability issues at this time (huge quality problems like dashboards cracking, at the dealership no less.) They had taken huge blows in other areas too, with the failed Oldsmobile diesel engine that was notoriously unreliable, and the V8-6-4 engine which was simply 20-some years ahead of its time, but another huge flop.
The 80's were just as bad, as the imports had a growing fan base and were becoming "cooler" and more acceptable with growing engines, more power, and more style, while GM--starting to feel the financial pinch from losing so much ground--started trying to modernize and cut curners. This was their second biggest mistake after being caught off guard and underestimating the imports in the first place. Domestic companes were trying to cut corners, but they did it in all the wrong places. At first the cars were just fat and underpowered with uselessly constricted, undersized motors, that they didn't have the technology to fix like we do today. But then into the late 80's you could truly see the efforts of their ineffective cost cutting with horribly cheap interiors, and persistent quality and reliability problems.
This trend seems to have run from the mid to late 80's, if not earlier, right up into the mid 90' or so. It seems that the domestics finally found their stride at that point, and started trying to "fix" themselves again. They managed a few decent cars, even class leading in a few cases, and had brought quality and reliability way up over what it was in the 70's and 80's, though they still had some problematic parts and engines, and they were still dealing with cutting the
wrong corners, especially to the interiors.
But the imports were way ahead by the mid 90's. Personally I wouldn't say in interior quality, from experience with my '95 Accord, but I've never owned a typical 1995 Ford or GM car, so I don't have much to compare it to. But reliably anyway, they seemed to really hit their peak at this point with a simplicity that had evolved to the point of earning "bulletproof" status.
But just in the past 10 years, we've seen a decline in import quality, and a rise in domestic quality. Ford and GM have finally hit a pace in the last decade, eeking out some great cars like the Saturn Aura, the Ford Fusion, the new Mustang, the Pontiac GTO, the Solstice and Sky, the Pontiac G6, the Ford 500, the Chevy HHR and Cobalt (to a lesser extent), and some of the high end stuff that I'm forgetting about right now. But even the most discerning--or biased--reviewers give these cars a lot of credit, even if they do have a few problems. These aren't "D" cars. At worst they're "B" cars, and to the masses who don't even know if their car is FWD or RWD, or how many gears the transmission has, these cars are terrific domestic vehicles that would serve them well, even if they're only close to the competition, and don't outclass them in every category.
Just because a website like Edmunds makes a list, one to five, of a class of vehicle and the domestic(s) don't take home the gold, people think that the car is simply crap. I wonder if people even read the reviews, because they usually always mention that any of the cars flaws, are flaws just because they aren't "good enough." The trunk space isn't as much as this car, the power isn't as good as this other car, it doesn't feel as "refined" as this other car, and it doesn't have the features of this car, so it came in fourth place out of five. It has nothing to do with the car being crappy, or unreliable, or having massive interior quality problems, it has everything to do with simply not being a as good as the class leader in each category. The SUV's/pickups have been class leading all along.
So why can't GM take all of their money, and build a new Chevy Malibu or whatever other midsize sedan, and just annihilate the competition? Because it's not that simple. Because even if GM spared no expense and built the most fantastic sedan this country has ever seen, class leading in every way, it probably wouldn't sell. At least not in nearly high enough numbers to outweigh what they spent developing and building it. GM has seemingly insurmountable perception problems, and outright hate from plenty of people. It's just not "cool" in many places to drive anything domestic. They would have to spend even more money trying to drag people to the dealerships with free gifts and prizes, only to have the new Malibu parked out next to the Aveo and Uplander, which are still at the bottom of the barrel in their classes, and that's putting it nicely. Then at the end of the year end up handing them out for 20% below invoice to clear out the lots and start handing them over in fleets to rental companies, which would obliterate the resale value.
I'm not trying to play apologist for these companies, and I certainly agree that they've made mistake after mistake. Especially stuff like letting good cars (the Taurus or Focus) wither and die over the years only to finally cut them off like a broken limb and try to grow a whole new one instead of just fixing what's already there. Or bowing out of a situation completely. But there's way more too it than some talking head with a big cigar in his mouth making a bunch of random, erratic decisions, and Ford or GM going bankrupt wouldn't be putting him in his place, it would be a huge blow to this country and the global economy. I think most all of us agree that nobody should buy a bad car, certainly not out of patriotism. It doesn't do anything but hurt the company. But you can tell the intelligent people from the "haters" when a good American car comes out, and they still call it crap and advise people against it, which is a terrible thing to do for these companies. That's slapping your kid across the face for bringing home an A, just because it's not an A+.
And the American consumer is still as guilt free and brilliant as ever. It's not like people buy trucks or SUV's in abundance, voting with their wallets for these companies to build more of them, making them their most crucial products for survivability. But then as soon as gas prices come up, the fickle consumes retaliate by selling their SUV for a compact, and then blaming the company that they bought it from for building it, not predicting the future, not building a 100mpg car, for not inventing a synthetic oil that's dirt cheap the manufacture in abundance, for Iraq, for terrorism, for poverty, for their tooth ache, for their obesity, for their marital problems.. And of course when gas prices come back down, they all quietly go back to their SUV's and trucks like nothing ever happened and they knew all along that everything would be okay.
Cliffs:
I think that the situation is way too big, and way too complex to summarize the American automotive industry by saying that they gave up, or they don't care, or whatever else. And it's fantastic that the people who accuse GM of being so short sighted and giving up, selling out cheap cars for quick profit with no long term goals are the same people who would probably run out and buy a bunch of home furnishings from Wal-Mart and drive around in their Japanese car, watching the American manufacturing industry collapse in on itself while they point and laugh like it's not their problem, because "value" and saving a few bucks here and there is more important than anything else.
Sorta like the short sighted morons who say "Hey, gas should be $20/gallon! It wouldn't effect me! I walk to work!" without thinking for a second that the price of oil effects
everybody without discrimination, and they'll end up bitten on the ass even if they haven't owned a car in years and have no plans to.
Also, I said "GM" a lot, but I don't mean them specifically, I'm talking about domestics in general. Congratulations to anybody who actually read through this, and please keep in mind that I'm talking about how this "seems." I'm not claiming to explain it exactly how it is, and corrections/criticisms/explainations would even be appreciated, as long as it's fact and not just another perception.