People who have known me for a long time know that for many years I’ve said General Motors is doomed. I based that conclusion on having rented many nearly-new GM cars at airports during my past years of business travel. They were uniformly awful. The Chevy Lumina was a particularly loathsome vehicle. The times I got a Toyota Corolla or Camry, the difference was striking. Year after year the American cars didn’t get any better, and even if they did, the improvements were lost on me in comparison to the Japanese cars I rented.
I think quite a few men my age have always owned American cars solely because their WWII veteran fathers would have had a fit if any son of theirs bought a “Jap car.” But we’re in our 50’s now, and if that prohibition still applies to any of us, it certainly doesn’t apply to our kids.
My father’s ’65 Falcon was rusted out by the time I started driving it in 1972. His ’69 Galaxy was junk by 1977. In those days, you were pushing your luck keeping a car more than six years. Odometers only went to 99999 miles before lapping back to 00000.
The first warning shot that U.S. auto makers had, telling them that the Japanese were making planned obsolescence obsolete, was 30 years ago. Chrysler was in crisis, and Lee Iacocca had to beg to get a loan guarantee from the federal government. Who was President then? Oh, right. Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Michael Moore is as despised by the Right as Rush Limbaugh is by the Left, but 20 years ago, in Roger & Me, Moore tried to raise awareness that something was rotten at GM. It seems he wasn’t wrong, and the day of GM’s demise appears to be at hand. Part of me would like to say good riddance, because it was so inevitable for so long, but the fallout from GM’s failure could tip the scales in turning a clearly defined economic Recession into a less identifiable Depression.
Ed Begley, Jr., still putts around in his electric car. Say, they had an episode of E.R. where a guy offs himself with a huge empty of air, which he fished out of the trash. (see latest post). Say, that was before they got smart and started disposing of needles properly in the hospital! Is that Neil Young I hear: “See the needle and the damage done … ” Oh, don’t mind me … I’ve had approximately 25 hours sleep in the past two weeks since my two giant steroid injections (talk about big shots!) Well, Doug, at least you and I have that searing, hideous, sudden, then chronic back pain in common now! AIEEEE!!! Only TWO MORE WEEKS to wait until I see the new pain clinic. But this one has it all: chirocrackers, elecrostimiluators, psychiatrists (for biofeedback), massage (with Anderson Cooper lookalikes, just joking). Oh, shut up, Jean, you’re on ‘roids and Percocet!
Hi Joan. Yes, the Geo Prizm is actually a Toyota Corolla, which explains the durability of your sister’s car. I think ’97 was the last year it was made.
Something about hybrids that I don’t understand is why the mileage is so low. When my ’89 Honda Civic base hatchback was still relatively new, it would get — no fooling — 65 mpg in the warmer weather. That’s based on 80 miles every day round-trip to work, with 10 of those miles being on side roads. It had a 1.6 liter engine with two fuel injectors for four cylinders, and a 4-speed manual transmission. No air conditioner, and no power assist for anything. Eventually the highway mileage fell to about 45 mpg, and mixed driving was 35 mpg. The Civic’s fate was shown here. My commute for the past ten years has been a much more manageable 30 miles, round-trip.
Hi Doug! My dad over the years had cars that made Detroit famous-the big gas guzzlers of the 50s, and the cars I remember-a Ford Fairlane, a 1970 Chevy Nova, and various Ford and Chevy trucks and cars. The vehicles he liked most besides the Nova have been his Subaru Loyale and his current Toyota Corolla. He has been teased for his loyalty to “rice burners” but he said he will never go back to American makes. My sister has a 1996 Geo Prizm which is still going strong and is a mate to the Corolla, but she wants to get a hybrid.
“Who Killed the Electric Car?” is an excellent documentary, and it’s proof that management is at the root of GM’s problem. What’s amazing is that the EV1 was made in the first place. GM badly managed the entire Saturn unit. At exactly the time it could have really taken off GM gutted it and forced Saturn to become just another division of the company.
I agree that the Japanese auto makers have an advantage because they don’t have the so-called legacy costs carried by the (now former) Big Three. Read the book “Rivethead” by Michael Moore’s buddy Ben Hamper, and you won’t come away with a feeling that the assembly line grunts at GM are noble and misrepresented. (I belonged to a union for a couple of years, not by choice, at the newspaper, and as far as I was concerned it was like having another boss.)
But the Detroit unions aren’t the reason why the Japanese did so well. They made better cars, and GM’s market share dropped. (My enthusiasm for Japanese cars has been diluted by a failed catalytic converter my Honda Accord, and the air conditioner literally blowing up in my wife’s Honda CRV.)
Tip the scales, you say? If not GM, then it would simply be something else, given the incredibly complex, convoluted economic mess we’re in. It’s a damned-if -you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma, and we’re boxed into a corner, it seems. Save companies like (and including) GM, and we save a lot of folks’ jobs, so they can still afford to spend money in the ailing economic market place. But the government is not a bottomless pit of bailout money. Unless, of course, we just crank up the printing press to turn out more greenbacks, which leads eventually to a new set of problems linked to inflation.
On the other hand, pick the choice of NOT saving companies such as GM, letting a Darwinian strategy of “survival of the fittest” take over, and we’ll see waves of hysteria and panic ripple through both Main Street and Wall Street. So we’re grappling not only with companies “too big to fail,” as was said when AIG got bailed out, but also the question of “when is a company too big to SAVE?” When do our efforts (using our taxpayer dollars) devolve into simply throwing good money after bad?
I’m not arguing for one side or the other on this. I simply don’t know. And the scariest part is, I don’t think even our best economists know the answer for sure, either. Maybe we’re not quite in a depression yet, but it sure is depressing!!!
Knee jerk reaction, my emotional gut says to let our American automakers get what they’ve had coming to them for many decades now. Nothing else has taught them anything, despite all the red flag warnings they had. Detroit still adhered to making inferior quality and less durable cars compared to the Japanese models available, despite all its flapping of gums to the contrary. They always dragged their feet on safety improvements as well, whether it was seat belts or air bags or anything else, which of course put making money ahead of saving lives. And our American auto industry deliberately and quite literally destroyed the electric cars it produced, as is detailed very nicely in the disturbing documentary film, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
To be fair, I don’t know whether the vast majority of the blame deserves to be laid at the feet of Detroit’s corporate executives, or whether the auto unions were also part of the problem. Some people say the unions, which were formed to correct exploitation of workers and to prevent future abuses by company management, eventually got so powerful that they in turn began to exploit the company to win overly generous benefits and wages. In which case, American auto companies would seek to keep their expenses lower in other areas, like vehicle production costs, than the Japanese needed to do, whose workers didn’t have as impressive pay packages. I suspect that, like in many things in life, it was probably some of both, with enough blame to go around to various parties involved.