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.
