Quote:
Originally Posted by tisonlyi
Let it die. All of it.
Assemble one viable, strong company from the rest.
Hopefully, the pensioning volk will get healthcare from obamaniam if not a decent pension.
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Let it die,and your Honda/Toyota/BMW is suddenly a hell of a lot more expensive.
That said, I'm unconvinced that there actually is a way to save the American auto industry. America's attitudes are finally catching up to it. We've never, with the exception of a few, isolated organizations, been interested in exacting quality standards and good engineering. We prefer to come up with the idea, and then try to make whatever we produce from it look good, without necessarily being good. Sort of a "Fuck it, it's good enough" attitude.
Rather than fix the severe quality problems that GM has had since the 1970's, instead they stuck bits of ribbed plastic, or wings, or fender holes on their crap-mobiles and expected America to just buy them, not picking up on the fact that it was a holey plastic turd with wings.
It didn't work.
It didn't work so spectacularly that GM a few years back sent out a letter to former customers. Paraphrased, the letter said "We know we built crap in the 70's and 80's. Please give us another chance and buy a GM car now."
Might have worked, except that instead of a true committment to quality, they instead had a true committment to sticking more plastic, holes, and wings on the cars.
GM's cars have been like old western buildings. From a distance the building would look like a really nice 2 story building. Get up close and you find out it's dirty, rat infested, and the 2nd story is fake.
You can only put gold dust on a turd and sell it as solid gold for so long before people start seeing beneath the shine to the offal beneath.
To fix things, GM has to turn themselves into the American version of Honda. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be the sleekest looking thing on the road. But it'd better be damned high quality.
Even if GM can overcome American laziness enough to find the workers to do it on a mass scale (They already did it in their Corvette program, but can they replicate that on large-scale assembly? Dunno. Doubt it), they have a nearly 4 decade reputation now for making crap. People are not going to assume they're suddenly making great stuff. So I'm not sure that even if GM started making decent cars, that they'd be able to convince the public that they were, in time for it to make any difference.