Quoted from The New Yorker magazine:
Car Talk by Elizabeth Kolbert wrote:
The Secretary of Transportation’s report to Congress begins on a dark note. Over the past year, the domestic auto industry has experienced sharply reduced sales and profitability, large indefinite layoffs, and increased market penetration by imports, it states. The shift in consumer preferences towards smaller, more fuel-efficient passenger cars and light trucks . . . appears to be permanent, and the industry will spend massive amounts of money to retool to produce the motor vehicles that the public now wants. The revenue to pay for this retooling, though, will have to come from sales of just the sort of cars that the public is no longer buying a situation, the report observes, bound to produce financial strain.
To improve the overall future prospects for the domestic motor vehicle manufacturers, a quality and price competitive motor vehicle must be produced, the report warns. If this is not accomplished, the long term outlook for the industry is bleak.
The Secretary’s report was delivered to Congress in 1980, a year after what may soon become known as the first Chrysler bailout.
28 years ago... and lately the Big Three actually had someone in Washington listen to them instead of whipping them through the streets like the pariahs they are?
Let them rot, people will still want to buy vehicles and others are still willing to make them.
Things may be uncomfortable for a while but c'est la vie, change or die.
Kronig wrote:
You are forgetting 1 major detail. They did not build the bigger vehicles because it was trendy or because their machinery was already set-up for that. They built it because that is what consumers wanted. They just got too greedy/lazy to adapt to the future.
They were building them precisely because it was trendy for those that could afford it.
But thats what only one segment of the consuming population wanted, it was highly profitable but an unsustainable market.
The constant demand for a small efficient car has always existed and whomever is manufacturing the current version of whatever the small and efficient hot-seller is probably barely meeting market needs.
The Japanese used to fill that niche, but at a price and U.S. manufacturers have never been able to match that size and efficiency with quality, like the Japanese did.
Corporate resonsibility isn't just for shareholders, it's for the employees, clients and neighbours too and as car manufacturers I maintain it's their responsibility to come up with the best car, not the best method of ******** money out of people.
Build it right and the money will come anyway.
This is actually getting posted instead of deleted like all the othe half-typed out crap that gets interrupted by work.
