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The Big 3's Failures Have NOTHING to do with labor costs...
. NO!
The problems have been--and continue to be--with the "Captains of Industry" running them.
For 40 years, they have been running the companies all-reactively. Little or no innovation to meet the new challenges in transportation; only newness a
"at the edges."
]They continued to build masive cars weighing thousands of pounds more than necessary, containing engines over-adequate to run these behemoths, The natural result has been a giant waste of irreplaceable natural rersources which will too soon run out, "justifying car" buyers' expenditure of too much $$ for each such outofdate car coming off the assembly line AND making a nasty assured global warming,to boot.
And YOU blame the workers?? BS!
-- artfulme
No, you don't get it. The cars you seem to despise are the ones that kept the Detroit Three in business. People wanted them, and bought them, and paid prices that were profitable for Detroit. Lexus and Mercedes built the same kinds of SUV's. Toyota and Honda want to get in on the same light truck market.
You seem to think that things like CAFE were the culmination of Democrats in Congress knowing more about the car business than the engineers in Detroit. That's complete nonsense. The Democrats wanted to take a stand for "clean air" and "less foreign oil." But they didn't have the guts or the intellectual honesty to place large taxes on oil, as was done in Japan or Europe. Instead, they came up with "CAFE," a scheme that Detroit executives and the UAW both new was bad. John Dingell (D-MI) was the UAW's man in Congress, and while his liberal voting record is flawless (he has introduced a bill to establish a single-payer national healthcare system in each of the last 20 or so Congresses), even he opposed much of the advancement of CAFE standards. When the Detroit automakers determined that the only way they could make the CAFE goals was with an increased mix of higher-mileage small cars (low profit vehicles), they had to go outside of the UAW to do it, with imported products, but the two-fleet rule additions to CAFE made it impossible for Detroit to do that. CAFE, as it turned out, had nothing to do with clean air of oil imports, but everything to do with Democratic Party paybacks to the UAW on the one hand, and the Sierra Club on the other hand.
Throughout, the car companies have not been regarded as businesses that needed to make products in demand, to be sold at profitable prices. No, for the Democrats, the automakers were a life-support system for the UAW, and a laboratory operating for the benefit of the "environmentalists." No wonder they had trouble being profitable in North America. And the same "suits" who all of you criticize for their stupidity and bad management of the American auto industry? They ran Ford of Europe profitably. Just as GM ran Opel in Europe profitably.
To those of you who thing that Detroit just needed, and needs, to quit building cars like SUV's, Cadillacs and light trucks; You. Are. Nuts. Those cars contribute to company profits. Americans want to buy those cars.
