General Motors
Mon., June 1, 12:44 PM
It certainly looks as if the automotive industry in the United States is, to say the least, moribund. I watch the problems cascade, people losing jobs they thought were secure and suppliers losing business as their customers are no longer buying. I can’t begin to address the whole industry. Did you ever hear the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”? The actual quote — I had to look it up — by Charles Wilson of GM, was “…I always assumed that what’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Like so many generalizations, that one is erroneous too.
Trying to analyze what I can see is fruitless. (I don’t even want to touch some of the questionable accounting practices I’ve seen.) It seems to me they began more or less in the right direction: they identified a market, that is, a group of potential customers, and provided a product for those customers to purchase. What they never considered, as far as we know, was what might happen when they saturated the market, and saturate it they did. Their newer products were more and more of the same thing, bigger and purportedly better. Did no one wonder why international manufacturers were becoming more successful?
I have often wondered why the growing technology could not be applied to something other than cars. (And don’t even mention Hummers, which I consider one of the blights of civilization!) Some people get so caught up in their assumptions that they are just unable to think further. Some twenty years ago, we had a client whose products were used in the space industry. The suggestion was placed before them that their products were applicable elsewhere, but “if it didn’t fly, they just didn’t want to know about it.”
What do you think Detroit is planning now? More of the same really is not the answer, although better car maintenance might be. The concept of a new car every year or two is outdated — there are enough usable vehicles already in existence. Remember, there are Japanese vehicles that perform well for fifteen years or more. Even if the U.S. auto makers, or what’s left of them, come up with a better car, just what is supposed to happen to all the cars they already made?
I absolutely hate this. If you don’t mind, I think I’d rather walk.
