The quality of Asian/American cars may indeed now be on par but I, for one, will never buy another General Motors (or the new GM) product again. My experience with a dangerous, POS Buick I purchased in the '80s forever has tarnished that brand name.
This, I think, is the point with many posts in this GM newsgroup. General Motors' reckless disregard for quality, safety, and customer satisfaction in the past has alienated so many people and that legacy continues to haunt their future.
Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry?s Road from Glory to
> Disaster
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> Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry?s Road from Glory to > Disaster
> By Paul Ingrassia
> Random House $26, 320 pages
>
> Japanese car companies, which overtook US ones in the early 21st
> century, leading to the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler last
> year, used a method of industrial innovation called kaizen, usually
> translated as ?continuous improvement?. From a humble start, the
> Japanese companies had got better and better at making cars that were
> economical and reliable.
>
Japanese kaizen ran into kabe ,or 'wall", as in "brick" wall many years ago.
Their cars simply were no better than American nameplates, but perception, led by the American media kept preaching about Japan's "superiority".
Even though, by the early ninties, American nameplates were as least as good as Japan by any apples to apples comparison.
Better fuel mileage, fewer recalls safer, etc.
By the late nineties, there was really no comparison, if one bothered to check things out on his own.
American nameplates continued to become even more reliable, more fuel effiecient, safer, faster and roomier.
Yet the perception continued that the Japanese made a better product than America.
Now, during the first ten years of the new century, there is little doubt that American nameplates are far superior than the Japanese.
Any comparisons that can be objectively made are decisively in favor of US nameplates.
Add to the fact that Japan has recalled TENS OF MILLIONS of their vechicles, and there can be little doubt who makes better products.
But, still, there are those who try to argue that Japan is "doing right". and they still make a better product than the US.
Really pretty amazing, if you ask me.
Either stupid, naive, or biased, but still amazing.
Meanwhile, Detroit perfected the technique of occasional improvement. As
> the Big Three ? GM, Ford and Chrysler ? slid deeper into trouble over
> decades of complacency, union obstructionism and mismanagement, they
> would occasionally stage a temporary recovery, with some new car or
> initiative prompting books and magazine articles about a Detroit revival. >
They made many many many great new cars during his period, dispite the unions, or mismanagement.
This all proved to be illusory, with Detroit?s detour from making cars
> (ground that it had in effect ceded to foreign rivals by the mid-1990s)
> to producing ?light truck? sports utility vehicles as the biggest
> deception of the lot. These were just upward blips on a long, steady
> descent from technological dominance to global laughing stock.
>
Literally tens of millions of light trucks and sport utility vechicles were sold during this period. It GM sold "junk', these tens of millions of vehicles would not have been sold.
This is a familiar story adroitly retold by Paul Ingrassia, a veteran
> Wall Street Journal reporter who has written about Detroit over the
> years but maintains his sympathy for the human beings whose lives were
> crushed by this vast systemic failure.
>
> In his effort to isolate what went wrong, Ingrassia goes back to the
> early 20th century, when Detroit was a ?Mecca for automotive
> entrepreneurs? such as Henry Ford. Things had clearly gone downhill by
> the 1970s, when Detroit?s quality standards suffered: cars such as the
> Chevrolet Corvair and Ford Pinto had reportedly broken down and exploded. >
A Corvair hasn't been made in about 45 years. A Pinto hasn't been made in about 35 years. Pretty bad examples for using America's "lack of quality standards."
OTOH, Toyota has made millions of light trucks with rusting suspension parts in the past 5 years.
In the past couple of years, they have sold millions of vechicles with sludging engines.
Unless they have already stopped production, they have made vechicles with sticking throttles in the past half hour.
I really have to laugh when idiots try to compare the failures of American nameplates nearly 50 years ago to those that Japan made last week.
Maybe Kaizen is not what it is cracked up to be.
And maybe a good American translation could be "has been."
There were, however, warning signs before that, when Detroit?s early
> focus on technology began, by the 1950s, to give way to an obsession
> with marketing and design. Ingrassia makes an entertaining journey into
> the history of tail fins. In 1948, these were borrowed from a Lockheed
> fighter by Harley Earl, GM?s chief designer, leading to a stylistic arms > race.
>
> One could trace it back further. Ingrassia?s account led me to wonder if
> GM was an aberration from the start. It sounds like heresy to even
> suggest it: business schools still study how Alfred Sloan turned Billy
> Durant?s rag-tag collection of brands into the epitome of the
> professionally managed US corporation.
>
> Sloan was, as Ingrassia says, ?low-key, methodical and prudent? and
> shaped GM into a portfolio of car brands, including Oldsmobile, Cadillac
> and Buick, intended to serve ?every purse and purpose? in the US postwar
> market. He also pioneered techniques of marketing and design ? the
> latter under Earl ? that lured customers away from the boring,
> technology-oriented Ford, with its black-only Model Ts. GM overtook Ford
> and became the car industry?s dominant institution.
>
> Yet Sloan?s vision of turning cars into dream machines, embodiments of
> their owners? aspirations, left a gap that the Japanese, and later
> Korean, automobile companies later exploited. Unfortunately, Detroit
> came to believe that sizzle sold, while technology and reliability were
> of secondary importance.
>
> Two other factors made Detroit vulnerable. One was its provincialism.
> Michigan became a one-industry state, dominated by the Big Three and
> hundreds of auto parts suppliers. It became unthinkable that auto
> companies could be run by anyone but Midwestern ?car guys?.
>
> A second vulnerability was the grip of the United Auto Workers (UAW)
> union, led by Walter Reuther, who exploited the complacency of the Big
> Three in the 1950s and 1960s, when money was flowing, to hammer out
> labour deals that later produced vast pension and healthcare liabilities. >
> Such forces not only made Detroit underestimate the Japanese invasion
> but also prevented it from responding effectively when it woke up. The
> Big Three maintained the comforting mantra that the plain, reliable cars
> being built by Nissan and Toyota ? the Model Ts of their day ? were
> alien to American tastes.
>
> Ingrassia describes the moment in 1979 when Detroit should have ceased
> kidding itself: when Honda built its first US plant in Ohio and showed
> that American workers could make high-quality cars. It was not a matter
> of nationality, it turned out, but of good management.
>
> The SUV boom of the 1990s brought a stay of execution, allowing the Big
> Three to prosper by switching from a losing struggle to produce decent
> cars and instead make bulky, highly profitable, light trucks. Eventually
> this avenue would be closed off by surging oil prices.
>
> The tragic figure in this account is Rick Wagoner, an amiable,
> intelligent executive who was appointed chief executive of GM in 2000
> and eventually led it to near-bankruptcy. Wagoner baulked at confronting
> GM?s structural problems head-on, and instead tried to make the best of > them.
>
> Such complacency in the face of trouble finally backfired at last year?s
> disastrous hearings in Washington at which the Big Three?s chief
> executives ? and the head of the UAW ? arrived on private jets to plead
> for a bailout of $25bn and were unable to answer even basic questions. >
> Despite this, GM?s board continued to back Wagoner until he was fired by
> Barack Obama as the price of a government bailout. ?GM executives had
> come to believe that solving their problems was impossible and living
> with them was inevitable,? Ingrassia writes.
>
> The question now is whether outsiders, helped by debt-shedding
> bankruptcy (resisted by Detroit until the end) can do better. Fritz
> Henderson, Wagoner?s successor, has been pushed out by Ed Whitacre, a
> former chief executive of AT&T and now GM?s chairman. Ford is being run
> by Alan Mulally, a former Boeing executive, and Sergio Marchionne, the
> head of Fiat, has taken over Chrysler. The line-up in Detroit, redoubt
> of the Midwestern ?car guys?, is now one telecoms guy, one aerospace guy
> and one Italian.
>
> A changing of the guard may not be enough. Ingrassia shows convincingly
> how Detroit?s problems built up, even during decades when it seemed to
> be doing well. It allowed Asian and European companies to shove it aside
> in its own heartland, and now the Chinese are coming.
>
> Detroit was not always a basket case. It was the Silicon Valley of the
> early 20th century, a crucible of US product innovation and flair. All
> good things, however, come to an end.
>
> --
> Civis Romanus Sum