Bob Lutz was talking to John Batchelor about the end of Generous Motors and if you read the book “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry”, nothing about GM has changed. He’s just been retained by the “New” GM to be their vision guy.
GM’s “problems” were a only problem of perception. That Socialist Media just would never give GM a break. Detroit’s cars were far superior than the cars from other places in the world – all that was wrong was the failure of the American Media to convince people of that.
The slimy sales tactics, the fraudulent practices rampant in the service departments, the overlapping brands all made in the same factory, the 60 year old factories, the resistance to use radial tires, the reuse of cast iron engine designs using pushrods, the UAW workers deliberately cross threading wheel nuts just for fun had nothing to do with GM’s failure…. GM failed because of the NY Times and Barney Frank.
My first brand new car was a “superior” GM 1975 Chevrolet Vega. My first boycott of an American company, lasting 35 years, was of the rat-bastard GM that sold me that superior automobile. Finally, I bought a Saturn … then two more. GM was forgiven. Then GM, in its infinite wisdom, killed Saturn. I just bought a brand new Suzuki Kizashi, all the bells and whistles — one hell of a car. I don’t have 35 years left on planet Earth, but if I did, I can’t see how I’d EVER spend a nickle during that time on a disgusting Government Motors / UAW car. I’d walk first.
Ha ha! The GM “vision guy” left over 35 years ago. His name was John DeLorean.
His departure was followed by the decline of our Big 3 and the rise of Japan’s.
Note to Piquerist: the problems with your Vega were due to other factors, notably UAW thugs, wildcat strikes, and worker sabotage (as cited by Art)… not DeLorean.
That’s a funny commentary by Lutz, because the NYT and B.Frank supported the GM bailout.
Every aspect of Generous Motors (its name in Michigan) supports the left and socialist, top to bottom. Coleman Young would have been out of his ass in Detroit in a day if GM had wanted it.
(Actually, he only mentioned the NY Times – I added in Barney Frank)…. but he’s singing the tune for some odd reason like he’s a right wing conservative.
GM is the best example there is of a a corporate government whore. It was GM’s “vision” of Tomorrow at the 1938 world’s fair that set the stage for destroying the cities by paving them over with freeways, destroying streetcar systems by getting the government to pay trolley systems to replace electric transit with “free” GM made buses, using the unemployment compensation system to cost-shift the costs of laid off workers to other companies, promising retiree benefits they knew they could never afford and would have to dump off on the taxpayers….etc…
In 1981, I moved to Lansing Michigan to do contract work for Oldsmobile. The folks at Oldsmobile were fed up. “Corporate” demanded that all computer system work be done in the Tech Center in Warren, Michigan. They were so overflowing with worthless people that it took 6 months to decide when to have a meeting to discuss setting up meetings. Somehow Olds was able to get the money to fund their own software development. I worked on a system to track “sample parts” – as a new model is coming together, the vendors ship in samples and the engineers test them to make sure the fit, the weight is right, they are strong enough, etc…. and issue revised part specifications and tracked that each revision until the the end of the process when it was time to fire up the production lines.
After that, I wrote about 80% of what was called the “Broadcast system” – as the cars go down the line, a piece of paper tells the person on the line what options the car has, and what that means they need to do (which radio to put in, does the car have air conditioning, what color is the interior, etc..). An important part of this factory was it used Demings quality control model (more or less). Each car was subject to random inspections that the computer chose, not the inspector. Defects would be caught fairly quickly and the cause identified – not letting 50,000 cars get recalled because one person did their job wrong and nobody caught it.
While I was there was when H Ross Perot arrived. His EDS company (that had made its money running the Medicaid billing systems for Texas [Yeah, Perot is an insider too] and doing the back office processing for credit unions. Perot sold himself as the guy who was going to kick GM’s ass. The savings he would create just in processing medical claims would more than pay for the cost for GM to acquire EDS>
I was working with a guy who had worked for EDS way in the beginning who filled me in on who they were and how they operated. By the time you learn that EDS is “taking over” your employers IT operations, it is way too late to do anything about it. The folks in the GM tech center had just recently voted to not be unionized. Perot is extremely anti-union, which makes him standing on a stage next to union leaders opposing NAFTA all the more curious.
So my memory is around 15,000 computer type people were told that EDS didn’t want them – they were being replaced by 20 somehings who would work 80 hrs a week and not want overtime or retirement benefits. They were offered one month of pay for each year of service, up to a year – to just go away. Something around 10,000 took the buyout.
EDS had no experience in the car business, and much of what GM did was people keeping their jobs by not writing things down – especially model year changeover when people pulled out a card deck from their desk to run the once a year jobs. (model year changeover is no longer really a discrete event) Much to my surprise, the first model year changeover under EDS did not cause GM to fall apart. Many of the existing computer systems served no actual purpose other than to print reports nobody looked at – and were just turned off.