Pimpmobile.
Posted on 07/15/2008 7:12:39 PM PDT by Kaslin
Competitiveness: As a venerable U.S. automaker cuts production by 150,000 trucks, a European producer is making plans to open a factory that will build 150,000 units a year. Guess which one is unionized.
The short-term intent of GM's plan is to raise cash and to reassure a Wall Street that is afraid the company that has lost more than $50 billion in the past three years will file for bankruptcy.
The long-term goal is simply to survive.
Tuesday's was the second restructuring announcement in six weeks from what was once the biggest employer in the U.S. and one of the five largest companies in the world. In June it announced plans to close four North American truck plants by the middle of 2010.
On the same day GM announced its cutback plans, Volkswagen said that it had chosen Chattanooga, Tenn., for the site of a new assembly plant that is expected to employ about 2,000 workers who will put out 150,000 cars a year. Unlike GM, whose positive impact on communities is receding, the German company says it will invest $1 billion in the new plant.
The reason that Volkswagen is growing and GM is clawing just to hold on is more complicated than high gasoline prices hurting GM's truck and SUV sales. This is the story of a company so weighed down by a labor union that it's desperately trying to avoid extinction.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
whatta joke:
“It’s a business that, by contract, once had to pay 2,300 workers at its shuttered Oklahoma City plant their full salaries and benefits for doing nothing.”
the best thing GM can do is go into bankruptcy and shed the UAW.
And fire their design head.
Anything less is voiding in the wind.
United Auto Workers would be a good first start !
It's certainly not the cars. GM cars have been North American Car of the Year in 2007 and in 2008, the Saturn Aura and the Chevy Malibu respectively. The Cadillac CTS is up for Motor Trend Car of the year this year. I fully intend to purchase a new Malibu as my 2001 Chevy Cavalier (which I had zero problems) is at 125,000 miles.
It's the union, the bloated management, and the inability to look ahead is what's killing GM. They put all of their eggs on SUVs and pickups instead of focusing on compacts and sedans.
First order of business is making cars people want. If you are in the car business, that’s the first priority.
...and leave that crooked union with the VEBA $$$$ for thousands of retired workers. Bite your tongue!
Lately, they have been. Like when they revamped the Chevy Cavalier in 1999 or 2000. It was a cheap sub-compact, reliable, utilitarian transportation that looked good and was affordable. They should have continued to make sub-compacts and started offering hybrids as well. They got burned by the SUVs and the pickups. People just want a car to get around.
The CTS designer bolted for KIA.
http://www.cardesignnews.com/site/home/display/store4/item124430/
The design chief wants to make everything look like an Escalade. Even the new (horrid) Camaro, which just got de-Z28’ed.
And I happen to drive a Chevy (older than yours) and am through with subsidizing the UAW retirement fund.
That guy oversaw the old CTS. The new CTS looks much better.
Pimpmobile.
Let’s hear it for the “ Corvair”, after we get rid of the dead beat union/ Sink them....
That would be the smart way but will democrats let that happen? It makes their whole union case look bad and we all know that image drives them. I am tempted to purchase 100 shares at this level.
Make that 1000
GM needed a unionectomy 25 years ago.
The big three are waiting for a rat bailout. The rats are sure to provide them cash to help their union buddies. The rats will effectively nationalize the domestic auto industry. We will have a national auto service similar to the postal service. The rats may even force us to buy their cars, putting the foreign manufacturers on the outside similar to the carriers of non first class mail.
It’s an election year and the Dems get nowhere without union support. Expect a bail-out soon.
Your first two sentences I agree with.
I saw figures from a couple years ago that showed that Toyota paid out something like $215 worth of health and retirement benefits per vehicle sold in the US. GM was well over $1000. Combine costs like these with less desirable products, a poor record for reliability based on decades of taking consumers for granted, and poor management and is it any wonder that the Japanese companies make thousands per car and GM actually losses money on every vehicle they sell?
The UAW? You’re kidding, right? What is wrong with GM (AND ALL OF THE BIG ONES) IS THEY ARE DEAD. They dinosaurs and they are just slow about dying. Look around you. What you see on the road today will be gone in ten years, maybe less. The world WAS changing and GM and the rest refused to change with it.
Come on people - we put a man on the moon in less than ten years! Would you have us believe that an electric/alternate fuel car we couldn’t do? No, we made our choices (the wrong ones) and we will slowly die.
But new industry will spring up (for those smart enough) and life will go on after a long period of exceedingly smarting pain.
You may think so.
Problem for your side is that that CTS is one of the few GM cars that is selling like mad.
5K units per month is not selling like mad.
Compared to the usual 500 units a month for Cadillac? No, it’s selling like mad. There’s a LOT of them in Dallas.
.
Cars designed 50 years ago had class and style.
.
Even my Shelby 1964 Cobra 289 FIA
If the rats gain firm control, they will be unpredictable. I doubt that they will try direct nationalization at first. If the big 3 continue to flounder, the rats may resort to drastic measures. It would not be the first industry that they will try to nationalize. They will most likely use tariffs to handicap the other producers. The GW legislation may drive lots of domestic manufacturing to countries with the CO2 restrictions. The tariffs will be applied to drive up prices of foreign goods even when the CO2 legislation pushes the industries to other less green locations.
Cars like yours are now ILLEGAL to make new (except as replicas).
Cars now have mandatory hood heights, deck heights, bumper heights and must incorporate a laundry list of mandatory safety designs and features.
Don’t like it? Fire the politicians responsible.
I know. The government exists to eliminate personal freedoms and confiscate a portion of your life through taxation.
So, pretty much, if you want to damn it, you have to damn all the Chryslers of the late 60s-early 70s. Especially considering that when they've been parked side by side, they look pretty much identical - to the point where people mistake them for twins.
That was supposed to be a picture of CadZZilla.
Ok. I’m aware of that. Did I say that I liked ‘40s styling? Am I supposed to like ‘40s styling. So what’s your point? I thought I mentioned ‘50s and ‘60s preference.
Blame modern laws. You can buy a convertible with no rollover protection of any kind, yet the Challenger and Camaro had to incorporate massive B-pillar to meet ridiculously high standards for rollover protection. Huge bulky cars are more the result of these idiotic modern laws, moreso than anything else.
And if you think today's bloated, gated automatic, retro cars look anything like the '60s muscle cars go buy one of today's bloaters. I really don't care. My last two cars have been BMWs.
As opposed to the bloated, non-gated automatic, originally ugly cars from the late 60s?
You need to see the pic of the old Challenger and new Challenger side by side.
Compared to that, your Cobra is just a bloated British sports car someone tacked some really ugly fender flares onto. :D
Among major car manufacturers, GM is the world leader in the development of a full-range (i.e.,, “Useful”) electric car. The Asian “hybrids” are nothing of the sort of electric cars.
If you weren’t such a moron, you’d have done your homework on the history of the AC Cobra.
Hey, just using the same sweeping generalizations as you were using on the new cars.
Turnabout is fair play, right?
How old are you? Twelve? My original post was not directed towards you.
Exactimundo: ‘The big three are waiting for a rat bailout. The rats are sure to provide them cash to help their union buddies’...well the Fed’s are throwin’ taxpayer bailout $$ are over the place and we can bet that the scummy Unions and GM will be able to get their share...
Who are you to second guess them?
Let the market decide ~ don't denigrate the value of the "contract" clause in the US Constitution or the state constitutions where these guys do business just because one company is run by a bunch of incapable people.
Remember, bankruptcy is a process whereby perfectly suitible assets are given new and more responsible owners.
Here's the deal ~ I bought it for about $15,000 less than the GM equivalent.
Gad! And it's put together with American labor running a remarkably roboticized factory in Alabama.
The other deal with this car is it came in only 3 classes ~ basic, some good stuff, all the good stuff. GM, and other American and European manufacturers continue to offer anything from 5 to 20 different classes of the same automobile ~ the differences having to do with the "options".
Just making the neat stuff into options costs more than the options themselves.
Did I tell you I got Electronic Stability Control? And, I have titanium structural elements so that when it rolls over it doesn't "squarsh me like a bug".
Oh, yeah, it's made in Alabama. An American workforce doing jobs Americans in GM can't do.
Oh, yeah, 34 MPG.
I think Alabama is a "right to work" state. Without a union these guys all think they're lucky to have such highpaying atomotive industry jobs ~ and they're getting a head start on handling industrial robotics.
ok.
but general motors has been on a declining course since the early 70’s—they used to have 1/2 of the market; now they have less than 1/4.
bloated management and unions.
meanwhile, honest working people paid more for junk cars.
so, now, who cares?
toyota and honda did us a favor. it’s called
COMPETITION.
Yeah I see them everywhere.
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