Posted on 11/28/2018 3:40:51 AM PST by reaganaut1
Faced with the bad news from GM — which is discontinuing several passenger-car lines, shuttering five North American factories, and laying off thousands of workers — President Donald Trump responded with his habitual bluster, telling GM they “better damn well open a new plant” in Ohio, and boasting that he was “very tough” on the automaker’s CEO.
As is often the case, President Trump’s bluster is unhelpful.
General Motors almost certainly is doing the right thing, as painful as that is going to be for the workers who lose their jobs and for the communities that had relied on — and taken pride in — those factories. GM is moving away from its less profitable (and, in some cases, money-losing) passenger-car lines to concentrate on building trucks and SUVs — which is to say, on the things that GM is good at, the GM products that customers actually want.
The sedan business has long been a low-return proposition for GM, which is following the lead of Ford, which is reducing its American production to trucks, SUVs, and the Mustang. GM has long been neither fish nor fowl in this market, which is dominated at the low to middle price points by Asian, mostly Japanese, marques, though many of those cars are manufactured in the United States, such as the Kentucky-built Toyota Camry. Who is an “American” automaker is an increasingly complicated question: GM’s shareholders live around the world, and many of Toyota’s employees live in Texas. At the other end of the market, Cadillac and other domestic luxury brands have long been excelled by European competitors. That left very little room in the market for GM to find a profitable perch.
GM’s restructuring was always in the cards.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
What car lines is GM dropping? Surely not the Chevy Camaro and Corvette lines?
...like I’ve been saying for over 10 years... everything Odungo gets involved with turns to s*it...since he installed his puppets on the board of
GM (remember government motors?)...
It’s gone to sh*t.
...heard yesterday they’ll concentrate on SUVS and trucks...
Obama bailed them out with the taxpayers money so GM had better keep the taxpayers in mind when they close the plant.
Chances are good one of their competitors would be interested in the plant and labor force.
That the labor force should be a major consideration in the negotiations is what Trump is after, I suspect.
This is not just "Trumps unhelpful bluster" but his watching out for American workers.
What is unhelpful are the cheap slurs hurled by the elitist a$$wipes at the National Review.
“heard yesterday they’ll concentrate on SUVS and trucks...”
Just like Ford announced earlier this year. The Sedan is no more for the Big three.
It seems that Obama’s bailouts didn’t fix anything, they just postponed the inevitable.
This is the same story we've been hearing for 40 years. U.S. automakers can't make money on smaller vehicles. Why? The UAW, of course.
Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, VW, etc. can make money on passenger cars built in the U.S. So could an American company, if an American maker could somehow free itself from its parasitic infection.
Cruz, Volt, Impala, Lacrosse, and Cadillac XTS and CT6.
The Impala, the Volt, some other little chevy chitbox, and I was surprised to hear the Caddy CTS.
GM has cut their own throat.
My prediction is that GM stock goes down, and some Chinese company buys them by 2021. Half of their production line will flip to China in the coming decade.
But here’s the key factor...most of their models were garbage. I’ve rented at least four in the past decade and found them to be mostly lousy cars for long-distance driving.
Now if only American makers would stop making them look like "mommy-cars" (Ford Explorer?), guys wouldn't have to stick with sports cars and pickups.
Folks, you can set your clock by the regularity of reaganaut1’s anti-Trump thread posts.
If ever there was a President whose bluster was helpful, that would be President Trump. Put a special counsel on the whole Big 3 take down by the last administration. There's enough there to keep our courts busy for decades.
>>>My prediction is that GM stock goes down, and some Chinese company buys them by 2021. Half of their production line will flip to China in the coming decade.
That’s already the case. GM sells more cars in China than they do in North America.
The very first paragraph registers classic National Review negative anti-Trump BS. Let’s see how the dust settles after Trump gets through with Barra. Find her name on the list of Podesta favorites and ask yourself whether this is nothing but politicals. Of course, liberals could care less about trashing humanity to advance their ideology. Just look at the abuse of black America and the South Border. I’ll put my money on Trump winning any day of the week.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15616
“and found them to be mostly lousy cars for long-distance driving.”
How can there be any excuse for a car built today to be lousy-driving?
I remember a car I loved to drive: the Chevy Citation. Maybe it was because the alignment guys did a good job.
If this was done for political reasons to harm Trump, don’t you think they would have done it in 2020 instead of 2018? And do you think Obama wants GM to screw Trudeau north of the border, too?
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