The bile triggered by news of my departure (last day November 12) brought back old memories of rancorous accusations of anti-American bias. At the beginning of the GM Death Watch, I had to delete several hundred obscene, hate-filled comments and ban dozens of persistent posters of TTAC Must Die TOO comments. Now, after the fact of Chrysler’s and GM’s bankruptcy, there’s a revisionist theme arising. “Anyone” could have predicted Detroit’s dissolution (many did long before TTAC, of course). And, believe it or not, yeah, well everything’s OK now. New GM is kicking ass. Leaving aside that delusion, I wonder: when was the last moment GM could have turned things around? I reckon it was the day that Bob Lutz and Rick Wagoner decided to spend GM money refreshing their GMT SUVs. IF GM had spent that cash improving their passenger cars AND cutting brands (they could have afforded to do so at the time) AND then got rid of Lutz and Wagoner for an outsider like Mulally, they MAY have dodged the bullet. As I told Stuart Varney, if my grandmother had wheels I’d be a trolley car. Still, what’s your take? When was the last time old GM could have turned it around?
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mid 90s, when it was time to replace the J body cars. I think GM at that point said, screw cars, we are just going to sell SUVs in the US. Made them a ton of money for a while too, but it allowed them to stagnate their car development and push it off to the overseas subs. Those got delayed and when the SUV boom crashed 10 years later, GM had two cars it could sell in the US (Malibu and CTS).
My bet would be the lack of refinement and evolution of the cavalier endless run…it started to kill GM that a generation of first buyer saw they’ve been screwed…i would also add the corporate greed that make them take the lowest cost supplier (i had to change twice a wiper motor on my saturn, like after 100 years of building cars they should get that right eh?) Die GM, it’s Darwin law…
the end was inevitable the day they sold GMAC. you can’t burn furniture to have heat.
Mid 80’s, and the Roger Smith era. Smith wasted billions and billions on acquisitions outside the auto industry, that at the end only ate of the resources. The GM10-Project was an absurd display of wasted opportunities. In my mind, if Smith had put those resources in r&d instead of spending, GM wouldn’t be where it is now. To my mind, the last time GM really had a chance, but blew it once and for all.
Believing that the failure or success of a company resides on a few events is what caused GM to fail.
You had a long series of editorial about the corporate culture of the company and the slow decay that destroyed the company from within. Issues like that result in failure, because the culture existed where they thought a few simple tweaks can result in a significant impact.
In reality tens of thousands of minute little decisions caused the failure of the company. Things from how thick the cylinder liners were on a Quad-4 or the amount of laminated glass on a GMT. It’s fun to poke at significant product launches since they’re convenient – but you’ve got to dig deeper.
Don’t forget dragging along ancient pushrod V6s all the way until 2004 when they finally started released the HFV6 DOHC engines.
It started in the 80’s when they looked down their noses at the imports. The last hope was the middle 90’s but Honda and Toyota already had a piece of the pie and were not giving it up. “Hey, lets build tarted up trucks that mimick luxury cars!” That worked for a while. Now there is no furniture left to burn. Or transmission companies, locomotive divisions, heavy equipment, etc…
It wasn’t possible without “breaking” the unions.
If Toyota and Chevy set out to design a $20,000 car, Toyota says, “Ok, first take $2500 off the top for wages and benefits. GM says, “Ok, first take $5,000 off the top for wages and benefits.” You just can’t engineer around a $2,500 cost disadvantage – it’s just impossible.
The only way GM was ever going to turn things around, was by getting its cost structures in line with its competitors.
As I write this I am almost 30 years old. The J-body Chevy Cavalier went into production shortly before I was born. When we were in university my best friend bought a J-body Cavalier brand new as his first car. Eventually we both graduated, got jobs and still the J-body Cavalier was in production. If GM truly had the will to succeed they would have replaced the J-body at least a couple of years before I got my drivers licence. Instead the company continued excreting Cavaliers onto their dwindling customer base.
In all this time GM was still the biggest and most powerful automaker in the world. They had all the resources they needed not just to survive but to kick ass. They could have chosen to do the difficult things that are necessary to succeed at any time, instead they chose to slouch towards oblivion. I feel sorry for the workers on the production lines and the engineers who do the real work of car making day in and day out who will lose their jobs. But I have no sympathy for the executives and managers, the “leaders” who couldn’t lead their way out of a paper bag. They’ve truly earned their failure and I cannot begin to feel sorry for the loss of GM when GM couldn’t be bothered to save itself.
Sigh, I’m beginning to feel old.
The shorter, more direct answer: GM could have turned itself around anytime before about 2002. After that the damaging effects of the cheap crack of sales incentives and 0% financing combined with the cost and long lead times of new car platform development probably sealed their fate.
The ’60s when they made the original bad deals. Someone should have got them an actuarial table.
I think they gave up the last chance they had it get it straight when they brought Lutz in.
His Big personality and obsession for (now dead) niche products like the Solstice/XLR/GTO and others was a giant distraction that cost time and energy that should have been directed to the mainstream products.
Between him pontificating years ago about “dead brands walking” (Pontiac) and then waisting the time on the G8 – Calling Global warming a “Crock” then dumping money into the Volt and then the Gang kicking Jerry York off the board for stating the obivious (eliminate brands), those guys were riding the Luzt jetfighter to elimination.
The GMT thing didn’t help but Toyata and Nissan were reading the same bad tea leaves too.
GM really went down the toilet when, one day, the Powers that Be started taking their customers for granted. It started about 1980. Before that, GM made a decent car for the money. What happened was the Japanese made better cars for the money. Instead of raising the ante with a better product to respond to eroding market share, GM intentionally made their cars cheaper so they could make more profit per unit.
GM evolved very quickly into an incestuous organisation that was only concerned with the people working within GM, not the people outside the hierarchy. The wages and bonuses of the top brass had first priority and the guys on the line also were only concerned with their bottom line. Any attempt by the GM management to improve quality or change anything on the line met with instant hostility from UAW members. A good example is how the UAW went ape sh*t when GM tried to introduce the “Quality Circle” in the 1980s.
While this inward focus continued, GM still believed their own lies, “If we build it, they will buy it.” Problem was people did by GM cars only to see them fall apart and self desrtuct. Instead of responding with better cars, GM blamed everybody else and they are still doing it with their absurd “perception gap” bamboozle.
GM will not succeed. Our money has been wasted. The same people who busted the company in the first place are still in charge. They are still blaming their customers for their failure. GM is an organisation that must die. It should have died last year. The problem in America is that failure is no longer punished. It is rewarded.
I feel sorry for the workers on the production lines
Aren’t they the ones who voted to strike in order to compel GM to agree to contracts that lead directly to GM’s bankruptcy?
When Ollie Johnson wrote his damning memo in the late 80s. Had GM upper mgt or the BOD taken it seriously, some moderate housecleaning could have been done and GM would not be where it is today. Once that memo was ignored and Johnson left, I think that the handwriting was on the wall.
It wouldn’t be too late to turn around GM right now, if there was a solid management team that could deliver a viable plan, and if there was enough cash. But the management team isn’t there to deliver the plan, and it’s hard to get private sector cash when the team isn’t very good.
The beginning of the end dates back to the 1950’s, when GM overextended its brands. Before the war, the brands had been comprised of a couple of models each, with several body styles among them. After the war, that morphed into a sprawl of numerous nameplates and niches.
That overextension occurred simultaneously with another mistake of GM’s decision to avoid pursuing total market share in excess of 50%. Combined, those decisions would ultimately make badge engineering inevitable, given how the lineups were crowding together, which in turn would feed the bloat that kept the company from responding to new competition as it emerged during the 60’s and 70’s.
Too many products led to dilution, but the organization was too arrogant to see the threat. A brave manager would have made the decision early on to either curtail the brands or merge them together. A really brave one would have spun some of them out entirely. Neither happened, of course.
The end became almost inevitable when Jack Smith decided to focus on trucks and SUV’s, to the detriment of the car business. That turned GM into a niche player that would be highly vulnerable to any dramatic changes in demand for trucks, and sure enough, that change in the market is exactly what put the nail in the coffin. Funny how he was lauded at the time for such great management, when he was ultimately responsible for creating the foundations for the destruction of the company.
I think the correct answer is “who cares?”. This is like discussing how Germany could have won WW2.
Pch101:
It is too late, the company received taxpayer money to stay alive. Any “turnaround” now is purely artificial.
jmo,
I don’t believe the disparity was ever that bad.
GM puts about 20 hours of labor in a car, that’s $1400 if you allow the $70/hour figure. TOyota puts 21 hours of labor in a car, that’s $700-900. The difference in wage cost per car is on the order of $700-$500. That is hardly a crippling deficit.
And GM could have easily made up for that deficit with the value of domestic preference. When Toyota and Honda first started in to the US market, domestic preference was worth a lot to GM. They lost that edge when it became obvious that Toyota and Honda were building better cars.
In fact, there’s still a hard core of buyers who absolutely will not consider a “foreign” car and if it wasn’t for them, GM would be out of business.
“I reckon it was the day that Bob Lutz and Rick Wagoner decided to spend GM money refreshing their GMT SUVs.”
I don’t think any statement could be any more wrong.
A similar question could be asked about TTAC. Now with RF and Jack leaving. What could have been done to prevent it. :(
As a system of systems, you have to blame decade upon decade of wimpy BOD. If there is no cleansing mechanism for those who make the big decisions, then the system does not get cleansed.
Ingvar :
September 19th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Mid 80’s, and the Roger Smith era. Smith wasted billions and billions on acquisitions outside the auto industry, that at the end only ate of the resources. The GM10-Project was an absurd display of wasted opportunities. In my mind, if Smith had put those resources in r&d instead of spending, GM wouldn’t be where it is now. To my mind, the last time GM really had a chance, but blew it once and for all.
+ 100 on that…
But I’d disagree that this was the last hurrah. Remember the ’90s, when the Big Three was raking it on SUVs? Instead of reinvesting that money into product, they sqaundered it buying up other companies (or in Chrysler’s case, it was the other way around; Daimler raided its war chest after the “merger of equals”).
Three more blown opportunities that could have made their current predicament a lot less serious: the 2002 Chevy Malibu, 2003 Saturn Ion, and 2005 Chevy Cobalt. Think how much better positioned the whole company would have been for the current downturn if they hadn’t ruined these basically solid platforms with poor execution. Saturn might even have ridden the storm out if it’d had a decent entry level product six years ago.
@RF:
Now, after the fact of Chrysler’s and GM’s bankruptcy, there’s a revisionist theme arising. “Anyone” could have predicted Detroit’s dissolution (many did long before TTAC, of course).
I think many predicted major problems, based on the product, and the recession that was inevitably coming our way.
What people couldn’t predict, though, was the perfect storm of 2008: the collapse of the capital markets, the collapse of the real estate market, and $4.00 gas.
I think Chrysler and GM could have probably ridden out a normal downturn without bankruptcy, but this wasn’t a downturn – it was a steep dive off a cliff.
Then again, like a personal financial disaster, the events of the last year have forced these companies to take a hard look at what was wrong.
Now with RF and Jack leaving.
No more Baruth??? Where will I go now to read of tales of thoroughly irresponsible driving? :) (His car reviews are pretty good, though.)
@Freedmike:
Perhaps it wasn’t the last hurrah, but to my mind, it was the last time GM had the opportunity to stay on top as the worlds largest automaker. If they had done things right then, they could have been equal or better/larger than Toyota.
Smith spent and lost something like 40 billion dollars in equity altogether, money that could have been better spent. Of course, there are other, later “last hurrahs”, but they would only make GM continue as a second tier.
And for Daimler ransacking Chrysler’s war chest. I’m sure Daimler must have lost something in the league of 50 billion dollars on the Chrysler experience, so any resources they raided could only have been a tip in the hat.
But it’s nice to see you agree with me on something…. :)
Thirty years ago, when I was still in my 20s, I was thrilled to be hired for a pretty good management-track job at GM headquarters, the company where I had always wanted to work.
What an experience … I could tell they were rotting from within even then. With few exceptions, the people with whom I worked were unhappy complainers who were waiting to retire and who bragged about how much they were paid and how little they did. Whenever I busted my ass on an assignment, one of the lifers was generally appointed to ask me to slow down. It was like they ALL were UAW members.
By then, the cars were already starting to turn to shit. My first company car was a downsized ‘79 A-body, one of the cars with the lightweight Turbo Hydra-Matic that was always in the garage. They admitted to me that it was a huge problem, but said they couldn’t afford to fix them. They just gave me a new car, of course.
I left after two years to join an upstart import company that today is among the most successful in the industry. My GM colleagues ridiculed me and my boss told me I was making the mistake of my life. I don’t think so.
The downsized B- and C-bodies were then still relatively new and relatively trouble-free (if you don’t count the diesels), but they remained in production 15 years. The 1981 J-bodies were an unmitigated disaster, and the 1982 A-bodies were little better; all versions of these two cars all looked the same. The new 1988 GM-10 cars were to have been the new family sedans — too bad they could only build coupes for the first few years.
By turning out such horrendous sleds from the late 70s to the mid-90s, GM alienated the largest generation of car buyers the country had ever seen and ever will see. The baby boomers and their kids are gone to the imports forever.
If I had to identify GM’s last clear chance to pull up, it was probably when they paid Ross Perot billions for a company they had no business buying, then billions more to make him leave because they didn’t want to hear the truth. Had any of the Pet Rock directors understood fiduciary responsibility, they would have broomed Roger Smith and kept Perot. But I have my doubts about whether even he could have changed such a stagnant, political, back-scratching culture.
The sooner we all accept that GM is dead and our money gone, the sooner we can move on.
I am apparently in the minority, but I still think there is something salvageable at GM. They have thousands of highly skilled manufacturing people at all levels and some of the best auto engineers on earth. What will make it a lost cause is if they continue to let the accountants run the business and do not get rid of the entire tier of top “management” who got them into this fix.
No leader worth a crap would allow the product he uses to be hand selected, then hand rebuilt, if he is representing a mass-market product. All of the current management have done so knowingly for their entire tenure and for this reason alone they should be gone.
Having said it’s salvageable, I’m guessing its 100-1 against them coming back as more than a niche truck builder. The culture of rotten management is so inbred they “did not see this coming” when the event had been choreographed since the mid-70’s. At that time, they ceded the small car business to the Japanese and it was cheaper to lobby for concessions in safety and fuel economy standards than to simply build the safest and most fuel efficient cars on the planet.
I’ll say around 2002-2004. The wind-down of Oldsmobile was in full swing and GM had a chance to realign all its brand with some high quality products.
Instead, over that period they released a warmed-over Grand Prix and Lacrosse, the Cobalt, the Aveo, the Ion, the H2, the SSR, the “not-quite-there” 6th gen Malibu, and absolutely horrible minivans across Pontiac, Chevrolet, Saturn, and Buick.
I don’t believe the disparity was ever that bad.
GM puts about 20 hours of labor in a car
That’s just the assembly of the components – until it went under, wasn’t Delphi also paying union wages?
1971, aftter the NHRA Nationals in September.
After Sept. 11th, 2001 GM aggressively marketed 60 month 0% financing with a program called “Keep America Rolling”.Next up was Employee pricing. Finally it’s been an endless stream of holiday red tag sales. GM has focused on selling the deal and product be damned for the most part.Buyers that demanded quality and longevity moved away from GM. Whatever chance GM had it was way before the endless discount programs.
I don’t think GM could have turned it around at anytime given its internal power structure. Ross Perot tried to and look what happened: too many others in some position of power $$ to vote against him. GM’s bonus system for exec’s (90% still there) and cost cutting for product is still there.
Ford had Bill Ford as the one in power that came to the conclusion that Ford co. needed to get outside help, thus bringing in Mulally. If at some time GM tried that, yeah then they would had a chance, but not likely as stated previously and honestly Whtitcare + Pres Task Force + UAW, etc. can’t do it either.
The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. – Shakespeare, Henry VI.
Shakespeare was wrong. Killing lawyers would be a waste of good ammunition when there are accountants out there.
The beginning of the end came when the Detroit automakers made accountants decision makers. They don’t understand the car business, never did, still don’t. Their nature and training leads them to apply logic to a business that wholly relies on emotion.
In the 1970s, about 25 years after the original Oldsmobile Rocket V8 engine appeared, General Motors adopted a corporate policy of mixing and matching engines among car lines. Many Oldsmobile owners were surprised and outraged to find Chevrolet V8s under their hoods. Even though the Chevy engine was a newer, more sophisticated design, Olds owners were so soundly convinced of the Rocket’s superiority they took GM to court for misrepresenting its product. The matter was eventually resolved, but it was a demonstration of the power of mystique. The accountants didn’t see the handwriting on the wall. And where is the Oldsmobile brand now? And GM. In the dumper, that’s where!
The domestic automakers probably could have turned it around as late as MY2000 when they still had roughly a 50-percent of the market by building good automobiles people wanted to buy at a profit and treating customers fairly and with respect. They didn’t, still aren’t, and will fail because their time is up.
Actually, it was 1969 (actual GM ad):
http://gas2.org/files/2009/05/gmelectric-car.jpg
Volt?: Phhhhhhhttttttttttttttttttttt !!!!
40 years and still spending…
“When Could GM Have Turned It Around?”
Answer: “When Could the Former Soviet Union Turned it Around?”
(this is a rhetorical question. the answer is, “Never”, in both cases. As with the FSU, GM was Hopeless. Their arrogance in refusing to accept any criticism for their ton of huge errors, errors that brought their market share steadily downhill, from 50++% a few decades ago to less than 20% now, and expected to be 10% a few years (the “new” much smaller GM), was monumental.
Early 1950’s.
At that time the European countries were putting in place partly government run health care systems and GM said something to the effect – we don’t need anything like that we can take care of our workers.
This showed tremendous arrogance and a total lack of care about the American people (their customers remember) and it frightened union members making them dig in their heels whenever a contract came up for renewal.
Perhaps when they removed the little “Body by Fisher” plates with their cute little coaches from the door sill kick plates … definitely when they were too embarassed to keep the statement “Mark of Excellence” below the GM corporate logo…
The electric car ad from ‘69 is amazing, and one’s heart can’t help but sink when one reads the names of all the good and great divisions (and brand equity) squandered and divested since that time …
Made me realize that the old saying: “it takes a generation to build a company, another to benefit from it, and the 3rd to destroy it”, is a scalable truism …
SAD, Sad, sad…
Godspeed Robert and thank you for a great site that I read nearly everyday-please keep us informed of your next escapade, I’ll be happy to tag along.
The generations-old ‘rot’ inside of GM as JSF22 points out, is a cultural issue and as such, I believe that at nearly any point over the last 30+ years GM could have turned it around by hiring a bunch of talented go-getters from other companies ‘doing it right’ such as Honda, Toyota, BMW or whomever you think was doing it right at the time. However, GM’s unwillingness to hire from outside, their near-insistence that anyone in a position of power come from within the ranks is what I feel was or is, at the root of the rot. As a GM lifer friend of mine says ” Stu…we don’t make cars at GM, we make careers “…That’s scary stuff if you spend 90% of your day on career posturing and 10% of your day on actual work-Yikes!!
The GM board is the biggest culprit of their failures; they could have made massive changes at the top to the senior management and thus to the culture at any time over the last 30+ years. The second biggest mistake at GM over the last 30+ years was when the BoD gave accounting more decision-making power than engineering had. This happened right after Ed Cole retired in 1974. From then on, Engineering never again determined the parameters of a program-accounting did with disastrous results.
While not fully back from the brink yet,I believe that from what I see and hear coming out of the Tech Center that GM has cleaned out a lot of the old deadwood and is making strides in the right direction. They’re not there yet, some of the old ways of thinking do permeate, but from my experiences dealing with GM staff on a regular basis, it is a vastly different attitude today from just five years ago. I think they are on the right track, but again, I would like to see some fresh faces from Hyundai, Honda, BMW etc…I think they just need a little more new blood and a BoD that gives a damn and they’ll be much better off in five more years than you might imagine if only they will institute a culture that rewards results.
GM’s biggest and longest lasting problem has been its culture and I don’t see any signs of change even today. Having Henderson, Lutz & LaNeve still in place and all their underlings waiting in the wings is a surefire recipe for failure. I don’t know how far back you’d have to go to have changed the culture as it is self perpetuating. If you wanted to succeed at GM you had to buy into the culture. John DeLorean and Ross Perot would be two examples of what happens when you don’t.
Truly and sadly GM doesn’t have a clue how to compete today and they don’t have the luxury of time to figure it out and move forward.
I really don’t think any one point was a last chance to turn it around because the overriding culture would not allow that to happen despite any individual decisions that may have been made contrary to what they were.
GM is a doomed entity which the government will allow to continue until GM is so small it won’t have anywhere near the impact. Then they will be gone as we know them.
After the current management is gone they will be replaced by the same. Of course, doing the same and expecting different results is the definition of an exercise in futility if not insanity.
GM for as long as I can remember was so big the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing which produced disaster after disaster. The reason for it of course is the corporate culture, either buy in or be left out.
It was the 80’s when GM made huge errors of omission and commission that put it on the path to doom. But I doubt that any CEO could have changed course because there were so many well-off and powerful stakeholders threatened by any change from the status quo.
JSF22, I’d love to hear more stories from your experience at GM headquarters. For example, do you know if anyone at HQ ever seriously dealt with the question, “Why is the Cavalier so crappy compared with a Corolla or Accord?”
Accountants are often blamed for poor product, but can anyone cite some specific examples when engineers were overruled by Finance? Did accountants compel, say, the use of Dexcool, or the notorious “rope” driveshaft or the Citation’s awful brakes? GM claims thousands of terrific engineers–what is the evidence of that?
I remember when GM introduced Dexcool, I went to a Buick new car intro for salespeople for the 96 model year and the entire meeting was about Dexcool. I thought to myself at the time, you’ve got to be kidding me, an entire new car intro show and nothing is mentioned about the cars only Dexcool??? Then a few years later Dexcool turns into another GM disaster.
Just another small example of GM think vs. the real world. Can you imagine the reaction of a potential customer if all you talked about was Dexcool? They would think you were smoking Dexcool.
Let’s take a slightly different approach and say 2005. IIRC this was the tipping point when GM’s non-US sales matched or slightly exceeded its US sales for the first time. Also the first year when the profit from GM’s everyone-else operations wasn’t enough to offset the losses in North America. At that point, Rick Wagoner should have run the numbers and walled off the GMNA sinkhole from the rest of the corporation, cleaved off the bits of GMNA worth saving (Corvette, the full-size pickups and SUVs, the LS program, and the Cadillac badge but not the vehicles), carried out an in-house divorce to let the rest of GMNA collapse on its own, and enjoyed the tax write-off.
GM’s downfall is their employees belief that we are to big to fail and I can remember back in 1991 when our regional Chevrolet district manager said that had not JACK Smith taken the helm from Stemple that they would have been insolvent and bankrupt in 12 months.
If you are old enough to remember the 1989 Grand Prix and the 1999 Chevy Lumina were available in 2 door only because according to my sources they did not have the money for tooling up the 4 doors.
This was just after ROGER Smith had sunk millions into Geo and we all know how that turned out. Although I would mind having a Geo Storm for the night to trash around some curves.
Then came Saturn!
Millions spent and I don’t believe that to this day that Saturn ever made any money for GM.
Then they started selling companies they had purchased over the years to conceal their losses. Check it out on wikipedia and see the companies thy have sold since the early nineties, millions maybe billions squandered.
Add Hummer, Saab, Delphi, and you must see a trend of failure.
Christ, how can you let a Saab customer open the hood of their car and see an efen “GM” logo on cap of the windshield washer fluid container and think that that would exude confidence in the brand. Ca mon. Thats just arrogance and stupid. These guys in GM management have been efen the dog for years and riding the gravy train provided by shedding assets for cash and the penchant of the American publics belief that GM’s a good company.
Well in fact it is, it has built over the years some laudable and great cars and trucks and still does. It the efen management that has lead them to where they are. Laneve,fool. Stemple,fool. Roger Smith, fool. Don’t get me started on Rick. These guys have taken a great company and, like a officer of GMAC said to me many years ago, when they bury him they are going to have to screw him the ground.
I’m am very sorry to inform all of you that General Motors is a dead man walking, soon to fall over and be buried by the sands of time.
1966 is when the slide started (but no one knew it): Chevy came out with the Caprice, thus all 5 brands had luxurious models.
1980 when they released the X-cars, hugely underbaked in development.
1988 when they thought the Corsica was anywhere near competitive to the Accord or Camry. As well as investing in EDS and everything else under the sun but their platforms.
However, if they had played chicken with the union in 1998 and closed shop for a few months, that may have set the stage for more reasonable contracts and the possibility of salvage-ability.
Then again the Ron Zarella brand experiment maybe would have extinguished that ray of hope.
They could have turned around in the early ’70s when Toyota and Datsun sales started to take off. They could have had Deming in much sooner (and they could have actually followed his advice for more than a year).
Their downfall was their lack of near-death experience that both Ford and Chrysler had in the early ’80s. Coming so close to being killed off led Ford and Chrysler to have a lot of innovative and well-recieved products in the 80s and 90s (before Daimler raped Chrysler, and before Nasser screwed Ford with his little buying spree and the Firestone debacle.)
Think of the innovative things Chrysler did pre-1998. The minivans, cab forward, they styling of the early ’90s Ram that every pickup maker eventually copied, the Cherokee. And Ford had some hits too–the initial Taurus, the Probe, the Explorer, the Navigator (which ushered in the luxury SUV market, BEFORE the Escalade).
Whenever General Motors DID try to do something innovative in this time period it was horribly executed and turned into a disaster. The GM-10 debacle, the dustbuster minivans, the Aztek. As bad off as Chrysler is today, and for as close to death as Ford came in the middle of this decade, both companies have real bright spots in their last thirty years. You can’t say the same for GM*. It’s just either failure, mediocrity, or piggy-backing off the success of the other two Detroit carmakers.
*MAYBE the CTS, but even it’s initial launch had quality problems. But because of the styling, people largely ignored this and gave it a chance. But I’m at a loss to think of any other really big, category-busting successes along the lines of the Taurus and Chrysler minivans.
That’s very true, GM has had not one mainstream hit vehicle that I can think of in the last 50 years. Fifty years ago their success was based on many brands and models but not one of them a huge hit that I can remember.
As I think about it perhaps the long downward slide started with the advent of badge engineering which caused all of the different versions to lose sales to the point we are at today. Too many divisions, too many badge engineered models and not enough resources or market share to support them.
Yet after all of this they still insist on badge engineering. They are truly clueless.
Mid 90’s because the economy was booming. The economy went in the tank 2000 to many years down the road. Too late for GM.
I think it was right after WWII. USA wanted Japan to be capitalist not communist. We let them have technology and $ and we allowed them to insulate and incubate their industries.
GM ignored.
It wasn’t just GM that died. (I think its dead man walking now)
How many areas of manufacturing were destroyed in USA because of cheap asian imports?
The real question is why GM was able to stick around so long? Why did those lenders let them build up so much debt? Don’t they understand what they were lending to? I Think they should have been bankrupt long ago.
That picture of Maximum Bob or Lutz the putz as I like to call him is a great poster boy shot of all that is wrong with GM.
I still vividly remember the idiot saying when gas was on its way to $4/gal GM’s large SUV sales would be unaffected until gas was $5/gal.
Right Bob, file that one next to your perception gap BS.
The only perception gap that exists is Lutz thinking the car buying public gives a $hit about anything he has to say.