“The total cost of ownership for a new Detroit branded car is well in excess of that for a Toyota or Honda.”

I can accept that this may be your personal experience, but what is the evidence that this is true across the board? I had a ‘75 Dodge pickup that was poorly put together, but it went 100k and 15 years before I let it die. Then a ‘90 Dodge pickup that went 190k and 13 years, and was still in great running order when I sold it. Then an ‘07 GM van that went 90k and 5 years before a deer killed it. I put VERY little money in these in total. OK, this is one person’s experience and proves nothing, but I remember checking at some point in the past on the Edmunds site about cost of ownership of domestic vs. Japanese products and finding to my surprise that the Japanese stuff cost more to run. I know that locally, the per hour rate at the local GM shops is $44 vs. I think about $80 at the Toyota shop. In my experience, a domestic just needs an oil change at specified intervals, now 7k+ for GM, and you’re good to keep going, whereas the transplant service people seem to want owners to often do this and do that which adds a lot to the cost to operate their stuff. Aside from CR’s suspect and very imprecise output, do you know of any data that support your point?

Very few ordinary people buy new, full priced, Detroit-branded cars in the United States, especially in big cities outside the rust belt. Now, Detroit sells a fair number of cars, and plenty of ordinary people buy Detroit-branded vehicles (that is, including pickups and SUVs). But a very large amount of Detroit’s car sales are to one of the following groups:

1. Government entities.
2. Rental car agencies.
3. People with employee discounts (because they work for, or used to work for and are now retired, or are related to somebody who works for, or used to work for, a Detroit manufacturer or parts supplier).
4. People who get discounts similar to #3 in one of Detroit’s periodic nobody-buys-our-cars sales.

Keep in mind that the number one company in car sales in the United States is not GM or Ford; it’s Toyota. Toyota sells more cars in the US than GM does. Now, GM does sell more light vehicles than Toyota does, because they sell so many pickups and SUVs. But they sell very few cars, comparatively, especially if you consider that a large amount of their sales go to people or groups in the four categories above, and very few of Toyota’s sales go to those groups (for example, I believe that the current promotion Toyota has is the first time they ever offered 0% finacing, while Detroit has done so countless times).

The idea that Detroit hasn’t changed is what rankles folks here in Michigan. Hell, even Roger Smith closed the archaic Fleetwood assy plant and had Poletown and Lake Orion built. Not that yet more change isn’t needed, but plants have been closed to reduce overcapacity, quality has improved, and they’re now designing and building some decent cars (except for Chrysler, who kind of got gutted by Daimler in terms of product development).

The problem is that they pissed off so many customers that people aren’t willing to see any of the changes.

Ronnie Schreiber
Motorobilia

As someone who works in a political environment, I can vouch for this. The more “difficult” personalities tend to be found on the extremes of both sides.

oldyak: There is SO much hate….so much…

I believe that it is anger and disappointment as much as anything else.

It has been painfully obvious for the past 30+ years that the Detroit needs to change.

American cars – up through the early 1970s – were stylish, fun, reliable (with a few exceptions) and great value for the money. But changing consumer tastes, changes in how people used their vehicles, the appearance of tough foreign competitors from Japan and Germany and government regulations required a change in the business model.

This registered with virtually everyone BUT management and the UAW.

Most of us are frustrated at the reflexive “can’t do” attitude exhibited by Detroit. We are also frustrated that the flashes of brilliance – Ford during the mid-1980s, for example – are quickly snuffed out by an industry culture that accepts mediocrity and takes the short-term view.

I think you’re sensing hate where there isn’t any. Disgust with the conduct of management at the big 3, yes. And they’ve earned it (see my post about GM and Saturn two above yours). If every GM car did what it’s supposed to do as well as the Corvette does, GM wouldn’t be in this pickle. And I would love to see them making cars like that. But I am not anxious to bail them out. I think they’d still ultimately go under.
David

I really don’t think that it’s a matter of hate…probably more like indifference.

I actually get the “buy American” slogan. Everybody who’s even a little bit patriotic would love to drive a car that was made in his home country.

The problem is, that this is one of the reasons why the Detroit boys are in the messy situation they are in now. They could simply count on the domestic market, because almost everebody would automatically “buy American”. Well, only to a point. They crossed the line and people started to feel as if they were ripped off by their domestics and slowly turned away.

Today, the cars made by GM, Ford and Chrysler are considered to be junk by many people. If there’s a perception gap or not doesn’t matter, what matters is that this is how people feel. And it’s the punishment for past sins…for thinking that people would always just buy American.

In the long term, patriotism is simply not enough. You need the economic factors as well and the Detroit 3 don’t have them. They burn through billions of Dollars each month.

I’m not talking about ideologues, I’m talking about run of the mill right of center folks who get tired of being called names or being excluded for their political beliefs.

Again, it’s anecdotal, but Jay Nordlinger has written on this subject.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjM2ODlkYTFmNTU0OTAxZmUzZTU1Nzk0YmNiOTkyNmE=
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTY0NDM3NmZkY2Y5ZGNhYjY4YjdjNGZjYzAyMTVkYzc=

The left has no record of tolerance of dissent. As Herbert Marcuse, perhaps the most influential leftist philosopher of the 20th century, said, “Liberating tolerance [would be] intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” Marcuse opposed absolute free speech because it allowed his political opponents to have a say.

Of course there are echo chambers for all political and social views, but it’s hard, for example, to be an open Zionist in most universities’ Middle East Studies departments. MESA, the so-called academic association of Middle East scholars is orthodoxly pro-Palestinian. More orthodox in their beliefs, it seems, than most of the rabbis that I know, and I know more than a couple. Of course rabbis have a long tradition of seeing problems from more than one side*. If you want to experience some hostility, try telling most American Jews to vote Republican. I’ve had relatives that I love dearly literally scream at me about Republican hypocrites when I’ve discussed people running in Democratic primaries.

*How many rabbis does it take to change a lightbulb?

Some say 3, some say 4, there are opinions that say 6.

True, but Smith accelerated the process and formalized the end of the divisions’ autonomy. It was too long for TTAC’s style guide, but I recently wrote an essay on how the Corvette, small block chevy and muscle cars destroyed Sloan’s model of “a car for every price and purpose”. It’s interesting that you brought up DeLorean because he himself had an unintentional role in how GM ended up competing with itself when he shepherded the development of the original GTO. By the end of the 1960s, all the GM car divisions except for Cadillac had A Body muscle cars: GTO, 442, GS, and Chevelle SS.

I find that hard to believe or, if true, hard to swallow. Ideologues on all sides are really, really quick to scream oppression. A lot has to do with how you’re going to project those views: it’s common for people to go in, guns blazing, because they hold a contrarian viewpoint and (this is important) don’t have a lot of respect for their opposite number and their opinions.

Rather like the way we discuss automakers.

It IS possible that certain groups favor certain brands over other groups. Market research reveals this. Would I be stereotyping if I said ALL old folks like Buicks? Possibly, but it isn’t all that far from the truth.

Anecdote: as a result of Japanese conquests during WWII, for the longest time many non-Japanese Asians avoided buying Japanese-branded vehicles.

Likewise, many Jews avoided Ford products for generations because of Henry Ford’s antisemitism.

I never said that Asians were monolithic and I’m well aware of ethnic and cultural differences between Asians. That’s why I used the words “anecdotal” and “seems”. I grouped Asians together because it was shorter than typing “Japanese drive Toyotas and Koreans drive Hyundais”. FWIW, I’ve noticed that Koreans around here seem more likely to drive Hyundais and Kias than Toyotas or domestics.

Like a professor of mine said, compared to Europeans and Asians, Americans are rank amateurs when it comes to racism. The US obviously has its own history of slavery and war, but both of those examples have been pretty much universal across the globe. The US has never had the kind of *genocide, democide, or religious wars one can point to in relatively recent European, African and Asian history (e.g. Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda). Ethnic Koreans who have lived in Japan for generations are not fully accepted as Japanese. Supposedly when an archaeological dig in Japan revealed evidence that the imperial family may have had its origins in Korea (not that unique in the world of aristocracy, George III of England was German and during WWI the British royal family changed their surname from Battenberg to Mountbatten) the dig was quietly stopped.

The Japanese are hated across Asia. So are the Chinese. I suppose like you mentioned, it has something to do with conquest and empire. Resentment and jealousy of the industriousness and financial success of ethnic Chinese minorities outside of China is also not unknown.

*Slavery in the US was not genocidal as the population of Africans in the US increased. It was also qualitatively less brutal than slavery in the Spanish and French territories in the New World. Regarding the aboriginals in the New World, while there was military conflict and undoubtedly incidents of wholesale slaughter (Columbus and the Caribs, as well as natives wiping out settler commmunities) perhaps 90% of natives died from viral disease before seeing any Europeans (though there now seems to be evidence that in South America it was more likely to be a local hemorrhagic disease than European viruses).

Also sprach Carathustra

I don’t agree with all of what you say, but I do agree that it is becoming increasingly difficult to debate issues without a marked polarization of opinions. We see it Canada regularly whenever our health care system is “debated.” Opponents of reform reflexively label any alternative system as “American-style” which of course frightens the ignorant. Any chance of a real debate, and a real exchange of reasoned ideas goes out the window.

The internet has had a fabulous effect on democratizing media, but it has also helped speed the reduction of discourse to lowest-common-denominator levels.

Regarding the editorial: I believe Mulally and Ford have the will, and probably the game plan, to succeed. If they can weather the storm until economic earthquake subsides (how’s that for mixing metaphors?) and their product pipeline starts to spit out these promising models, I think they will be well poised to remain a player in the market. They still have some work to do on the branding front, however. I’m thinking of Lincoln, here, and I echo RF’s thought that it should be taken well upmarket.

Wagoner’s only will is to make his hay while the sun shines. GM is doomed with him at the helm. Full stop.

Now with GM’s and Chrysler’s admissions of impending failure, a firestorm of debate has erupted as to whether Detroit is deserving of government assistance. That is not the question. In fact, there should be no debate as to whether the United States, as a modern economy, should have its own domestic automotive industry. Without it, we sacrifice our ability to determine our own solutions to future transportation needs.

Ken,

Please don’t take this personally, but the above is just plain silly.

Consumers determine their own transportation needs, every day in the free marketplace. And we’ve determined that Detroit’s models by and large don’t suit our needs. (Not me, personally — of the eight cars I’ve owned, five were domestics.)

Toyota, Honda, et el, have proven themselves more adept at serving our future needs than Detroit has. What makes anyone think that my tax dollars will somehow change that fact?

And most of them repeat the same conventional wisdom that is acceptable in their social circles.

Ask a political conservative who lives in San Francisco or NYC’s upper west side about bucking their social circle’s conventional wisdom. I know of people who don’t discuss their conservative or libertarian ideologies on the job for fear of losing their jobs.

RE: Apple.

Steve Jobs has been brilliant at getting people to buy in to his version of planned obsolescence. Create a market niche, then keep the customers in the fold with incremental upgrades and forced use of proprietary Apple apps like iTunes and the iPhone store.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I didn’t say anything about the fact that buying an Apple product is something akin to joining the Steve Jobs Fan Club with a requirement of regular membership fees.

Jobs is smart, no doubt, but he’s not perfect. Remember the Lisa? NEXT? Losing control of his own company?

Steve Jobs is a smart guy. Woz is smarter.

To refer to customer preferences and discontent as a “meme” is to trivialize it. It dismisses the loss of market share as a cultural fluke or bias, rather than as a logical outcome based upon the failure to serve the customer.

You’re mired in the problem to an extent so deep that you will never see it, because you don’t want to see it. Admitting blame is too painful, it’s easier to blame the media and everything else than it is to step up, own up to your own failures, and take full responsibility for the result.

The Japanese entered the US market with tremendous disadvantages. By all accounts, they should have failed miserably. But through persistence, hard work and gaining an understanding of the market, they ultimately prevailed against the odds.

There is a lot to be learned from that, but Detroit is too busy whining to launch an effective counterattack. Since American consumers won’t willingly give them the money by purchasing the products, they now want the government to take those consumers’ taxes in order to provide the funding that their own products could not.

Americans who have defected to the transplants and imports instinctively understand this, which is why they are largely opposed to this rescue plan. The public knows that a rescue wouldn’t be necessary if these same companies hadn’t driven them into the arms of the competition in the first place.

I was discussing the meme that “nobody buys American cars” and how it gets propagated.

If anything, I’d say you have things reversed. It’s all the foreign cars etc. in NY and LA that explains the media bias. That being said, memes have a way of being self-fulfilling as more people accept them as conventional wisdom.

It’s getting tiresome. I try to debunk myths about the $73/hr UAW “wage” and I get called a shill for unions. I take exception to foundational myths of organized labor and I get called a union buster.

Stephan Wilkinson’s comment the other day about the need to THINK was well stated.

So you disagree with what Ken said about Ford?