Was it worth it?

We hocked the entire US supply chain to the Chinese for some granite countertops and a box set of DVDs.

It’s not an investment any more than the public cleaning up toxic waste left behind by that company you just made profits from.

Except in this case, most of the investors were real idiots because they ended up losing everything in the bankruptcy.

Some folks have bought 2-3 non-hybrid cars since hybrids were introduced. People are generally bright… So why did nearly all of them not by a hybrid?

Hybrids are maybe on their third gen at most. Smartphones have been around for about as long in absolute time, and given their dev cycles, are on about 10 gen or more, and their penetration is not absolute.

Even some thing as successful the “internet” was around forever before it became mainstream.

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What is so significant about a hybrid that I would dive in head first?

For not that much more $, you can get significantly better mileage. Cars are not computers, and a hybrid is just one aspect of car tech, so I’m not sure why you’re expecting magic.

Hybrids have been sold for over 10 years… If we are still in the early adopter phase, then something is wrong.

Some folks have bought 2-3 non-hybrid cars since hybrids were introduced. People are generally bright… So why did nearly all of them not by a hybrid?

Also the iPhone is PERFECT for someone of limited means. Based on who I see walking around with them, poor folks snapped them up early and often. They can buy one device for much less than a laptop costs and do 90% of the things that folks would do with a full computer. They also get a portable MP3 player, portable GPS and a whole host of other things that a laptop will never be.

What is so significant about a hybrid that I would dive in head first? 100MPG average? Can seat 10 comfortably? Zero repair bills? Drives itself? I’m missing the point…

…and TomG…my French is pretty bad ..but what cars are French? As for German: Ja, ich kann Deutsch lesen. I spent 3 months in Europe one nice summer. Mostly in Germany with my cousins. The eldest has worked 17 years for BMW. And unless there’s another Toyota somewhere the one I know of lost ‘7+’ billion in the 1st quarter. That at a time when Hyundai / Kia / and Volkswagen made sales gains. Please check above chart. Toyota and Honda make they’re vehicles in Japan or North American to a fairly large extent. How about Hyundai. How many plants do they have.
Are there any Volkwagen plants in North American. I can’t think of any. But there sure are in Mexico and Brazil. I know, the answer, hoorah…let’s call the GM, Ford, Chrysler, honda, toyota guys back to the table and tell them they’re gonna get the average of the mexican and korean autoworkers pay. It’s a never ending cycle folks. And i’m not saying we get rid of foreign car companies that don’t use north american workers. Just that they have to buy equal value of our products. X-ray machines, computer programs….maybe they could just pay first the amount that gets pirated each year.
….keep well

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Poor people don’t drive hybrids so I know they
don’t save you money vs. a comparable gas only car.

Poor people don’t buy new cars sold at somewhat of a premium, period. In a few years, even if oil prices hold at the current level, common economy cars are exactly the type to benefit the most from the hybrid treatment.

Prius tends to be bought by the educated middle class like most new tech. Looking for the destitute to become early adopters doesn’t make much sense.

Don’t confuse “cutting edge” with generating a positive return on investment. The secret to the iPhone is the iPhone app store. Nobody else can turn a phone into compass or into an All State claims processor.

Poor people don’t drive hybrids so I know they don’t save you money vs. a comparable gas only car.

My best guess is that middle to upper class folks with cash to burn buy hybrids to be different and/or feel like they are sacrificing something for mother earth. Most are hypocrites as they pull the hybrid into the 3 car heated garage, but as long as they sleep good.. WTH…

Socialism is egalitarian, and it deteriorates into the belief that everyone is absolutely equal (quite different from the idea of having equal rights before the Law which everyone doesn’t have to be equal to have). It’s pure fantasy. Everyone isn’t equal in the sense that they bring the same talents and abilities to the table as someone else.

A high ratio of engineering students in general are Asian, which would explain the situation better than the usual affirmative action bigot rant.

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A long time ago Steve Jobs described Apple’s task as designing and manufacturing products that will provoke wonder and awe in consumers. The phrase he used was “amazingly great”.

That’s apple marketing their wares. It only seems amazing to people with no prior exposure to whatever tech they decided to rip off their version of.

Funny enough, the cutting edge amazing tech products in the auto world are exactly the type that a lot of conservative car guys hate like the prius or volt or tesla, ie. green.

Did we forget that BMW, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and others all make cars in the United States, using American workers, and make money doing it?

When you stop laughing, you may want to download the annual reports of GM and of Toyota. Then take some time to analyze them and figure out how has been making profit and and which business units were responsible for that. Maybe you will notice that the only division at GM with a positive ROI was GM Bank.
Before you get your next laugh attack you may also want to research the hourly wages at Toyota…
Oh, and then you may also want to research consumer satisfaction reports and ratings of international automobile associations (American as well as European and Asian), given you can read French, German and Chinese. If later is not the case you may also consider getting an education in one the countries you are bantering about.

The point I am making is very simple: the pattern of thinking you are demonstrating here is exactly what lead to the situation that the American automobile industry is in. looking for mouse holes and arguments, blaming others instead of critically examining the reasons…

The corporate philosophy of GM is reflected in this pronouncement from the General Motors website …

” … All managers are expected to meet or exceed their diversity goals set through the Affirmative Action Program and initiatives and efforts. Executive representation goals have been set for each GM Sector and performance and targets are expected to be fully satisfied ……”

From a Ward’s a Auto World article written in 2001 …

” … He says since 1988, Chrysler’s policy has been to make half of its engineering hires minorities or women. At GM 57% of job offers made to engineering students last fall went to minorities and women …………….”

See … http://waw.wardsauto.com/ar/auto_high_demand/

Socialism is egalitarian, and it deteriorates into the belief that everyone is absolutely equal (quite different from the idea of having equal rights before the Law which everyone doesn’t have to be equal to have). It’s pure fantasy. Everyone isn’t equal in the sense that they bring the same talents and abilities to the table as someone else.

I’m sure other basketball players work just as hard as Michael Jordan does, but why don’t they produce as well as he does? Differences in talent — which demonstrates that all people are not equal in ability. It doesn’t matter how hard some people work at basketball, they just won’t achieve as high as Jordan will.

In the case of GM, it doesn’t matter how hard some of the employees of GM work, if they were hired or promoted for political reasons rather than excellence, they won’t produce the same quality of work as more talented persons will that were hired or promoted for excellence rather than political reasons. This corporate socialist egalitarianism that pretends everyone is equal is a fantasy, a fairy tale to make everyone feel important. The strive for diversity for diversities sake, produces corporate failure and mediocrity when compared against other companies that have better hiring and promotion practices.

And when employees see that the hiring and promoting system in a company is based on political reasons rather than excellence, it poisons the corporate culture. Why should an employee work their butt off to produce excellence when it doesn’t matter? They will just end up getting overlooked for a promotion political reasons. So employees just do the minimum required and put in their 9-5 hours to get a paycheck. Well, … as long as the company survives.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the socialist East Germany was a backwards, economically and technically underdeveloped country compared to West Germany. They were driving automobiles that were 20 years out of date technically and engineering wise. These corporate socialist/egalitarian hiring and promoting policies do the same thing to companies as counties, only on a smaller scale. Good luck in fixing 25 years of these GM corporate policies.

And GM only has $11bn in debt now? What happened to the other $50bn in debt that GM was carrying? The government cover these debts for Wall Street so they don’t have to take the loss on a bad bet?

Yep.. I wanted the same thing. I’ve bought GM all my life. A perfect client for them.. In my mid 30s, good paying job and I love anything with a gas tank. Currently own 3 cars, 2 motorcycles and an RV.

I’ll never touch GM until they pay every cent back to the government. Even the government debt that was forgiven must be paid back for me to step foot in a GM dealership.

So now we can start a cash burn watch. With a few months of data we can predict when Obama will need to slide them some more cash. I’m thinking within 12 months. Maybe less depending on how high the unemployment #s go.

I just didn’t get the feeling that they really addressed a significant part of the cash burn problem in Ch. 11. It feels like they just diffused all the debt time bombs that were out there for the next few years.

The ONE tool they had left was Ch. 11 and they blew it…

Exactly! I wanted to see a restructured GM that made a dozen high volume Chevrolet models at a profit plus a few interesting unique models. They don’t have to be RWD performance models, but I’d like to see interior plastic that looks at least as good as the stuff used in my 10 year old Honda plus and exterior with some of the styling magic of the 60s. Chapter 11 was GMs one shot to get rid of the redundant rebranding gone wild BPG sales channel and tell the UAW to go pound sand. Yes they also need to cut some dead wood out of management, but they don’t need a bankruptcy judge to help clean out Ren. Cen. Instead of a clean start, the government backed Chapter 11 injects taxpayer money and restarts the GM Death Watch.

Tempting…

On a serious note, no. I do think that, for the good of the economy as a whole, that the decisions that need to be made ought to be made more quickly. Renault’s restructuring in the 1980s is the model I was pointing to, and Louis had been gone for forty years at that point.

Chrysler’s path was actually quite quick and I think we’re all the better off for it now that the company has direction. There was very little of the kind of “too many cooks” behaviour we’re seeing in the handling of GM, it’s creditors and it’s dealers—something we’re seeing because the government isn’t acting quickly and wholeheartedly, but is dithering and acquiescing to other parties.

CNN ran the comment “GM reinvents itself in 40 days”
They weren’t able to do so in 40 years, now they do it in 40 days? That would be a grand joke if it weren’t for the taxpayers (BTW,not only in USA) having to bail out decades of incompetent management. They didn’t learn in the late 70’s when the Japanese overran the US auto market. They didn’t learn inn the 90’s when the rest of the world developed economic vehicles and now the same management has “reinvented” itself…

IMHO, GM is what it is, a dinosaur best left to do what it is good at: becoming extinct. Or to put it in other words, where is the famed American neo-liberal philosophy? Where is the philosophy of markets that regulate themselves?

On the other hand if GM would disappear, I would have no further case studies of mismanagement (on all levels) for my lectures.

I think my point is valid despite my passport’s having a lion and unicorn on it instead of an arrow-wielding eagle. Americans as a culture have issues with overt nationalization, and instead allow themselves to fall victim to a kind of apparently limp-wristed, backdoor form of it that’s both far more ineffective, and yet nastier for it’s underhandedness.

GM would, I think, be better off under direct, decisive government control, not this four-hundred cooks nonsense.

Chrysler is the only one that I think is going to work, just because they had their management swiped clean and replaced, as well installing Marchionne, who has proven that he is an effective manager with his turnaround of Fiat.

GM has been playing this same old song in various versions for the past 30 some years. Maybe I’m just too cynical but GM is the boy that cried wolf a few too many times. Why should anyone believe this isn’t just another Roger Smith moment.

While consumers are not completely rational actors, for the most part they are looking for quality and value. A long time ago Steve Jobs described Apple’s task as designing and manufacturing products that will provoke wonder and awe in consumers. The phrase he used was “amazingly great”.

The usual suspects of the good cars in GM’s lineup are not enough. Yes, the Malibu is competitive in its field, usually ranking with Camcords in comparison tests, sometimes coming in #1, but what GM has to produce are products that are unquestionably superior to their competitors in terms of value, and have some element of “amazingly great”, some distinctive sparkle that catches consumers’ attention.

Don’t compete. Leapfrog.

I personally think that Canada should scrap its orwellian Human Rights apparatus that is little more than an attempt to suppress politically incorrect speech but I realize that as an American it’s really not my position to tell Canadians how to govern their country.