Say It Like You Meme It: Gas Guzzlers Killed Detroit
I could write a book about Detroit’s decline. It’s a complex story of greed, arrogance, intransigence, incompetence, ignorance and more greed. Hopefully, a book reviewer wouldn’t boil it down to “Detroit built gas guzzlers when everyone wanted alternative energy cars.” That’s a misleading simplification that takes us to the wrong morality play: Motown as mustache twirling planet killer faces well-deserved comeuppance at the hands of kindler, gentler foreign car companies. In fact, Detroit built plenty of higher mileage vehicles (just not many good ones) and spent billions (many of them yours) exploring alt-power vehicles. Their product lineup conformed to all US fuel economy legislation (unlike several fine-paying foreign manufacturers). In terms of self-destruction: production efficiency, labor relations, reliability and branding are far more significant. But the big, stupid, insensitive greedy planet-killer meme is more politically effective. Just ask the president’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel . . .
White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, said the plight of General Motors Corp. is “a wakeup call to America” that signals the need to increase energy independence and overhaul the nation’s health care system.
Emanuel, a former Democratic congressman, said GM pursued a strategy over the past 20 to 30 years that left the biggest U.S. automaker in a “very unfortunate position.” The company relied on sales of “gas guzzlers,” never invested in alternative energy cars and instituted an outdated health care program that hurt the company’s business and employees, he said.
Hang on. Does “outdated” simply mean plunderable? The Detroit News reports that Big Ron II thinks Detroit’s suffering makes a wider point: we’re going to bury you with taxes. [paraphrasing both Khrushchev and Obama]
“It’s an example, in my view, of what the president’s saying for this country, we have a day of reckoning,” Emanuel said on CBS’ Face the Nation. “That is the challenge we face as a country.”
Ironically, conservative talk show host Sean Hannity has been using the exact same rhetoric, from Martina McBride’s Independence Day, for years. Chorus:
Let Freedom ring
Uh-oh.
More by Robert Farago
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Re: Emanuel's comments yesterday, he's got no resume in the car business, and, can't be taken seriously on the matter of what needed to fix the US car business. Simply put, Emanuel "can't reach the pedals."
While I have no doubt you could write a wonderful book of the downfall of the Big 2.8, several other authors already did a good job - and quite a while ago. De Lorean's 'On a clear day you can see General Motors' from 1979 (written in 1973) or Brock Yates's ' The decline and fall of the US automobile industry' from 1983 have pretty much all the writing on the wall in them already - and it is exactly the factors mentioned in the article, rather than a specific vehicle / class of vehicles, which is to blame. On another note, in a recent article here, on the cultural deficiencies at GM Elmer Johnson's memo titled 'Strenghtening GM's organisational capability' was quoted. Makes for some very interesting reading - for instance one of the problems he describes is that 80% of the development budget at that point of time was invested in cars, which contributed to around 50% of the sales - he then called for an increase in the development budget for trucks. It's not developing or profiting from SUVs that was ever the problem - it was not having built in the flexibility of adapting to makret conditions and realities, not having an appropriate structure in place, etc. that were to blame. Just like they suffer now from putting too many of their eggs into the SUV basket, so they were harmed by putting too few of them into the same basket 25 years ago.