by Jerry on Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:44 am
The American car manufacturers failed for three basic reasons:
(although there's others)
1... Corporate: Greedy fat cats who decided that Americans would buy anything they came up with. They never cared about what the public wanted, and finally when they did... they tossed-out quicky cheap designs that were for the most part.. experimental... and we paid the price for bad designs. Corporate attempted to make the cheapest car possible (especially in the 70s & 80s) without regard to quality of any kind. If it could roll off the dealership lot... that was good enough.
2... Old technology. They failed to invest those billions in robots and good engineers. Of course, even a great engineer cant do great work of Corporate wont approve the budget for a better design. They refused to update factories. They failed to hire designers that knew what the kids wanted. The last men that had a clue about these things (like Harley Earl, John Delorean and Lee Iacocca) were now either dead, in prison, or old coots. So Detroit kept grinding out the same old crap with little thought to innovative design OR more importantly.... quality. After all, cars had a built-in "due date" of 50,000 miles for many years. Why change that? Less cars sold if they lasted longer was their motto.
3... Labor Unions. Let me first state that I personally couldnt do assembly line work for ANY amount of money. I'd rather work down in a coal mine than do assembly line work. Remember that assembly line jobs started out as one of the best ways to feed your family back in the day when there were 500 hungry men applying for one job. The work was hard on your mind... monotonous, boring. The Corporation did little to alleviate that by moving people around to different positions. (The Japanese had figured this out already) And for those maddening jobs that no human could last long at... the Japanese used robots. OK.... like many unions who become too powerful... the UAW has to accept their share of the downfall of Detroit. While they had little say in the design or materials of the cars they were building, they DID help to make the junky cars cost prohibitive. To this day, the American car manufacturers cant recover from the past union agreements. More importantly, a union is great about protecting 10 goldbricks out of a hundred. Add-up the thousands of workers and you have a bunch of people doing a half-assed job. I can remember walking though a couple of plants outside of Detroit back in the 70s. As I walked by what seemed miles of workers, it struck me that 95% of them were watching us... instead of watching what they were doing. Yes.. I know a man can do most assembly jobs blindfolded after months and years. But talk about bad PR! At least APPEAR like you're paying attention to building a quality product instead of never looking at your work. While most still managed to do their job properly, I'm sure some work quality fell through the cracks... where the union would then go to bat for them. I wont even get into the drug problems the factories had to face, especially in the last couple of decades.
4... Quality control: The Japanese were willing to stop the entire line should a quality issue develop. In the 70s at least, there WAS no quality control in my opinion. There couldnt have been. Otherwise, body parts and instrument parts wouldn't have failed so miserably. Most of us older guys remember when it was NORMAL, STANDARD PROCEDURE to take a brand new car back to the dealership in the first week or month to get all the things fixed that broke or fell off. This lasted right up through the 70s into the 80s.
Yes, I'm well aware that the Japanese cars were pretty bad in the beginning. But most of their issues had to do with bad steel, not bad engines or design or fit of body panels. Their bodies rusted out faster than ours... which was almost impossible in itself. But once they decided to tackle that issue once and for all... the Trifecta was complete.
But never forget that there's always somebody out there trying to build a better mousetrap. The Koreans are nipping at the Japanese, the Chinese are nipping at the Koreans as we speak. And the bottom line of the car business is the same as any business... build the best car you can at the lowest price possible. Low employee wages in other countries makes this possible. But low wages alone wont cut it. You have to combine that with QUALITY... and that's a hard thing to pull off sometimes. Take all the Jap manufactures right here in America. How did THEY do it when Detroit couldnt? Simple: No Unions (usually), lots of robots, efficiency of plant design and the assembly line itself. BUT, the COST of these cars is still high in my opinion. Anything we build on our shores, or import from Europe is high. Having said that, I have to remember that the car I'll pay 24 grand for will last me 4 to 5 times as long as anything on the road when I was a young man. I have to remember that we're willing to pay a little extra for quality... which is something Detroit never acknowledged except for it's Cadillac and maybe Lincoln. Even these cars names were besmirched by such offerings as the greatest disaster since the Edsel... the Cadillac "Cimarron".
This thread was to discuss what happened and why... not to gloat. But we tried to tell them for years that they were going in the wrong direction and they wouldnt listen. Now it's too late in my opinion. There's nothing they can do to recover.
