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Can the Auto Industry Retool Itself To Build Rails?
knapper_tech writes "The scope of the auto industry troubles continues to increase in magnitude. The call to retool and develop new vehicles has been made several times already, but with all of the challenges from labor prices and foreign competition, how exactly can the industry retool itself to be more competitive? In light of superior competition facing losses, there doesn't seem to be enough room in the industry moving forward. In the context of finding a new place in the auto industry, the future isn't bright. Calls for no disorderly collapse of the cash-strapped big three and a reluctant congress can only point to an underlying lack of direction. However, consider two other standing economic challenges. The airlines have continued to struggle due to fuel prices and heightened security. Consumers backed off of SUV's due to high fuel prices, and while those prices have eased in the face of global recession, the trend will pick up again with growth in China and India leading the fight for resources. In short, things are moving less, and the industries that support the movement are in need of developing new products while consumers are in need of a cheaper method of transportation."
Read on for the rest of knapper_tech's thoughts.
knapper_tech continues:
"Looking abroad, it's clear the US has far less invested in local and regional rail systems. With regard to high-speed rail systems, the US is conspicuously behind. France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h. China operates the world's first commercial maglev line while the famous Japanese Shinkasen goes without mentioning. In the US there is only one line in operation between DC and Boston with a few more planned as a result of the 2008 election in California.
The traditional barrier to implementation of rail systems is the initial investment costs, but in the context of economic stimulus, such investment sinks are actually desirable. The auto industry has clearly taken note with proposals from companies like Caterpillar for huge new infrastructure projects.
A friend who recently bought a house observed that real-estate prices are on the rise nearer to city centers, where the fallout of mortgage problems and expensive, time-consuming drives from the suburbs can be avoided. Recalling the huge number of urban revitalization plans and efforts to increase the viability of older city centers, it seems as though many municipal governments would also be in line to gain from the added density of rail systems and increased activity they can support in downtown areas.
Putting it all together, it seems like now would be a good time to direct the industrial capacity of the automotive and supporting industries to developing local and regional, high-speed rail systems to provide a more efficient and effective infrastructure basis for US cities while essentially creating a new market where competition from foreign car manufacturers will not be a problem. At the same time, a huge labor force would be required. The task would call for engineers for development, factory workers for manufacturing, operators, and maintenance workers. Caterpillar still gets to sell construction equipment. The inevitable stream of stores popping up around stations would provide new commercial areas. Last-mile bus and taxi services would also have a new place. The list goes on.
Besides the savings in fuel, the US could also gain international prestige and possibly help lead China and India away from our mistakes, helping to stem the rising demand for oil globally and avoiding the attendant international tension. Climate change is yet another win in this scenario.
It seems like we're not exactly headed in that direction, and I'm curious to see what Slashdot readers think of all this. What pieces need to be in place to make the investments pay off? What are additional resources that are required? Can the industries really make such a change of direction? Do we have everything we need in the US? How would such systems work out long term? Would the initial investments be able to pick up fast enough to stimulate the economy?"
"Looking abroad, it's clear the US has far less invested in local and regional rail systems. With regard to high-speed rail systems, the US is conspicuously behind. France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h. China operates the world's first commercial maglev line while the famous Japanese Shinkasen goes without mentioning. In the US there is only one line in operation between DC and Boston with a few more planned as a result of the 2008 election in California.
The traditional barrier to implementation of rail systems is the initial investment costs, but in the context of economic stimulus, such investment sinks are actually desirable. The auto industry has clearly taken note with proposals from companies like Caterpillar for huge new infrastructure projects.
A friend who recently bought a house observed that real-estate prices are on the rise nearer to city centers, where the fallout of mortgage problems and expensive, time-consuming drives from the suburbs can be avoided. Recalling the huge number of urban revitalization plans and efforts to increase the viability of older city centers, it seems as though many municipal governments would also be in line to gain from the added density of rail systems and increased activity they can support in downtown areas.
Putting it all together, it seems like now would be a good time to direct the industrial capacity of the automotive and supporting industries to developing local and regional, high-speed rail systems to provide a more efficient and effective infrastructure basis for US cities while essentially creating a new market where competition from foreign car manufacturers will not be a problem. At the same time, a huge labor force would be required. The task would call for engineers for development, factory workers for manufacturing, operators, and maintenance workers. Caterpillar still gets to sell construction equipment. The inevitable stream of stores popping up around stations would provide new commercial areas. Last-mile bus and taxi services would also have a new place. The list goes on.
Besides the savings in fuel, the US could also gain international prestige and possibly help lead China and India away from our mistakes, helping to stem the rising demand for oil globally and avoiding the attendant international tension. Climate change is yet another win in this scenario.
It seems like we're not exactly headed in that direction, and I'm curious to see what Slashdot readers think of all this. What pieces need to be in place to make the investments pay off? What are additional resources that are required? Can the industries really make such a change of direction? Do we have everything we need in the US? How would such systems work out long term? Would the initial investments be able to pick up fast enough to stimulate the economy?"
I think that SUVs really say it all. An SUV is a gass-guzzling inefficient monstrosity of a car, yet its name "sports-utility vehicle" is meant to convey fun times and yet excellent functionality. Consumers were taken in for some time, but then they realised they'd been duped.
Now U.S. car companies are paying the price for trying to satisfy the market. The market has now moved on, and the car companies are are left with... SUVs.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Industries that are based on building 2000-10000 pound widgets have no particular reason to start building things that are several orders of magnitude heavier and more expensive. The neighborhood Dodge dealer is going to start selling switching engines?
I think not. You're better off asking Caterpillar to start building rail cars.
Besides, the big problem isn't building the individual rail cars. It's building the infrastructure.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Here is an artist's rendition of the new train currently being planned.
A major problem with electric vehicles is the weight of batteries. My suggestion is to build "electric lanes" on major highways. These would supply power to electric cars as they drive along, and so give them more range. Locally in cities, or at the home end of trips, you would use internal batteries.
If you can supply more power than the car is using, you can "charge while driving" and top off the internal batteries.
The way to transfer power to the cars (sliding contacts, induction coils buried in the road, etc), safety, and payment features are left as jobs for smart engineers.
GM used to make locomotives via its Electro-Motive Division (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-Motive_Diesel). They sold the division back in 2005, and I don't see them reentering that market anytime soon, since General Electric now dominates it.
Seeing that they killed the rails, why would they want to build them?
Seriously, Detroit and SE MI used to have trains, cable cars, etc. But they were killed off so that everyone would buy a car.
They wanted to make a world with only cars. They can flounder in the world they made. Let some new business spring up and seize the chance to build. Let the automakers die off.
You have the cart before the horse. Customers define the market, not the business. First rule of business isn't starting with a good idea, it's doing market research and seeing what people will buy (how's that world-changing Segway selling?). If GM can't sell Americans what they want at a profit (cars) how the hell can they sell them something they don't want? The Big 3 should be emulating Honda, not Amrtrak.
The solution is not a bailout, by rewarding the same failed business model, but for the Big 3 to declare bankruptcy, shed their ridiculous labor costs (and spare me UAW's FUD and disinformation campaign, already heard it), and actually start making a profit per vehicle again - like all the other "American" auto companies (Toyota, Honda) have done in states outside of UAW's thumb.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
The problem with the big auto companies, like GM, is that for every dollar they pay in salary to workers, they pay two for benefits and pension plans. Their labor costs are absolutely horrendous. The rest of their operations are similarly inefficient. They're going to have a real tough time competing no matter what they make.
Personally, I say let the big auto companies die. It's going to be a clusterfuck, but we can't just keep bailing them out year after year. Remember, the current dire state of affairs has come about after a decade of prosperity, and this isn't the first bunch of government cash they've asked for and gotten(in Canada at least)! The important thing is to find a way to keep workers employed and parts companies in business.
What is needed is not more of the same incompetence from the big 3. What is needed is for proven companies who know what they're doing in their respective industries to take over the auto plants. It's not very enticing though. These plants have the wrong equipment and the auto unions will probably make all sorts of trouble for them. This is where the money saved not bailing out the big 3 again and again can be used to offer incentives to lure these companies in. Likewise, parts companies that are run competently should receive short-term loans to help them transition to working with these new industries. Government intervention should be used like a surgeon's scalpel. Cut out the cancer and reroute blood to the healthy tissue.
..and solve three problems at once: Zero emissions, doesn't require fossil fuels, and more people will get off their fat lazy butts and get the exercise they NEED to be a reasonable weight and otherwise healthy.
What do you have against bikers? You're so mean.
Agreed. Use Perl unless undef.
I pay $160 for a monthly pass on the local commuter rail line (VRE in northern Virginia). They're increasing fares by 7% next month, and they're still heavily subsidized by both the state and federal governments.
The population distribution in most of the US is simply not geared toward passenger rail except possibly at the local level (i.e., subway/light rail). This isn't Europe, and you can't necessarily repeat the same things that work in Europe and expect them to work here also.
Are you serious? No, really, I wonder if you mean what you say.
Fuel cells are a few engineering problems away from being a viable solution for electric driving.
1)Any problem with the fuel cell unit itself can be solved with the application of money for engineering. It's all solvable, it just needs an investment of effort which translates into money.
2)To the whiners who say "We don't have a hydrogen infrastructure" I reply with this: Hydrogen can be produced ANYWHERE there is water and electricity. Every gas station in the civilized world has WATER and ELECTRICITY. All we need to do is drop an electrolysis station in their parking lot. This can be containerized and done with tractor trailers.
The whole problem right now can be solved with an investment that is far less than the banks needed. Less than the big 3 automakers requested. It would place our nation in the forefront of the energy industry and make us financially and strategically secure for the next century.
Or we can sit on our asses.
But honestly, why? The US has demonstrated that there is little to no interest in pubic rail. Well, there may be interest, but when it comes down to the "money where your mouth is" part of the argument, rail measures have traditionally fallen short (and yes, sometimes at the hands of automakers trying to push their evil agenda of....selling their products). California and Hawaii have made gains on rail projects, but even those are years away from laying track.
Looking at this from the 500 mile view may make this absurd enough to clarify your point: You're saying that the Big 3, a group of companies that have either A. Inepted themselves to bankruptcy at the hands of idiotic management and/or greedy workers or B. collapsed as lines of credit disappeared and their customers easy access to the means to purchase their respective products vanished should.........completely leave the industry they created and rebuild themselves as the primary suppliers of a product that is:
1. Already dominated by foreign (or domestic. Hi GE!) suppliers who are already producing fine products
2. Outside the scope of what these companies have built in the last 50-ish years
3. So limited in demand there is a market for at most a few thousand of these items over the next decade, for companies that have been producing millions of a particular product,
4. Not a priority for a nation whose infrastructure is dominated by products these companies currently produce.
Yeah...Not gonna happen.
The Big 3 aren't the ones having problems. The AUTO INDUSTRY is having problems. Every manufacturer of automobiles has seen the sales numbers drop (at best) by 20% a month for the last three months. Even the industry's anointed "do-no-wrong, their shit smells like fresh cinnamon buns" companies Toyota and Honda are taking beatings. Hell, Toyota is going to take their first loss EVER. EVER. The Big 3 were in a bad spot because they were left holding the bag when gas prices skyrocketed. They were making what the public wanted, and were getting fat. Shame on them. Toyota and Honda benefited from their innovations, and the Big 3 have now gone into full chase mode. For the previous years, Toyota was chasing the Big 3 in the SUV and Truck market, and were getting their asses handed to them.
I do have to chuckle at the backlash against the UAW. The UAW is evil because they "bent the big three over the table during the fat years" by demanding profit sharing, and reaping fat bonuses for their workers. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is evil because they don't provide benefits, make employees work unpaid overtime, and their management gets fat bonuses....
(I'm not too interested in the debate about wage disparity and the cost of labor vs the cost a car, I just find it funny that when a company doesn't provide something, the company sucks, but when a union bargins for that same thing for employees, they're being greedy assholes.)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I agree with the first paragraph... I have no desire to wait around for a train to show up. Of course, the submitter of the story wants us all to live in urban environments, but alas, this is not the case for most of the US.
The second paragraph is flame-bait. No links? Foreign car manufacturers even in the US are subsidized far more than US counterparts. That's not FUD, it's a simple fact. Inside the US, they are subsidized.
"Spare me?" Is that an argument? Mod this down.
This Fox News meme about "government programs causing the great depression" is ignorance in action. It only showed up recently as some Rovian talking point.
Fact is that it was a combination of poor free market regulation and then the Dust Bowl disaster that threw things into disarray.
Try getting facts from someplace other than the Morning Zoo Croo.
In American industry, the more unreasonable the request, the better the engineers and workers assigned to the problem like it. American White and Blue collar labor loves and lives for the "moon shot" - we don't know how we'll do it, the current state-of-the-art says we can't do it, and we've got an irrationally short timeframe to do it in. Out of our way, we'll freakin' do it.
This is reflected in the Aerospace industry, in Silicon Valley, and even in Detroit. Ford asked their engineers and UAW workers to build a hybrid. They built one, then two hybrids that beat the everloving hell out of the Japanese models.
Here's the deal, tho... if Ford didn't have an "outsider" CEO, a guy who came from Boeing, it would never have been done.
There is a class of employee in Detroit who refuses to see the writing on the wall. Who refuses to alter the way they've been doing things for decades, convinced of their inherent superiority.
Not the UAW line workers. Not the pencil-pusher engineers. The management. The MBA miracles who have, in concert, done their damndest to run the US auto industry into the ground.
The engineers love a challenge, and American engineering stands for itself - from the original Model T to the Apollo Program to the Apple II. The workers stand for themselves, Union or not - Ford (Union) and Honda (Not) get about the same productivity from their American factories, and at the same cost, and it's a hell of a lot better than even the Japanese factories. (The problem facing the Big Three is actually =overproduction= - their factories churn out too much product that no-one is buying, because the product is crap, as mandated by MBA Miracles.) The Unions take pride in their work... you don't hear much about "those shoddy Boeing Jets", despite being engineered and made by Union members.
The management, the "money-men" - they all suck. Universally. This is the same class of management pros who ran Wallstreet into the ground. Fire them all, and put an engineer or a union boss in charge - I can guarantee a better product at a lower cost.
France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h.
Not quite; 574km/h was the maximum speed obtained on a special test run, using a train consisting solely of power cars (i.e., no passenger cars), with modified electrical systems and a special raised voltage, just to demonstrate the theoretical possibilities. The maximum speed day to day is 320km/h.
Not that that invalidates the rest of the article; passenger rail in the US is lagging behind the state of the art and, in many cases, behind the state of the practice (witness the state of Amtrak, which makes Britain's post-privatisation railways look like a model of efficiency).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just made a weekend trip from western ma to buffalo. About 350 miles. Round trip was over $130 dollars round trip, travel time was 9 hours. Plus all the before and after time dealing with a station, taxi/parking, etc
Even in my Jeep Liberty getting ~22 mi/gal it ended up being less than $100 including tolls. And this was when gas was over $1 more than it is now. Travel time was a smidge over 5 hours. Plus, when I decided to sleep in an extra hour before my return leg it wasn't a big deal. And when I got there I didn't have to worry about how I was going to get around for the weekend.
And this was just for me. If I had another 2 or 3 people in the car the train would never be cheaper even at $10 gas and chances are someone would have a better travel car than I have.
Now don't get me wrong. I tried, and really wanted the train to work. But it simply didnt for me. And where the price to drive stays pretty much the same when adding passengers, trains just start to add up more.
And this isn't just a US thing. On my company trips to northern France we would have people from other plants in France meet us. The furthest being Dijon, a pretty good 6-8 hour drive. Across the board they almost always avoided taking the train and preferred to drive. Especially if it was 2 or more people. It was simply cheaper, faster, and simpler. Outside of Metro areas I simply think trains are overrated.
Rail has been a popular environmentalist cure for traffic, pollution and fossil fuel use since at least the Arab oil embargo of 1972.
The issues which have prevented its universal adoption across the United States are still here.
Don't hold your breath on rail.
You know, as much as we've heard about the auto industry in the last few months, and their ailments, as well as endless ad nauseam fixes, there are a few things that *NOBODY* wants to talk about here, at least no one involved.
First off, tage a gander at CAFE regulations, or the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards set by the EPA in the US. This is something which, of course, was instituted after the Oil Crisis in 1972. In theory, its a nice noble set of standards for regulating better fuel economy in the US.
Now, in spite of the fact that these standards are something of a joke (they haven't changed a bit since 1992, and have only been increased a grand whopping total of 9.5 MPG since they were instituted over 30 years ago), there are a few peculiarities in the enforcement of these which, I think, are specifically causing or have caused the problems the Big 3 face today, and, in fact, were specifically caused by Congress and the Clinton Administration.
Now, buried within these standards is a little rule called the Two Fleet Rule. Essentially, what it says is that the foriegn produced cars imported by a company to the US are a different "fleet" from the domestically produced cars. It goes further to say that, in fact, if a car company (by default the Big 3) want to be considered "domestic" producers that the cars they produce in the US are, in fact, the only ones that count for their inclusion in the CAFE regulations.
Now, this has some nasty side effects, the biggest being that, in order to be considered "domestic" car producers, the Big 3 were actually forced to manufacture all of their vehicles in the US, regardless of whether or not they could actually afford to sell said vehicles at a profit. In other words, this "2 Fleet Fule" was a very specific sop directly to the Auto Unions and forced the Big 3 to produce and sell their economy cars a loss for 2 decades. Not only that, but since they were actually losing money on a huge percentage of sales, they were forced to concentrate production on the most profitable lines, namely SUV's and Minivans. Which worked great, sort of, for a decade or so. Until the public decided that a) gas was too expensive to spend in a gas guzzling vehicle, and b) the enviroment matters.
So, a downturn in large vehicle sales causes a double whammy against the Big 3, in that they can't afford not to make them, and the fact that they still have to produce a significant amount of small vehicles to sell at a loss since they can't make a profit anyway. Not only that, but they can't make a profit on increased sales of economically viable vehicles as those were already selling at a loss...
Sucks to be them.
So we need to blame government, specifically the Democrats but I believe the measure had decent bi-partisan support, for this mess. By giving a few people job security, they've endangered the well being of an entire industry.
Oh, and these are the same people we're trusting to solve the mess...
What could possibly go wrong?
Bill
Look, an auto company would have been a fool not to tap into the SUV fad--it was quick, easy money. The problem was only a fool would have seen SUV's for anything but a fad. A smart auto company would have pimped SUV's for as long as the fad lasted, but all the while plan for something else once the fad goes away.
The US automakers seemed to have thought SUV's would be a long-term trend and not a short term "cheap gas" fad. They put all their eggs in the SUV basket and forgot about the whole "long term" thing. Now they are Screwed with a capital S.
Maybe this business model doesn't work anymore. Maybe smart auto companies will engineer business processes that don't require 5 years of re-tooling between models.
Seeing as how they are making said cars on our soil, we just kick them out and re-purpose the plants to make stuff.
There are very good arguments for creating a "floor" to gas prices to a) stabilize oil prices and b) encourage domestic companies to create replacements.
Unknown to most of the people who've commented so far, freight rail in the US is making a big comeback. US rail traffic in ton-miles has doubled since 1980. LA opened the Alameda Corridor a few years ago, with three tracks in a trench, like a freeway, across LA from the port to connections to the rest of the US. Most major railroads are upgrading capacity. The work often isn't highly visible, because the upgrades are heavier rail, better ballast, better signaling systems, better locomotives, and better rolling stock. But it's happening.
Chicago is the bottleneck in the US rail system. A deal is about to close under which Canadian National will take over U.S. Steel's old railroad and upgrade it to route traffic around downtown Chicago. Suburban residents are bitching.
As an engineer, it drives me nuts to watch someone troubleshoot the wrong problem. American auto makers have no problems competing outside the USA. Why? Well, they are not subject to asinine CAFE standards, congressional regulations and miles and miles of red tape that have been added on to BIG EVIL AUTO MANUFACTURERS by the US Congress. Not to mention that each car made is heavily taxed at every level, from the top to the bottom. The feds, the state and local governments soak the BIG AUTO companies, they've been doing it for years, and now they've finally killed them.
It is also the Unions. Did you know that GM has roughly 90,000 workers, yet provides health coverage for nearly 10x that? Yes, nearly a MILLION people are getting lifetime health insurance benefits because of the Auto unions squeezing the tit of BIG AUTO, "those big evvvvvil auto bastards that make billions of dollars"... well, the auto unions should be jumping with glee, they've been working to kill the industry for decades just to prove that they hold all the power. Well, they proved their point and in doing so they have killed the goose - and we all know what that means; no more golden eggs. Today, GM is nothing more than an HMO health care provider that just so happens to have a side business of making cars. People blame the auto makers for signing the contracts allowing such generous compensation. However, what they do not realize is that the auto unions threatened massive amounts of immediate pain (strikes) for a labor contract that would meet with disaster in 10-20 years. The industry has had a gun to its head for the past 30-40 years, I just can't believe it took this long to kill them.
Every single other industry in America, when faced with similar treatment (Big EVVVVil oil, or evil [insert industry here]) they simply pulled up stumps and moved their industry overseas. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out when you're not wanted. Big auto doesn't have that luxury of moving away.
It is the foreign car makers that do not have to comply with CAFE standards, they're doing just fine. Nobody makes big, rugged hard working vehicles like the Americans can. People WANT to buy American vehicles, if they weren't so expensive due to regulations, taxes added to production costs, and union overhead added on to the sticker price of each vehicle.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
...have been in CANADA. Where they don't have to pay for crippling, expensive, private health insurance. The workforce in Indiana, Kentucky and Alabama are also of such poor quality there (low education level) that they have had to stoop to pictogram instructions at work stations. And Canada? High literacy rate, great quality workforce.
Time to get back to basics...invest in educating our populace and cease to be the last industrialized nation without some sort of guaranteed health care for all. Otherwise the rest of the world will continue to eat our lunch.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Fact: We have far more space to cover than most countries, and we cover it with highway, not rail. The auto industry knew, and knows, this. The problem is simply that the means of propulsion is in transition. Peak oil (see chart) seems to have pretty clearly passed, and even if it hasn't, geopolitical issues are having the same effect. So motive power is really the key issue here.
What Detroit needs to do -- and what I think it will be forced to do -- is convert to long range electric vehicles, that's all. Light through heavy. That's what the environment needs, that's what petroleum product availability will require, and that's what works with the US infrastructure.
They can do this. It's all about the power sources. Batteries are getting close to what we might be able to put up with, and the promise of ultracaps is still somewhere over the horizon (and if it ever gets here, that'll pretty much be the end of batteries.)
As for rail, land is too expensive / valuable in the US for any real rail development. Look at the highline, an east-to-west rail passage that is extremely busy; but no amount of congestion has been able to get the rails or the government to invest in a second line so that they don't have to delay trains by side-tracking them to spurs to let one train pass by another. This is where they already own the right of way. Nothing is going to get them to open new right of way. Financially speaking, it is incomprehensible.
Electric is the coming thing. Petroleum, hydrogen, hybrid, ethanol, all these will fall by the wayside, because nothing can compete with the distribution system or the mass efficiency of large electricity generating stations. Even petroleum produces far more power in a central electric generation situation, even accounting for transmission losses (which are not as high as most think) than it does being consumed on a per-car basis. But that's not the kicker; the kicker is that we can transition to any mix of any type of generation we want once the transport system is electricity based, because any type of electricity generation system can add power to the entire grid. That means a measured transition to nuclear, solar, wind, wave, geothermal, anything reasonable that comes along.
The problem - as always - is getting US concerns, both political and corporate, to invest in systems and ideas that extend beyond the next quarter, or at most, fiscal year. Everything is about the next quarterly report or the next election. The obvious weight, horsepower, pollution and efficiency advantages of electric should have anyone with any sense investing their heads off. Detroit will get the message eventually. That, or they'll die. And in that case, we'll have a whole new industry springing up, good riddance to the old.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They're not, much in the same way it'll be a cold day in hell before I'm a GM customer again.
I grew up on a farm. We drove all sorts of GMC/Chevy trucks, because they were what we needed to get the job done. Sure, they broke down, but they were the best option available.
I continued being a loyal GM customer through college and into my professional life. Each one was a progressively more annoying piece of junk. Each generation found more bells and whistles added (that often broke) without going back and fixing the powertrain / steering issues that had plagued the previous generations. Basically, rather than focusing on what was really important, they kept adding crappy "features".
Finally, with my 2001 Yukon having chronic steering and transmission issues that started right after the warranty was up and costing me a grand or so in repairs every 10,000 miles, I bought a Honda. Just a little used 95 Civic as a commuter car that I bought for $3k. I was hooked - the damn thing was simple, without many of the extras to which I'd become accustomed, but it ran. And ran. And ran. It seldom ever needed maintenance, and usually when it did, it was cheap and easy to fix.
I still have it. It now is closing in on 300k miles with the original engine and transmission. I do scheduled maintenance, and it mostly just runs. I now have a CR-V and an S2000 backing it up, and you won't find a GM product around. My Yukon is gone, my Pontiac is gone, my wife's truck is gone, and I don't even look at what they're offering these days because they haven't learned to concentrate on the basics yet.
My parents, back on the farm in Iowa, have learned the same thing. The troublesome GMs and Fords are gone. In their place are Toyota trucks and Honda/Acura cars.
GM & Ford, hear this: Build a car that is first and foremost fundamentally sound, and then look at which of those "features" you really should offer.
It's 'you're', not 'your'.
-- Cheers!
Yay, more "blame the unions".
how about you read more from others in this response column who have noted that, at triple the wage union workers have right now, the cost of labor would still only be about 2k per car.
for an economy car, that leaves about 8k left. .. now let's get down to reality, in which labor is only about 600, and even if they used slaves the difference in costs would be.. *fanfare*.. 600 bucks less!
Do keep blaming the unions though for corporate's incompetence at engineering small, light, fuel efficient cars. No, that doesn't mean sacrificing that american tradition of visceral driving either. Japanese sports cars run on in-line 4's and 6's, and go faster on half the gas through competent engineering.
Stop blaming the unions.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
While I agree we (americans) have bought way too many SUV's and trucks for image sake, why does everyone blame the big 3? Hello. Have you seen a toyota sequoia? A nissan titan? Even honda's pilot ain't very efficient. Don't blame the big 3. Look in the mirror! The big 3 just built what you wanted. And japanese companies followed like puppies. The SUV's were cash cows and everyone wanted some. I think maybe the most popular suv I've seen is the lexus. And there is no way those are used for hauling manure.