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Originally posted by Nothing But Net
This car is fine... why do the Europeans get all the good ones?
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Because their corporate executives 30 and 15 years ago possessed and used driver's licenses? Not a joke. Quite serious. When US cars were, across the board, no exemption, in 1979, the worst cars in the western world, no top American auto executive could drive nor saw any reason why he should drive.
This from a book by Paul H Weaver:
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When I went to Dearborn, it worried me that I knew nothing about cars - that I didn't even own one. Wouldn't this be a handicap to a rising young auto executive, I wondered? The answer was no. People at world headquarters almost never talked about cars. Even the many colleagues who had risen through the ranks of NAAO [North American Automotive Operations] and therefore had to know a lot about automobiles didn't show it. No one expresses any enthusiasm for cars that I ever detected. ... What did interest my colleagues at Ford ... was the company's position in the auto industry. ... It often seemed that my colleagues would bear any burden or incur any risk than see a competitor gain the tiniest advantage. Issues like the character and quality of our products, or how customers used and felt about them, struck few sparks by comparison.
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Classic symptoms of an MBA dominated company.
Ford has only just recently eliminated the last of the MBA, pre 1981, cars. They still use many pre-1979 engines - probably one reason for violent arguements between Nasser and Ford. But to have world class products requires management for decades that comes from where the work gets done. You find that in some European car companies.