They should have gone into bankruptcy a long time ago. There is no news here.
I certainly don't want to see any of the Big 3 fail...but I just don't know if Chrysler or GM can really survive this.
Failing or the threat thereof means most employees don't lose their job AND screwed up top management gets dumped. Attack the reason for failure. It has not changed. 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. If that problem is not solved, then even employees and stockholders lose everything.
But again, need I post lessons from history including 1979 Chrysler and 1981 Ford. Or John Aker’s 1990s IBM? Or 1981 Xerox? Or Spindler's Apple Computer? Armstrong's AT&T? In every case, the threat of bankruptcy forced the only problem to finally be removed. In Apple's case, I am told it was four letter words cast upon the Board of Directors in a stockholder's meeting after Spindler was not removed. The same solution applies to GM and Chrysler's only problem.
How much damage has been done to GM because money games averted a 1991 bankruptcy? Or how many did not know that GM was only 4 hours away from bankruptcy in 1991? Those unsolved problems continued to fester today.
Dear GM:
Build cars that people want to buy. Get new engineers.
Does that include the actual wages of the hourly workers who build the car?
Again, need we list facts that were ignored in those posts? GM does not need new engineers. Just like during the Challenger (every engineer said, "Don't launch."), GM also does not have patriots in top management. GM engineers do not design GM cars. Innovations from GM engineers often appear in foreign products 10 and 20 years later. Even McPherson was a GM engineer. Of course, you know that McPherson struts appeared on superior imports 20 years later ... and GM still would not use it.
Benchmark for stifled innovation is the 70 Horsepower per liter engine which was developed in GM in 1975 and is still not in all GM cars today. Just another innovation that has been standard in patriotic (foreign) cars since 1992. But again, more GM engineer innovations stifled by MBAs - business school graduates who are taught and practice communism.
Let's see. Bill Clinton gave them $100 million in the early 1990s to build a hybrid. Since you are an informed American, then you also knew Ford, GM, and Chrysler had working hybrids ready to take to production before 2000 - the Prodigy, Precept, and ESX3. Where are these domestic hybrids? Stifle the engineers in the name of cost controls. Then get the ignorant to believe engineers designed that crap. Stifle innovation - an MBA solution made even easier when government no longer requires innovation. Wacko extremists even encouraged them to stifle innovations in fuel economy. And then blame the engineers? Are you that uninformed?
We all know George Jr hated innovation. After all, he was trained as an MBA. Therefore no more government pressure to liberate engineers – to permit innovation. MBAs also trashed their hybrids as any good MBA would do. Then blame the higher costs on unions - because so many Americans would believe that myth rather than first learn the facts and numbers.
Labor costs too high? Trivial labor costs per car were defined previously with numbers. I need not repeat what everyone should have known before having an opinion. But just like Saddam's WMDs, so many knew by ignoring numbers. Labor costs are trivial and do not explain the much higher costs of a GM product. Little hint on why you know labor costs are small. How many man-hours to assemble a car from scratch. You knew those man-hours times $50 per hour is how much?
If you do not know those numbers, then propagandist love you - because you can have an opinion and don't bother to first demand numbers.
The sooner GM and Chrysler admit bankruptcy will be the minute that both remove their #1 problem - Wagoner and Nardelli.
Meanwhile Ford has been far more American patriotic. Rumored fist fights between Nasser and William Clay until Nasser was removed. Only then could Ford engineers finally design a 70 horsepower per liter engine. As a result, Ford does not need government money just like two other patriotic companies do not - Honda and Toyota. Yes, all are losing money. But patriots are only leaking money. GM is the busted dam with some of the world's worst products and virtually nothing innovative in the pipeline. Just another paragraph chock full of facts that should have been known before having opinions.
Yes, Ford still has much work to become profitable. They have only been at it for most of the last 10 years. Undoing only four years of MBA management typically takes something closer to a decade. But then anyone with basic economic knowledge or who learned from history also knew that.
Jobs bank - the employee takes training, helps refine better manufacturing techniques, etc. Employees can be offered a transfer to another plant and fired if they do not take the transfer. Instead, GM would have everyone sit on their ass doing nothing. After all, when the boss is an MBA, then more training or fixing (optimizing) a temporarily halted assembly line only means more costs. Innovation, according to spread sheets, makes no profits. Jobs bank problem is only how management (people who despise innovation) makes it most destructive.
BTW, Saturn never made a profit. Now compare the myths to reality. Saturn was saddled with debt that increases the price of every car by $2000. To pay back that debt, Saturn needed a second assembly line. But GM MBAs said Saturn had to first make a profit. Classic Catch 22. Eventually, independent Saturn had to sell itself to the devil which forced Saturn to now sell renamed Chevy, Pontiac etc. Independent Saturn who could sell every car made but could never make a profit - due to GM's top management.