auto industry bailout?

[slug420]

so my friend and I were talking the other day about how awful and mostly unnecessary so many american car brands are....like....Lincoln, mercury, buick, gmc for example. Together these photocopy brands HAVE to be a burden to the automakers and just another example of how they are in the position they are in because they CONTINUE to make terrible terrible decisions.


I could go on and on about how retarded the american auto makers are but I would like to get to my point which is the idea my friend and I came up with for the auto industry bailout. Lets let ford and GM advocate that they need help and need to be bailed out and need money....then when the billions of dollars are ready to go out the door...lets make a decision to not bail out the ******* morons for continuing to shove their heads into their asses.....lets give it to a company that has been at least TRYING to do something INTELLIGENT. Lets give the billions to tesla!

I think I heard they recently had to put their sedan on hold (maybe indefinitely) and lay off workers due to financial problems.....why dont we give the billions of dollars to this american company so they can buy up some of the soon to be vacant GM and Ford plants and start mass producing their electric cars! Helps address the oil issue at the same time...

 

[genericuser]

I'd actually buy the Chevy Volt. It is a darn fine looking car. If it delivers what GM is promising, count me in.

The problem with the American automotive scene is that they are purely reactive. They'll do "just enough" to keep afloat. They don't innovate, and they don't lead the industry. That's why they are in the situation they are in now.

If you look at it right, the Volt is just a reaction to the Prius, more than a decade later!

 

[BlackCherry06]

Like everything else happening lately, the bailout is a story with 2 very important sides. Without the bailout, one or more of the big 3 fail - imagine the jobs lost. Unemployment goes up and the economy gets even worse.

With the bailout, the corporate waste is encouraged to continue. Fatcat wages and parachute plans up top, huge union wages down below, and still producing vehicles that are rediculous for the times we're living in now. (For example...Ford's SVT division just put the finishing touches on a 6.2 liter-engined Ford Raptor pickup built for off-road use).

Do we let them fail due to their decades of bad decision making and let thousands of Americans suffer? Or do we bail them out and let the stupidity continue into the future?

If Ford / Chrysler / GM deserve a bailout, Tesla deserves a grant for future growth and development.

 

[jred321]

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/30/autoline-on-autoblog-with-john-mcelroy/

 

[OhSchnapps]

Why not have the bailout under specific pretenses, such as, "If we give you this money, you may not build any vehicles with under 25mpg rating" or something along those lines. I'm no corporate genius, but you see what i'm stabbing at.

 

[slug420]

yea, totally......or you have to shut down 2 of your american brands....if the auto industry is struggling why do we need chevrolet, cadillac, gmc, pontiac, saturn, and buick? seriously? this is how you plan to survive? Hummer? Is that really neccesary right now? You cant just go back to making H1s for the military?

 

[jred321]

their problem isn't really the vehicles they build (though many of them aren't great) but instead their lack of foresight. they did not adapt to the changing environment. setting rules like "can't build vehicles with below 25mpg" doesn't address their core problem of not looking ahead and not adapting quickly enough. what i would support for conditions for the loan would be forced management changes instead of product specifics because products change so much (and their current next gen products aren't bad, just too far off)

 

[slug420]

i think limited bailout for the big 3 to keep them afloat...and make that bailout conditional upon their trimming of stupid things as mentioned above.

then more support for tesla that exceeds those bailouts

 

[evilmonkeyMSP]

As much as I dislike most of what american car companies make and the fact that they're always 2 steps behind other car makers as far as what the market needs, the problem is we can't allow them to disappear. As bad as our economy is, if these companies go south we're in for even more trouble. Sooooooooo many US jobs are directly tied to these companies by letting them fail these people will be out of a job....

But, I think something that should be done as far as the US auto industry is some regulation on the workers unions in the industry. There's no reason so doosh nozzle should be making $24/hour installing wiper blades on a car simply because he is part of a union. If those things could be brought under control the industry could save a lot of money.

 

[bgibb68]

about the big coorperate wages.....what's the point of say giving a company 2 billion $ when the board probably took home half that in bonuses and pay in the last 5 years....should make the big wigs reivest in their own companies and that goes for every company accross the board

 

[jred321]

if the auto industry is struggling why do we need chevrolet, cadillac, gmc, pontiac, saturn, and buick?

they all address different markets. or are supposed to. what they need more than to eliminate brands is to build a brand identity for each one to address a specific market and then build the products to match instead of building 1 product and trying to make it fit into multiple brands. the brands you mentioned aren't really cross shopped so i don't see a problem with them existing

the markets they're supposed to address (though clearly they don't)
chevy - average joe
cadillac - executive types and well off old people
gmc - work trucks
pontiac - their fun, performance brand. should appeal mostly to males 20-40
saturn - a good first vehicle type of brand like scion. youthful drivers
buick - old people who aren't quite well off enough to afford a cadillac

is each market big enough to support its own brand? perhaps not. but a clear brand identity and then developing products to meet that would help clarify things. taking the same vehicle, throwing new bodywork on it, and sticking a new badge on doesn't mean that vehicle fits into the market segment they're trying to capture. it just means that brand has one more vehicle to sell. perhaps instead of eliminating brands they could consolidate dealerships so each dealer carries all brands and then the cadillac/buick/gmc dealers aren't calling for products to sell to the chevy market segment

 

[slug420]

yea, well what you just described (all GM brands under one dealership) is the same as consolidating to fewer brands. Trying to appeal to different markets sounds like a neat idea but they should be doing that with cars, not with BRANDS.

If GMC doesnt exist and someone needs a work truck are they suddenly more likely to buy the Ford than the Chevrolet? Are they going to go to an expedition and not an escalade/tahoe to replace the Yukon Denali they can no longer purchase?

If Mercury doesnt exist is the old person spending 28k on a POS grand marquis (which most old people interested in grand marquis's cant afford anyway) going to buy an impala instead of a crown victoria?

Who the hell is buying a lincoln mark lt that wouldnt just buy an F150 lariat supercrew shortbox with a few additional options? hell who is buying a lincoln mark LT to begin with lol...

 

[BlackCherry06]

While I agree that having different brands under the GM umbrella can provide vehicles to different market segments, the overlap doesn't make any sense. A GMC Sierra isn't any more a work truck than a Silverado. And the differences between a Sky and a Solstice? 100% cosmetic. The same goes for the SUVs that Chevrolet, Saturn and GMC share. It's waste. Pick the best of the bunch and round-file the rest. If you can't cough up enough DIFFERENT platforms to keep 5 brands supplied, kill off the brands..don't duplicate your efforts by putting a different grill on the same SUV and calling it a Saturn. Their idea of branding is a bit bizarre.

If they desire to have 'branding' within the corporation, it needs to be done like Scion and Toyota. There's nothing you can buy at Scion that you can buy at Toyota, and vice-versa. The tC shares some of its mechanicals with the Camry, but that's where the similarities end. You don't see any Scion that looks like anything on the Toyota side of the lot. Yes, Scion is basically a Toyota-on-a-budget, but the concept can apply up-market as well.

A government bail-out needs to come with a BIG knife to trim the fat.

 

[jred321]

yea, well what you just described (all GM brands under one dealership) is the same as consolidating to fewer brands. Trying to appeal to different markets sounds like a neat idea but they should be doing that with cars, not with BRANDS.

that was my point. the cars under each brand need to match the market that the brand seeks to address. putting new bodywork on one car and calling it something different doesn't mean it's a whole new car that magically fits into the different market. to do this would mean that each brand would have fewer vehicles and thus not enough volume to support an independent dealer so they would need to carry all brands.

they need to make the badge on the front of the car actually mean something other than which dealership you bought it at

 

[slug420]

a chainsaw perhaps

 

[jred321]

i put this together. i started with a list of all GM vehicles per their website (sans saab, i don't really count them as GM). then i marked whether the vehicle should or should not be under the brand in my opinion. i didn't pay attention to whether the car should exist at all (many of the SUVs should just get killed).

 

[ehidle]

Bailing out the auto industry will do nothing unless they can shed some of their burdened manufacturing costs. I forget what the figure is for GM, but a huge amount of money goes into each car just for employee benefits. The pension obligations have become so enormous that there is nothing any of them can do to be profitable at this point.

 

[slug420]

nice jred! GMC took a beating....and rightfully so

 

[mx-p5]

as much as i agree with the "Big wigs" of teh company cutting their own wages to help the company out, it isn't gonna happen

But, i must admit, there are people out there willing to do what it takes.

The president of my company did not pay himself for over a year while we were experiencing growing pains.

He had enough in the bank to keep him a float no problem, so, rather than continue to build it, he kept it in the loop for his other employees.

Him doing that keeps everyone else here that much more loyal and willing to make sacrafices ourselves.

And we are a multimillion dollar a year company, but not a multibillion like the big car dealerships

I just don't see it happening with the car industry

 

[jred321]

indeed. they should focus on commercial vehicles. the only reason they have those other ones is because dealerships who carry them are only bundled with pontiac, cadillac and buick. the dealerships called for more SUVs when they were big because cadillac/buick wasn't selling and they needed sales. GM responded by doing the easiest thing it could - rebadging. this took away from their brand's strength but dealers were happy for a little while. now they need to fix their mistake and build the brand again.

as i was compiling that a thought popped into my head - should the corvette be a pontiac? i know it never will be just like the camaro will always be chevy but if pontiac is the "driving excitement" brand wouldn't it make sense to have the most exciting car they make under that brand?