Where’s My Flying Car? (A Question For The Big 3 On The Occasion Of Their Bailout)
I live in the future. I can tell; I have a telephone in my pocket and I am typing this on a home computer. So, where’s my flying car?
http://mrfuture.com/2008/11/10/from-england-to-timbuktu-in-a-flying-car/
And where’s my solar powered electric car? Some low-speed cargo carriers to move bulk loads for pennies? It seemed pretty strait forward to me.
Oh, and my micro-commuter? The one with comfy seating for five adults and a decent stereo and the wheelbase of a Radio Flyer so I can park it in a half a parking space and a 2-cylinder engine that gets 75 mpg?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4251491.html
Why do I get the impression that The Big 3 have done absolutely no research on these projects?
I don’t think these car guys are serious about serving the American motoring public. When the state of California mandated an emission-free vehicle GM produced the EV-1. It was slow (top speed of only 70 mph) and had a short range (about 100 miles). As near as I can tell, every available unit was snapped up almost immediately. Every one loved the little buggers. The quick pick up was way cool. Sure, it wouldn’t get you from Seattle to Miami. It would get you from Seattle to Tacoma. It would get you from LA to Santa Barbara. How about going from Galveston to Houston? It would be real handy going from Sun City to Scottsdale. What happened to those little guys?
http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/
Seems like as soon as they didn’t have a GUN POINTED AT THEIR HEAD the car companies threw away a Billion dollar investment and a rapidly expanding customer base. The only thing to make a company throw out a booming market share is the need to protect another market share. If the Big 3 do not want the market share represented by motorcycles, golf carts and the Nation of Japan what do they want?
The draw for these jumbo luxury cars is not expanding. The trend is quite the opposite. I do admire the 4-door HD work trucks. I’m just not convinced it was demand from the public that brought this style back. When I was looking for one in the late 70’s I was told that there had never been a large enough demand to justify making them.
It looks like the Big 3 have, as a cohesive group, followed a blinkered coarse of self-delusion. One and all ignored the same data from sales, environmental research, industry critics and their own middle management. How could they ALL make the same mistake at the same time? To return to my question: whose market share was protected?
The answer is behind that curtain where the guy with all the knobs and switches is standing. Car companies are not dynamic individual businesses. They are corporations that are owned by groups of rich and powerful men. These rich and powerful men own many corporations between them. Any individual RPM may be an owner of all three car companies as well as a couple of financial institutions and any or all of the big oil companies. When looking at the group and the holdings represented by the group patterns of consistent behavior can be seen.
In every situation the group of people owning the companies make money. Individual companies or groups of companies may lose market share or just lose money. The individuals who cause the companies to lose money do not lose any of their own money. This always looks very suspicious to individuals or groups who do not participate in the ownership of corporations.
There is this little thing about pay. When Wall Street got their bailout every body got paid. Individuals who sold Mortgage Derivative Bonds that ruined the company got full salaries and all of their bonuses. Sales people as a group were roundly rewarded with “above salary” compensation. Rank and file workers who brought in 80 to 90% of the income were told to look for jobs and forget about vacations till after the reorganization. While labor costs only account for 10% of the cost of building a car it is the workers who are being blamed. Labor costs include hourly wages, health insurance, SSI and Work Comp matching contributions and company retirement funds. This is what it costs to hire the most productive, loyal, and most highly trained workers in the world. Damn strait it should cost that much. By using an obscure and secretive formulation not available to auto industry executives and GOP pundits* The League of BartCop Bloggers has determined that even if every worker went on welfare and worked for free American cars would still not be profitable. While sales has been doing a heck of a job and research has always produced what was asked of them there remains only one part of the equation that can be eliminated. If cuts must be made they must be to-the-bone cuts. Every executive who serves primarily as an owner must be cut. Their office cleaned out and, most importantly, all their financial benefits must be withheld to pay creditors and employee retirement commitments. To say some one is only responsible for the profits of their actions and not the losses is more than childish. A child learns that lesson before they enter school or they are considered retarded.
Since we all know that American CEO’s are never dishonest it can only mean that they are retarded. Since retards, pardon me, “Special Needs Citizens”, should not be trusted with large sums of money and power the UAW should be appointed conservator of the Big 3 as their closest relative. If given the same restrictions and guide lines that Wall Street was given I’m sure that the individuals of the union will produce cars that will be legendary while treating their former masters with all the compassion and generosity that the American worker has always know from these ardent proponents of the Free Market. Besides, nothing improves worker moral better than a spa. I have heard that the Ford Family estates have a real nice one.
Spas for Workers. It’s the future of labor.
(* arithmatic)
There’s a video about the EV-1 in which the people that received them, just to try them out (the autos were still property of GM), loved them. But no matter how they protested and objected, declaring their love for the car, GM silently, no explanation, took the cars back and destroyed all but a few for museums.
GM has steadfastly refused to give the consumer a smaller car even though over the last three decades the Japanese have increased market share from 20% to 50%.
The reason is that GM makes more money per unit on the larger autos.
GM is run by a gaggle of stupid bastards and deserves to die.
The answer to this is to rescue GM then break it up into smaller companies under Sherman anti-trust laws.
A company too big to be allowed to fail is too large to exist – except in socialist nations; not here.
Grimgold
Comment by grimgold — December 18, 2008 @ 10:35 am
I’ve invested some capital in the company making this flying car: http://www.moller.com/
And I’ll probably lose it. But I’m not ready to give up on my dreams of the future. Worth a little scratch.
Comment by Peregrin — December 19, 2008 @ 5:31 am
A friend of mine worked for several car dealers — mainly Chrysler and Ford — over the span of ten years. Here’s what he said:
– The Big 3 made an executive decision to produce SUVs with the highest profit margin, to the near exclusion of reliable compact cars or hybrid/electric engines, even though the dealers were getting requests from potential customers as far back as the ’90s for alternate, flex fuel, hybrid, electric and/or smaller, more gas-efficient cars. Guess who got all of that business — Japan. (Toyota and Honda can’t keep up with the number of Americans who want hybrid cars.) My friend was told more than once to push the customer into a gas-guzzling SUV no matter what kind of car they wanted to buy.
– Part of the reason for this was that the corporate officers of the Big 3, or their families, also have stock holdings in Big Oil — the more gas a vehicle burns, the more money they make.
– Ironically, all of the BIG 3 were, and still are, making fuel-efficient cars for the foreign market; they just don’t sell them in this country. As was explained to my friend, they (the Big 3) are going to ‘squeeze the suckers here until they pop.’ It’s the new American way.
– While there’s been all of this brouhaha about UAW workers earning ‘high wages’ — real earnings of $14 to $28 an hour before taxes — you don’t read about Alan Mulally, the Ford CEO, who, along with his other Big 3 exec pals, earned over $2,000 an hour while the head of Toyota, for example, earned about $900 an hour. Why can’t Mulally and the other corporate brass cut their pay to bring it into line with what Japanese execs make, as they expect American line workers to do to stay ‘competitive’? (Forget the temporary showboating of taking a dollar a year; reduce all executive salaries by at least half permanently — and no bonuses, stock options or other compensation packages.)
The UAW workers aren’t responsible for designing, manufacturing, nor marketing all of these huge vehicles nobody wants to buy (or can’t buy in Junior’s ruined GOP economy) — why should they be asked to give up even a dime an hour in wages for the terrible decisions of these ‘mentally-challenged’ (like Fox News) execs?
All of the Big 3 and the nation would be better off if the top tier of executives acted like the Roman aristocracy they pretend to be — or Frankie Five-Fingers, as the case may be — and quietly took a hot bath with a straight razor handy; the ancient aristocratic answer to a massive failure in decision-making and — ahem — execution.
Comment by RS Janes — December 20, 2008 @ 6:37 pm