gpctc

my 2 cents worth:

yes, the proliferation of "badge engineered" lines is sad......if I'm
correct, the last time Ford, Mercury and Lincoln had unique
chassis/bodies was 1960! I think the Edsel and failure to establish the
Mercury as a buick competitor with the '58 to '60 Park Lane forced the
retrenchment to the Merc as a (barely) glorified Ford in '61.

At one time, duplication was also justified by dealer agreements: "John
Doe" was given a contract that guaranteed he would have exclusive Ford
rights within a certain territory.......but if additional sales were
available, "Jerry Smith" could have a Merc dealership. The real master
of interchangeability was Chrysler with Plymouth/Dodge and
DeSoto/Chrysler being virtually identical cars for many years, with the
dealerships juggled as needed....and by '69 everything from Plymouth to
Imperial shared one body.

"badge engineering" is sad.....but with the cost of designing/tooling
unique vehicles to pass safety and EPA standards, and to reduce
manufacturing costs, we'll never see unique FoMoCo makes again, I'm
sure. How much can it cost to make another plastic grill to turn a Ford
into a Mercury? And it saddens me to see a Ford truck gussied-up and
called a Lincoln, but as long as you can get a sufficient number of
status-seekers to pay $80,000 for one....who can blame the maker?

within the last couple years, there was all sorts of conjecture that
the Ford family would step in and buy-up a lot of the publicly held
shares..........if we don't see that happen at today's prices, it says a
lot about their faith in the long-term health of the company.

On one hand, I can't fault anyone from getting in line for all the
handouts they can get - in fact, it's probably their duty to try. But
any relief they get will be temporary at best: if GM is losing
$5billion a month, what will a $25b or $50b get them? Or the taxpayers?
Just a few extra months. Better that they fail sooner, so they can get
busy re-organizing outside their present union constraints.

I hear a lot of the "talking heads" on the news shows saying that
it's the American makers' faults for not offering fuel-efficient
models....apparently these "experts" still think the FIsh carburetor is
locked-up in the vault and domestic makers could easily make a car that
gets 100 mpg but don't want to for some perverse reason. I wonder if
their contracts call for them to be chafuered to their broadcasts in a
Focus or a Lincoln L?

Then they opine that a "Car Czar" should be appointed to bring
government-style efficiency to the industry. We can guess how well
that would work - especially since the Czar would undoubtedly be some
clueless Flub-a-Dub like Joan Claybrook.

Trivia Buffs: someone mentioned other makers who failed.......not
only didn't they get help, some were helped to the grave by government:
Eisenhower was elected and appointed Charles Wilson - from General
Motors - as Secretary of Defense. Wilson quickly imposed a "narrow
base" of limited suppliers for defense contracts, cancelling many
contracts from the previous "broad based" philosophy. Among the
mortally wounded were Studebaker and Packard who depended heavily on
defense business. (Amazingly, GM got most of the business - no conflict
of interest back in those days)

A connection to the present: Packard was in good financial shape in
the early 50s but a few misfortunes during their revitalization program
put them on the ropes: loss of the defense business, and purchase of
Briggs Body by Chrysler to name a couple. Another resulted from their
desire to have more dealerships and a broader product line. The
quickest route was thought to be merger with another independent.
Studebaker became the alternative when George Romney of the new American
Motors rebuffed them. So.....Packard hires management consultants -
including respected Lehman Brothers of recent notoriety - to study the
concept. Lehman reports that it's a swell idea, but Packard should BUY
Studebaker. So that's how it went down. Except Lehman didn't bother to
look at Studebaker's books: if they had, they might have noticed that
Stude was operating at less than half of breakeven point. So drowning
Stude - which was much bigger than Packard - soon sucked all of
Packard's money down the drain. Packard's plants were shut down within
2 years of the "merger" and a half-hearted attempt was made to sell
badge-engineered Studes as Packards. Bless their hearts, Lehman Bros.
was again hired in '56 to recommend what to do with the mess......they
recommended that Stude-Pac make a brave show of vowing to stay in
business while simultaneously putting all the assets up for sale, then
slam the doors shut, declare bankruptcy and screw the shareholders and
employees. Nice folks, those Lehman Bros.......glad to see they got
theirs.

ted mittelstaedt

That's a great writeup. However the root problem today is that ALL other
countries regard auto manufacturing as a critical industry and all of them
have governments that subsidize or otherwise heavily encourage those
automakers to stay afloat. For example in Japan the laws make them
scrap their cars at the 50K mi mark. So every year there's thousands
of perfectly good cars going to the wrecker and Toyota is right there to
sell the population brand new ones.

The sooner the US drops this fantasy that every automaker in the world
is operating under capitalism, the better. Cars should be import-tariffed
and that's the end of it.

Ted

gpctc

Ted: Wow! I had forgotten about Japan's regulations that forced the
junking of relatively young cars. I can remember being amused - back in
the 70s - at the proud new owners of Toyotas & Datsuns.....good values,
of course, since they were being virtually dumped here to establish
beachheads....but the idea of buying a car made in a country where cars
weren't expected to last struck me as silly. Unlike the British,
though, the Japanese companies built cars that were capable of running
beyond an expected life of 30,000 miles.

Can you remember those days when people with new Coronas or 510s
lavished care on them, taking them to the dealership frequently for
check-ups and following the maintenance schedules religiously.
Meanwhile, their old Fords and Chevies slogged on for 150,000 miles
without so much as an oil change. And how those "rice grinders"
dissolved away in 2 or 3 years in rustbelt states. Honda always made a
good car - but can remember reading a friend's Manual for his new
Civic........4 wheel MacPherson struts that were supposed to be changed
every 20,000 miles, If I had coddled my Chevette like that, I'd still
have it instead of dumping it after only 7 years and 135,000 miles
because the air conditioning quit!


Apparently the pundit's talking points include the phrase ".....and
build cars people want to buy". I venture to speculate that GM, Ford
and Chrysler make a lot of models people would like to buy......if they
had secure jobs and weren't so rattled about all the "sky is falling"
reports that have filled the news for the last 8 months. But we had to
be educated that we need Change.

was going through my new issue of Hemmings Classic Cars
yesterday......one of the columnists relates how GM Chairman Alfred
Sloan imposed new corporate economies and cutbacks at the beginning of
October, 1929 (i.e., before the Crash). His reasoning: the automobile
industry had become so proficient and efficient at making cars that the
industry had reached a potential production capacity twice any
reasonable market demand......a situation he recognized could not be
sustained. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

mike hunter

Henry Ford sold the model "T" long past is completive years by steadily
improving the car and LOWERING the price by as much 75% because of economies
of scale. Consumers soon started to buy the cars Chevy was building because
they built a more modern car that people preferred to buy.

Over the past fifteen to twenty years, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan MB
and BMW ALL grew in the US by building the bigger safer cars, SUVs, trucks
and luxury vehicle that Americans preferred to buy and could afford.

To say the Jap sales grew because the made small fuel efficient cars buyers
wanted to buy is a myth. Toyotas grew by following the domestics in making
their cars BIGGER more powerful and by adding SUVs, BIGGER trucks and luxury
cars, not buy continuing to sell the small and midget cars they had been
selling.

Toyota best selling cars are not their small and midget cars but their
BIGGER more powerful Corollas and Camrys. The Camry and it predecessors
went from being a subcompact to compact and in the past few years, to a
midsize car In the real world even Camry sales are down, their top selling
year was in back in 2004