GM - Bankruptcy?

[Twentyover]

Add into this mix the fact that the US Government saddled the domestics with crash and safety standards that, because of the "gas crisis" of the early and late 70s, they allowed the smaller imports to skirt.

Bill

Please provide a source for this claim. What constitutes a "smaller import?" Phusical size or production volume?

[wicked68]

what do you deserve?

I think that has been set out already pretty clearly - read the bill of rights - life liberty and the pursuit of happieness.

That did not say a 3000 sq foot home with central heating and 3 cars that are of a certain level and a flat screen tv in every room.

You have your life if you are reading this, you have your liberty (at least for now), and you are clearly still able to pursue happieness.

Happieness is what you make of it. if you look at houses and cars and all that back 50 years ago - it was not the current standards we have now. Go back another 50 years from then - its even less.

People need to quit griping and live as such:
no one owes me anything. I am where I am because of me. If I want something I am the one who has to get it and I will only get what I have money in the bank to get after I have no debt / I have paid all my bills / saved for retirement / given some to charity. The amount left over is what you can go buy with. We as a country have become whiners and spoiled brats. We are owed nothing.

What happened to being happy that you survived the day? What happened to entertaining yourself by just going outside and throwing a ball (how expensive is a ball???? ) ?

The fed govt is here to regulate interstate and international commerce and to provide for the defense and security of our country. That is all. What happened? Its now an insurance company, a wealth redistribution company, a redistribution mechanism for education funding / roads/ etc. Its a big redistribution machine and it takes a huge cut to do this.

Its mantra is that the people are all morons and if we dont wipe their ass they wont do it themselves. Is this true? If so we are doomed.

Investment - someone mentioned that these companies being bailed out are owned by someone. yes they are - they are all public companies. Guess what? no one is forcing us to invest in them - at least not for now - wait till the govt trys to nationalize your 401k holdings. But no one is forcing you to invest in them and guess what the smart money is and has pulled out of them. its going to go over seas. I can put my money in a far east fund right now in fact and it wont touch us investments and since its in overseas securitys as the dollar falls it will go up even more. You know this is going to happen.

Then the cost of capital becomes more expensive for us companies because to atrtract the investment back they have to give away more and guarantee higher returns. its an ugly cycle.

I have a lot more of this - but I figure its too nasty to take in long rambling diatribes.

[Steve1968LS2]

The feeling that "owning a home is a right, not a privilage" is what got us into this stupid mess.

Govt dictated that people that couldn't afford a house be given loans for them. This caused a false supply shortage and inflated prices. Then the people that did ZERO down loans just walked away from houses they should have never qualified for.

[Damn True]

"I think theres alot more to GM's woes than just the unions....."

You mean like making cars the public as a whole didn't want for the better part of 3 decades?

Yeah, that might be part of it too.

Complete fallacy and I really wish you'd quit trotting it out. GM sold more cars IN THE US than any other automaker until about the middle of last year. You dont sell more than anyone else if you are making stuff nobody wants. Because YOU didn't want one does not mean that the rest of the populace didn't. When you get out of CA GM and Ford cars vastly outnumber imports on the roads.

[parsonsj]

Let's bring this back to GM please. Otherwise we'll close it down as a political thread.

jp

[Damn True]

why don't you like unions? just wondering.

Tell us about which industries are currently thriving with a majority of Union Labor.

[Nicks67GTO]

"I think theres alot more to GM's woes than just the unions....."

You mean like making cars the public as a whole didn't want for the better part of 3 decades?

Yeah, that might be part of it too.

Bingo

[Nicks67GTO]

They sure sold an awful lot of those cars nobody wanted. Even today GM is still the second largest producer of automobiles in the world, and, if given access to the Japanese market, they probably still would be.

in 1965 GM domestically sold 4,551,399 cars that people presumably wanted

in 1970 GM domestically sold 3,681,484 cars that people presumably wanted

in 1975 GM domestically sold 3,665,990 cars that now, according to your calculations,nobody wanted

in the boom year of 1980 GM domestically sold 5,053,190 of those cars nobody wanted

in 1985 GM domestically sold 4,490,883 of those cars nobody wanted

in 1990 GM domestically sold 3,307,102 of those cars nobody wanted

in 1995 GM domestically sold 2,930,619 of those cars nobody wanted

And these figures do NOT include SUV sales!

Shiny Side Up!
Bill

Now I dont have hard numbers for you here, but if im not mistaken between 1965 and 1995 the population in America about doubled didnt it? That would then make their sales in 1995 alot less impressive.

[Nicks67GTO]

I mean seriously, I don't know what the average union worker is making but he's probably making around $30/hour TAKE HOME. To me, that's decent money, not fantastic.

At John Deere unskilled workers make far less than that.

[bigvegan]

Complete fallacy and I really wish you'd quit trotting it out.

Really?

So GM HASN'T gone from a 60% market share to less than 25% of the market over the last 35 years?

http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/01/gm-...0102flint.html

[Damn True]

You know what they say about statistics.

Yes, the marketplace has become fragmented which ultimately is good for the consumer but the bottom line, as I stated earlier that until mid last year GM sold more cars per year than any other automaker. Period.

That does not equate to "cars people don't want".

[parsonsj]

BV, your market share numbers are about right.

But you said:

You mean like making cars the public as a whole didn't want for the better part of 3 decades?

Let me repeat: that's an ignorant statement.

GM's dropping market share is due to many complex circumstances, and simply saying it's because they made cars Americans didn't want is ludicrous.

Please stop with the one note song.

jp

[Damn True]

BV, your market share numbers are about right.

But you said:Let me repeat: that's an ignorant statement.

GM's dropping market share is due to many complex circumstances, and simply saying it's because they made cars Americans didn't want is ludicrous.

Please stop with the one note song.

jp

Paraphrasing:

Well, the trouble with our friend is not that he is ignorant, but that he knows so much that isn't so

[chicane67]

Nobody hates unions.. we just hate the one-sided way they view economics.

They would rather drive GM into the dirt rather than give up anything. They see no problem in someone being paid $75 and hour to bolt in seats and it's unfair to pay that person $74 an hour even if it means that GM will go BK.

Unions use to be about collective bargaining but now it's more about collective extortion.

Union contracts are the main reason GM is in this bind but they don't seem to care at all about that.

Ding ding ding. WINNER.

It cannot be stated better than this. The only exception to this is the number... as the Union actually charges $175/hr for this labor and the fact that they wont budge from it will not only cost the Manufacturer it's stake in the free economy... it will cost thousands their jobs because of it. Gee... $75 to the one who does he work... and another $100 for the fatass and his soapbox. No wonder GM is having so many problems...

Tell us about which industries are currently thriving with a majority of Union Labor.

Uhm... I certainly can't think of one. And I dont wonder why for some reason.

[SDMAN]

It was inevitable. GM has alienated such a large portion of their customer base its amazing this hasnt happened a decade sooner. I got so sick and tired of the crappy cars and horrendous dealer practices that I havent bought a new GM vehicle since 1979. And have no plans to alter my vehicle purchase habits.

I see this as getting it going ahead of the curve. GM has been betting the farm on the Volt. And its going to be a complete stinker. Even for GM.

[bigvegan]

GM's dropping market share is due to many complex circumstances, and simply saying it's because they made cars Americans didn't want is ludicrous.

Not so much. The factors are pretty simple, really.

Market share drops when people prefer the competitors' products to those of a given company.

In this case, GM has gone from having 60% of the market to less than 25%.

So, 75% of the American car-buying population prefers to buy non-GM cars and DON'T WANT GM cars.

You can blame the unions all you want, but the fault here is GM's management and a bloated dealership structure that has left them with an unsustainable number of brands.

If GM was just Chevy and Cadillac and got to pick the best products from the rest of the GM lineup, and had 1500 dealerships like Toyota, instead of 4500 like they do now, they'd have a fighting chance.



But no, they're going to blame the unions instead of standing up to the dealerships, while asking for GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS themselves, fail to see the writing on the wall, and probably go bankrupt in the process.

Socialism is bad. Lemon socialism is worse.

[ProTouring442]

Please provide a source for this claim. What constitutes a "smaller import?" Phusical size or production volume?

For a quick start, I'll relay that I was a technician in a Maryland authorized emissions repair facility, and there were two sets of standards. One was for GM, Ford, Chrysler, and another was for Toyota, Datsun, and Honda, etc. I'll have to do a bit of research, but I distinctly remember the reasoning was that the imports were smaller and therefore more efficient.

Please note that I may be incorrect in my assertions here as I cannot find any evidence of this online though I distinctly remember the differing standards.

Shiny Side Up!
Bill

[ProTouring442]

Now I dont have hard numbers for you here, but if im not mistaken between 1965 and 1995 the population in America about doubled didnt it? That would then make their sales in 1995 alot less impressive.

Not when you consider the huge increase in competition. There was no way that GM could have forced the Japanese and German imports from the shores.

Shiny Side Up!
Bill

[ProTouring442]

It was inevitable. GM has alienated such a large portion of their customer base its amazing this hasnt happened a decade sooner. I got so sick and tired of the crappy cars and horrendous dealer practices that I havent bought a new GM vehicle since 1979. And have no plans to alter my vehicle purchase habits.

I see this as getting it going ahead of the curve. GM has been betting the farm on the Volt. And its going to be a complete stinker. Even for GM.

I don't know, my 1993 Bonneville went over 200K with no major problems, and I sold my wife's Miata at 130K due to its needing new too much work.

My wife's Mercedes SLK230 has an interior made from cheap cardboard, with the dye peeling off the dash, its gone through 2 security modules (at $700 plus labor) and all this at only 50K.

Shiny Side Up!
Bill

[ProTouring442]

There are also good and defensible reasons as to why the major car companies should be assisted through the approval of loans for the purpose of helping them survive a serious economic crisis. Of course their is the incredible impact that the loss of GM or Ford would have on the US economy due to the large number of people employed either with or through them. While the so-called "Big Three" directly employ around 335,000 people, their jobs would not be the only ones affected by the failure of the US auto industry. It is estimated that nearly 1 out of every 10 people employed in the US is employed by a company or in a service related to the US auto industry. Even if we could somehow contain the job losses to the 335,000 directly employed by the industry, the collateral effect such an increase in the number of people suddenly jobless would have on the economy is likely to be more than our economy can handle and will plunge the US, and most likely the world, into a depression likely to be much larger than the one experienced in the 1930s. History also shows that the major auto manufacturers played a vital role in the defense of the US during WWII and Korea. During WWII the former president of GM, William Knudsen, headed the effort that lead the US auto industry to produce some $29 billion dollars worth of vital war materiel. Thus it can be truthfully stated that the US citizenry has a vested interest in the survival of the US auto industry due not only to the impact their closure would have on the economy, but also as to the role they would play in any future major conflict in which the US was involved.

As for the supposed lack of quality in the domestic vehicles, I can say that my company car, a 2007 Chevrolet Equinox AWD, is a very nice car. It gets very good fuel mileage, is quite, rides smooth, and handles better that any car-truck has the right to do. My parents own a 2008 Buick Lucerne, and it is a fantastic automobile. On their recent trip for the holidays their Lucerne averaged 30mpg, and has to be the quietest car I've ever ridden in. Everything about this car performs flawlessly, a statement I cannot say about my wife's current car, a 1999 Mercedes Benz SLK230. The SLK's interior sheds parts faster than a long haired dog sheds hair in the spring, and the seats are really comfortable for at least the first 30 minutes! Her former car, a Mazda Miata was the worst though. The engine was noisier than a 40 year old sewing machine, and the interior was made by the same people who bring you those molded plastic cafeteria chairs!

My last GM car was a 1996 Pontiac Bonneville SSEi which pushed 30mpg on the highway, and had more than enough pep to be quite a fun car to drive. Before the '96 was a '93 that we sold when it turned past 200K miles, needing only a VATS module and an alternator during its stay in my family.

Yes, GM in particular and the US Auto Industry in general need to revamp their operations, but you cannot change a company as large as GM overnight. Especially one that is required to pay the employees it lays off for an additional four years! GM pioneered the air bag, brought us the successful front wheel drive car, designed (and I believe still builds) the crash-test dummy, etc, etc. GM has been turning its ship around for some time now, though the recent economic downturn hit them while they were still down, and much like the Queen Mary, this ship will need a bit of room if it is to avoid a fatal collision.

Shiny Side Up!
Bill