When will GM 'Get It'?

I warned my girlfriend not to buy a Pontiac Grand Prix. What a piece of crap! It's a 2002 plaugued with stupid quality problems. Door panels falling apart. Window actuators breaking. Seat uhpolstery coming unstitched and the latest, threw a rod this week and is in the shop getting a new engine at 37000 miles! The $100 pops for repairs under her extended warranty is starting to get stupid!

Aside from GM trucks which seem to be decent, when are US car manufacturers going to take a lesson from japan? How long can they keep cranking out fast depreciating garbage and continue to stay in business?

 

As long as their board believes that if/when they file BK, they will get a nice government bailout courtesty of your tax dollars and mine. Build your business big enough, employ enough people and then it really doesn't matter how bad things get, the politicos can't afford to let you drown.

 

I don't think it's a question of taking a lesson from Japan, but rather, when can they rid themselves of the UAW. Give the employee "incentive" to keep their job and they'll assemble a better car.

Just reading about Delphi's bankruptcy and how the employees and UAW are taking it makes me ill. Delphi is quickly going down the tubes and those idiots don't want to make any concessions to help the hand that feeds them.

///Michael.

 

Only when all vestiges of the idiot management is totally purged. It's such a large job even Joseph Stalin couldn't do it completely.

 

True. I read an article about GM management. The writer visited the VIP/management floor at the GM headquarters building. All the big managers have secrataries that answer all of their calls.

The big guys were all in their personal offices, with the doors closed.

 

Couldn't agree more!

 

The problem is that GM still operates the same way that it did 30 years ago. I think the unions and suppliers strangle any attempt at change and management just doesn't know any better.

I just don't understand how you develop something like the SSR (a complete waste IMHO) and pinch the hell out of every other product line. That being said, things have to get worse before they get better.. think Nissan in '97-'00. Their quality probably isn't much better than GM, but they've got a distinct, fun and exciting lineup.. people will gravitate towards that.

 

i think gm will get it when they truely look at what other auto makers are doing, and decide to up thier quality, and when they get rid of most of the executives that are driving it into the ground...

 

Here's the irony.. GM actually thinks that they are upping their quality and conducting themselves as the other, more successful car companies do.

You know how insane people think that everyone else has the problem? Yeah, it's sorta like that.

 

I've bought 3 GM cars in the last 6 years for various family needs. The only decent one was a Pontiac Vibe, which is actually a Toyota/GM joint venture in their NUMMI plant in California. So one part of GM knows how to do it, under Japanese training. Getting that know-how spread out to other parts of GM seems to be choked by a combination of Mgmt and Labor.

 

GM along with Ford and Chrysler are in trouble sort of. People dont really like their cars. Besides the Corvette, Hummer, Trucks, SUV's, Viper, mustang. But can you sell enough corvettes and vipers to keep your company afloat?

 

Well, various empirical evidence would prove them right. GM's quality has been quite good over the past few years (JD Power backs it up).

The real problem is that hangover of 20+ yrs of crap cars is hurting their image. So, for every C6 Vette someone is thinking of the crap Z-28 IROC.

 

Chrysler is probably #1 out of the big three at this point. Unlike the other two, the merger negatively affected Mercedes product- Chrysler is using the good MB parts and engineering for their cars, MB is stuck designing platforms for both. Conversely, Ford and GM insist on using THEIR parts in companies that don't necessarily benefit from them, nor do they want to learn and apply knowledge from another co. in their own product.

Someone at GM needs to throw themselves on the grenade, halt development of current projects, trim the platform-sharing fat and start using the companies they own to design some quality automobiles.. Holden comes to mind (although the way GM sees it, since the GTO isn't selling nobody wants a Holden product in the U.S.)

The Soltice is a good start, but even then they shoot themselves in the foot by making the Saturn Sky.. what other company competes with itself?

 

Quality is pretty subjective.. I don't base it on automobiles "not having problems" I base it on materials, design and engineering. Most of the cars drive like crap, have noisy, truck-like engines and absolutely no panache. They may stay together, but most are designed for the rental-car market.

The C6 is an excellent automobile but for the price the interior is still has too much plastic, it's on leaf-springs and uses a pushrod engine.. best of the worst, IMHO. (I still love them though!)

 

What, exactly, is the problem with a pushrod engine if it can belt out 400 hp, get 25+ mpg, and take up less space than a similarly spec'd DOHC engine? Oh, it's also significantly cheaper to manufacture.

I'm all for high tech. But not just for the sake of high tech.

I drive a 2005 GTO (used to be a pure import guy) and I love it. Solid (built much better than my Honda was), smooth, gorgeous interior, and it will hit 60 in less than 5 seconds with some of the best engine sounds this side of a pro stocker.

GM isn't perfect and hasn't been for a long time. But they are making some very nice cars in several price ranges and they deserve another look by the car buying public.

 

Absolutely nothing wrong with a pushrod engine. The biggest argument against it is valvetrain inertia. I beat the living hell out of my 5.7 and it keeps blasting away without complaint. I just keep it full of oil and coolant.

Oh yeah, no cam belts or chain tensioners to worry about for 180k miles or so.

I am not against OHC engines, I have two. I see the merits in both.

 

There's nothing wrong with a pushrod engine.. I've got one with my LT1. It takes a lickin' and keeps on ticking..

As I see it, the 'vette should be pushing the envelope as it's the flagship car for GM-- if it's not going to be technologically sophisticated then the price should reflect that. Looks and performance aside, you get a lot more car for $50k from BMW than you do from Chevrolet.

 

Was the Concorde a pure Chrysler (pre-merger) design or did it have Daimler-Benz input/parts?

 

I believe it was a pre-MB merger car.. Still though, Chrysler had a pretty solid rep going before (duh) but the merger really ditched the K-Car Snoozefest PR hangover they had for 15~ years.

 

GM and Ford are being crushed by the fact that they work hardest to keep the build and part costs down for their cars. They dont care about anything else. Its a bottom line at the end of the quarter deal. The cars end up being cheaply designed, and cheaply built. The acceptable rates for part and system failure are pathetic.

The Japanese squeeze their parts suppliers such that the PPM (part per million) failure rate is in the SINGLE DIGITS. This makes life difficult for suppliers but it makes for better cars. Japanese also never stop re-designing. A vehicle shelf life for a japanese cars is very short. Domestics linger for years as the manufacturers try to squeeze every nickel from old tooling.Most Japanese cars are no more interesting or exciting than the domestics, but they hold together better and retain value. This is crushing the domestic manufacturers.

The domestic manufacturers never changed their business to match the times, and they are going the way of the dinosaurs as a result.

 

The first generation of the LH platform predated the merger in 1998, but I don't know how much of the second generation was influenced by Daimler-Benz...

 

They all start to run together when you're looking through this glass!
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Thanks. Just trying to figure out if Peter's positive experience with Concorde was a case that supported: 1) American car companies do know how to build decent cars, or 2) they had to go overseas to get that expertise.