What can I say that hasn’t already been said.
I suppose I should establish my credentials.
I’ve owned a Chevy, a Mazda, a Honda, a Ford, a Geo, and a Volkswagen.
The Chevy I liked well enough. It was more comfortable than any of the other cars, and had a ‘in the tree’ automatic shifter which I miss; I wish more foreign cars had those. The only advantage to having an automatic car in my opinion; otherwise I drive a stick. But for its size it didn’t hold much stuff (it was a sedan) and it didn’t get particularly good gas mileage. Never did understand why it had to be so heavy or have such a big engine in the first place.
The Mazda I wish I still had. It didn’t hold as much, but it was a 2-seater, so it had an excuse, and got better gas mileage. Unfortunately the racing wheels it came with were less stable in wet weather conditions than I anticipated and I hydroplaned off the road into a tree. Lesson learned. No more racing wheels for me, even if they come with the car.
The Honda got the same gas mileage as the Mazda, and hauled twice as much stuff. I miss the Honda, but in the end, other cars did even better that way, and gas was spiking at the time.
I found such a car and to my astonishment it was made by Ford. So I bought it. It did what they said it did, but no more. And the engine did weird things when you tried to accelerate beyond its capacity. Took some getting used to. But worked until I found something that got even better mileage and carried the same amount of stuff.
And to my surprise it was made by Chevy, though it was a Geo and therefore designed by someone in Asia, in this case someone working for Suzuki. And boy do I wish that Chevy had redesigned a few things. That car could have done with being 10 pounds heavier even with the mileage hit, if those ten pounds kept the body from falling apart where the control arms attach. Ended up paying some guy $1000 to weld a bunch of steel on it to keep the front end from coming apart. But after that…most reliable and convenient and fuel-efficient car I ever had. Least safe, though. I lived in fear of anything larger than a badger. And of course after a couple years GM tried to turn it into a GM car, put in a bigger less efficient engine and turned it from a hatchback into a sedan, so buying another one to replace the old one isn’t an option. Still have the car, but good luck finding parts for it these days.
And now there’s the VW. It’s 10 years older than the Geo was and only just now has the front end started to come apart. It gets as good mileage and hauls as much stuff, but runs with diesel which in MN is now cheaper than gas, plus I could run it on vegetable oil. Just as much trouble getting parts for it, and finding someone who understands old VW diesel motors…good luck! Took me 3 years and as many motors to get the thing running. Fortunately the last re-build finally seems to have taken and it’s running slicker than greased snot. But of course now the front end is coming apart. (see my other post)
So I’ve had a lot of cars, and liked (and disliked) them all for various reasons. My main pet peeve about domestic cars is that they never seem to put the whole package together: great fuel efficiency, reliability, AND hauls a bunch of stuff. You can get any two of those three, but never all three. You can get the car that hauls a bunch of stuff and is reliable, but it gets horrendous mileage. You can get the car that is efficient and reliable, but it’s always a sedan, and never a hatchback. You can get the efficient hatchback, but it falls apart.
My main pet peeve about foreign cars are all comfort features and not that important to me: the lack of in-the tree automatic shifter(s) and comfortable seats.
In the end the only car I’ve owned that had the whole package is the 1984 diesel VW rabbit hatchback. The Ford Aspire might have made the list, but I didn’t have it long enough to determine if it would have fallen apart.
Credentials established. On to the commentary.
First I think Michael Moore often goes a little too far in what he says and turns people off to his own arguments by indulging in too much rhetoric.
I’m a little sad about this because I agree with all his major points. I think the important thing about GM at this point is not its status as a company, but in its remaining assets, its trained workforce (including most of the people it recently laid off) and plants, which are a part of this nation’s infrastructure, and if we allow them to atrophy will bite us in the ass in the future if we ever need them again. Hence it is worth it for our nation to spend money to maintain those plants and that workforce, and since we’re doing so put them to work doing SOMETHING. If not cars, green technology sounds good to me. There are few other products as complicated and requiring such diverse mechanical expertise to produce as modern automobiles.
As to who’s fault it is, I’d tend to lay the blame more on the management side, but I think on the whole it was the fact that both management and labor took the view that the other was there to screw them over. In the end neither was there to make cars, they were simply fighting over a pot of money.
Management acted as if it believed its own propaganda, that unions were there as an arm of the international communist conspiracy to destroy American capitalism, rather than just to ensure workers got treated and paid fairly. As such, the ‘stupid’ decisions they made made sense. If you really believed that was labor’s goal, your only option would be to do whatever you could, even run the company into the ground, to destroy the labor unions. And that’s what they did. And of course it is your patriotic duty as a capitalist to take as much money out of the company as you can yourself which you then invest in some other company that doesn’t have to deal with labor. If that’s what you really believe.
Labor also came to believe its own propaganda (and not without reason), that management was not there to provide structure and organization, but rather to get workers to work as hard as possible for as little reward as possible, and crush unions. This caused them to fight change as much as possible, locking in contracts to guarantee themselves pay regardless of how much they worked, and locking in plants with outdated equipment to avoid retributive plant closures, simultaneously (unfortunately) making it hard to impossible for GM to change anything significant about the cars they made. I can’t have been the only one to notice that when a brand got bought out by GM a bunch of predictable changes were always made to how the cars are constructed. There’s a reason junkyards have a “GM” section. All GM cars are basically the same in a number of predictable ways. Don’t tell me you’ve never had a hard time telling on sight an Oldsmobile from a Buick from a Chevy.
Caught in the middle (as always) were the actual workers. I don’t know about you, but I enjoy a good day’s work, like to have made something worthwhile at the end, and really get a kick out of supporting myself through these efforts. I don’t think getting paid to do nothing would be all that great. Neither do I think not getting paid to work my ass off would be a particularly good deal. Something in-between would be ideal. Unfortunately, the unions and management weren’t there to come to an agreement on something in-between. They were there to win at all costs. And they won. And it’s costing us everything.
The thing I worry about with Moore’s argument is that modern assembly lines are not the simple conveyor belts of the 30s. I’m really not sure they could be so quickly changed to produce other things. In the 30s people did most of the work. You just told the person to do something different and they did it. Someone had to design the process, but as guns, tanks, etcetera, were already being mass-produced elsewhere, you just got the guy who did it there to do it for you.
But mass-producing green technology…well the companies that make green technology have never really had the funding to explore how such a thing could be done. So far as I know no one is doing much of it anywhere. You can’t just fly in some expert and re-tool your whole production line in a week. And it’s not just people anymore. You need to reprogram welding and insertion robots. If welding and insertion is even what you need to build a wind turbine. I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows. And even if someone does know. I’m not sure anyone knows who that person is and can call them. There’s been such a disconnect between management at car companies and the rest of the world that I doubt any manager at GM could call his cousin Steve who works for a big green technology firm down in Dallas and have him come in and Green up the place a bit, the way they could call up cousin Steve who works building tanks in another division of the same company at the other plant across town back in the 30s. It’s not going to be nearly as simple as Moore describes it. I still think it’s worth doing, though.
Also, there’s no way Obama is going to get away with the kind of sweeping wartime reforms that Roosevelt was able to make. As much as he may call this a ‘war’ to save the environment, he won’t be able to use it as leverage until many more serious events to do with global climate change affect the lives of many more people in the U.S. It could happen, but it might not happen in the U.S. in the next 4 or even 8 years. Some transit systems might get built, but probably just the ones that were in the pipeline anyway. And bullet trains crossing the country. Would be cool. I’d ride them. Heck, the country needs them. But it’s probably not going to happen during this administration.
That’s my take.