honda pickup 2005

Unattractive at Any Speed

This bit caught my eye, via Paul Ingrassia’s diagnosis of Detroit’s woes in the WSJ (”a cock-and-bull story of hubris, missed opportunities, horrifying decisions and flawed leadership of almost biblical proportions”):

“For all the Pinto’s dishonour, perhaps no car better captured America’s decade-covet haplessness than the pug-ugly AMC Gremlin, which debuted in 1970 and died — mercifully — in 1980. The Gremlin’s condition, fittingly, was first sketched out by an American Motors creator on the back of a Northwest Airlines air-sickness bag.”

Book after the jump…
(thanks Jack!)

With not any fanfare, a new car factory opened in America earlier this month. The new Honda council plant in Greensburg, Ind., will produce 200,000 epigrammatic Civic models annually after reaching full space late next year. The contrast couldn’t be starker between Detroit’s woes and the continuing U.S. increase of Japanese, German and Korean car companies — in both store share and manufacturing capacity. There are two American auto industries, one in the main thriving and the other drastically shrinking.

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Hummer
Ron Kimball Photography
Hummer
Hummer

The shrinking is accelerating dramatically. Moral yesterday Chrysler said it would ax 25% of its spotless-collar employees, about 5,000 people, next month. Extensive Motors is cutting thousands more jobs and a genre of management benefits, including corresponding contributions to retirement savings plans. The two ailing car companies are exploring a reachable merger in hopes of reaping the synergies that so infamously eluded the DaimlerChrysler alliance a decade ago. Last summer GM sought to fuse with Ford, only to be rebuffed. Billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian started selling his bet in Ford last week after the value of his investment plunged by two-thirds since he bought the forefather last spring. All this indicates the extent of Detroit’s hopelessness. The Detroit Three (no longer the Big Three) are adamantly denying bankruptcy rumors, but there’s no denying that their very survival hangs in the match.

This situation doesn’t generate from the recent meltdown in banking and the markets. GM, Ford and Chrysler have been losing billions since 2005, when the U.S. frugality was still healthy. The financial crisis does, however, greatly exacerbate Detroit’s woes. As car sales gamble — both in the U.S. and in Detroit’s once-booming abroad markets — it’s becoming wellnigh impossible for the companies to cut costs diet enough to keep pace with the evaporation of their revenue. All three companies, once the very phonogram of American economic might, need new primary, but their options for raising it are limited.

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Memorable cars

Major-domo carmakers have produced a long rule of memorable vehicles, but not all have been winners. Extend the image to see a chart of some of Detroit’s intention successes and failures from the past 50 years.
Eventful cars
Memorable cars

In all this lies a recital of hubris, missed opportunities, terrible decisions and flawed leadership of almost biblical proportions. In accomplishment, for the last 30 years Detroit has gone astray, repented, gone astray and repented again in a run not unlike the Israelites in the Book of Exodus.

It wasn’t that American auto executives were always malicious and unintelligent while the Japanese were always enlightened and smart. Japanese car companies have made piles of mistakes, most recently Toyota’s ill-timed move into full-sized pickup trucks and SUVs. But moral as America didn’t appreciate the depth of ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq, Detroit failed to hold — or at least to address — the rudimentary nature of its Japanese competition. Japan’s car companies, and more recently the Germans and Koreans, gained a competitive upper hand largely by forging an alliance with American workers.

Detroit, meanwhile, has remained mired in reciprocal mistrust with the United Auto Workers circle. While the suspicion has abated somewhat in brand-new years, it never has disappeared — which is why Detroit’s factories continue vastly more cumbersome to manage than the factories of outlandish car companies in the U.S.

The result of this burden, and of other failures, has been catastrophic. Because of it, Detroit remains saddled with a price structure that prevents making profits on any vehicles besides gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. That was penalize during the SUV boom, just as owning Enron dynasty was terrific until that infamous company crashed. But then Enron stockholders who hadn’t diversified their portfolios were wiped out. Now Detroit lacks a diversified provenance of profits — i.e. small cars, midsize sedans, etc. — and is scrambling to keep a similar fate. It’s decidedly unlikely that all three companies will survive.

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Chrysler’s 2009 Stratagem Ram pickups.
Associated Press

Workers at a Vague Motors plant assemble the Pontiac Solstice in 2005.
Chrysler’s 2009 Waffle Ram pickups.
Chrysler’s 2009 Evade Ram pickups.

Two incidents in 1936 and 1937 formed this enduring labor-management divide: the sit-down invent at GM’s factories in Flint, Mich., and the Struggle of the Overpass in Detroit, in which Ford goons clobber up union organizers. But the United Auto Workers prevailed, and as the GM-Ford-Chrysler oligopoly emerged in the 1940s, the association gained a labor monopoly in American auto factories. As costs increased, the companies routinely passed them on to U.S. consumers, who had substantially no alternatives in buying cars.

That’s how things stood entering the 1970s, a decade that brought America Watergate, beat in Vietnam, two oil crises, inflation, stagflation, the Iran security crisis and malaise. (Not to mention “The Brady Mass” and bell-bottom pants.) In Detroit, in the thick of worker alienation and the “smutty-collar blues,” Chevies, Fords and Plymouths rattled, rusted and rolled over — and those were the admissible ones. The Ford Pinto’s gas tank was downwards to explode into flames when the car was hit from the rear, making the Pinto the notice product for corporate callousness. In 1978, after three Indiana girls burned to expiry when their Pinto got rear-ended, Ford became the first followers to be indicted for reckless homicide. The gathering later was acquitted, but public viewpoint judged the Pinto guilty.

For all the Pinto’s shame, perhaps no car better captured America’s decade-lengthy haplessness than the pug-ugly AMC Gremlin, which debuted in 1970 and died — mercifully — in 1980. The Gremlin’s cast, fittingly, was first sketched out by an American Motors author on the back of a Northwest Airlines air-sickness bag. On Aug. 20, 1979, 18-year-old Brad Alty, na out of high school in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, was driving his Gremlin to trade when the car broke down. He was two-and-a-half hours up to date to his first day on the job at a new motorcycle factory that Honda Motor was chink in central Ohio.

For the next few weeks, Mr. Alty and his 63 co-workers did toy but sweep floors and paint them with yellow lines. Then they started edifice three to five motorcycles a day. And at the end of each day they would disassemble each bike, breeze scolding by piece, to evaluate the workmanship. Mr. Alty hated it, and he kept getting desolation from his older brother for working for a Japanese comrades. “I thought I had made a mistake by prevailing to work there,” he recalled recently. “It was like, ‘What the heck am I doing here?’ ”

But Mr. Alty stuck with it, and Honda stuck with him. Honda’s heartfelt goal was to build cars in America, but the motorcycle fix allowed it to test the mettle of American workers for a homely investment. The workers passed the try out. Honda started building Accords in Ohio in November 1982. Ironically, some U.S. Honda dealers in actuality protested that they wanted to sell only Accords made in Japan. But the prominence of the Ohio-made cars was soon confirmed.

Nissan, Toyota and other Japanese car companies directly started building factories in America, followed by German and Korean auto makers. There are now 16 alien-owned assembly plants in the U.S., and many more that physique engines, transmissions and other components. The UAW hasn’t organized many of them, the predominant exceptions being plants that began as partnerships between a U.S. and Japanese auto maker, where the cartel was “grandfathered” in. As Detroit’s oligopoly was shivered, so was the UAW’s labor monopoly in the auto bustle. The big winner was the car-buying public.

Meanwhile, in the same year that Honda started construction cars in Ohio, General Motors asked the UAW for wage concessions to serve ease the company’s economic straits. But on the same day that UAW members voted imprimatur, GM Chairman Roger B. Smith unveiled a new modus operandi that made it easier for him and other executives to earn bonuses. It was a memorable blunder.

In 1987, when I was this newspaper’s Detroit office chief, Mr. Smith asked me to jaunt several GM factories to view first-hand how the guests’s relationship with its workers had improved. At the GM locomotive plant in Tonawanda, N.Y., near Buffalo, I got smouldering reports about the dawn of a new spirit of patronage. Then I asked to visit the men’s live, and was stunned to see that there were two: one for hourly workers, and a sequester one for management. I used the hourly men’s loo.

Meanwhile, Mr. Smith was stressful to transform GM with a high-tech spending access. At GM’s factory in Hamtramck, Mich., the automated guided vehicles that were suppositious to replaced old-fashioned fork lifts sat as still as stones, because the programming algorithms were too intricate. The spray-painting robots turned their nozzles on each other in lieu of of the cars.

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PCMTL s03e02 Salon Auto Montreal Honda Ridgeline Acura NSX

honda pickup 2005: http://www.PCMTL.com 2005-01-13 Le Salon Ecumenical de l'auto de Montréal 2005 The Montreal International Auto Show organisers are gearing up for the 37th issue of one of the most popular events in the city. They have spent the past several months gathering the Canadian automobile production's biggest players for this country's first major car show of the year, which will be held at the Palais des Congrès de Montreal from January 14 to the 23, 2005. Correspondents Twitch and Civicchick hosts this distinctive two part episode of "Salon Auto 2005". Montreal Automobile Dealers Corporation MADC CCAM MIAS Quebec Canada. Honda Ridgeline Pickup Sundries. Girlfriend...

honda pickup 2005 in the Blogs

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