soapbox

I suppose there are times in history when you can step up and move forward or you can stick to the old ideas and lose completely. I don’t have good examples, but maybe stagecoach manufacturers when cars started getting big?

It sounds like the auto bailout just died because of a similar problem. The UAW failed to understand that having a job is better than not having a job. Apparently current costs for a US employee in a GM plant is 50% more than a US employee in a Toyota plant. Of course, that’s only part of what’s killing the US auto industry… years of mismanagement and bad products definitely haven’t helped… but agreeing to bring labor costs in line with other plants in 2011 doesn’t help much when the crisis is now.

I have a feeling that Ford will come out of this mess OK. They have good compact cars that people like to drive, they just don’t sell them in the US yet. Throw in good trucks and I think they’ll be set. GM and Chrysler though… between the two of them, what do you have? Dodge trucks, the Corvette, and the Chevy Malibu? I don’t know that that’s enough to merit keeping the companies around, especially if they have no hopes of getting costs under control.

The real hope is that Toyota/Honda/Subaru/et al. don’t have efficient enough plants that they can pick up the slack of one of the major US automakers going under without having to hire on new workers.