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Automotive News & Views United Automobile Workers of America (UAW)
16701 messages, Last post on Nov 20, 2009 at 3:39 AM
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Jan 11, 2009 7:07 am) C'mon, DD. You call yourself a classical liberal - as opposed to a New Deal welfare liberal - so the Cato Institute should be your intellectual home away from home. The CTS V has the recarro seats and a V8 which makes it the Status Car if one is looking for the envy factor. I happen to like the CTS - it's unquestionably the best looking Cadillac since the Eldorados of the late 60s - & I hope that it's the breakthrough car that Cadillac desperately needs. But it has to undo almost 30 years of fumbling & blundering, for which I blame GM management more than I blame the UAW. Perhaps Cadillac is still an aspirational vehicle in Texas & elsewhere in the interior states. But on the coasts, & particularly in the all-important California market, the wealthy & the wannabe wealthy broadcast their social status by buying German. This has been true since the first of the baby boomers reached their early 30s, back in the late 1970s. Remember when the word "yuppie" became part of our popular vocabulary in the early 1980s? Preferring German cars - BMWs in particular - was a large part of being a yuppie. No self-respecting yuppie would be seen alive or dead in a bustleback Seville. Cadillac's core business was under attack, & alarm bells should have sounded in divisional headquarters. But Cadillac wasted most of the 1980s & all of the 1990s designing & building cars that few buyers born after WWII wanted to buy - particularly if those prospective customers were affluent college-educated professionals living in high-income coastal zip codes. Just think how much better off GM would be today if it had brought a high-performance Euro-inspired RWD sedan like the CTS to market in 1993 instead of 2008. Try to imagine how many billions of dollars in lost profits this failure has cost the company. You can carry on all day about the VAT (devised, BTW, by the French in the 1950s to combat revenue lost to smugglers), but the real story here is how Cadillac lost an entire generation of luxury car buyers by failing to understand what they wanted.
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Replying to: jimbres (Jan 11, 2009 9:00 am) They lost me years ago. Big tobacco, Texas sodomy laws, the nuts from Waco, and then they support the neoconservative movement have lost many supporters. Like any large organization, its leadership has been hijacked by special interests. BMW does lots of leasing and there were plenty of sub prime folks out there in the auto market. I was amazed when the local Infinity dealer told me that 70% plus of their cars were leased. Word is that the repo man is doing good business these days. So one could out right buy a Caddy and or appear to be more affluent by leasing. The fact is that GM in France builds the transmission on the 3 and 5 series BMW. I see common parts in many euro cars. Then I see BMW motors in some GMs too. Its amazing how this cross referencing works.
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Jan 11, 2009 9:27 am) That's nice, but wouldn't you rather see GM sell the whole car & not just the tranny? I grew up in a fairly well-off suburb of NYC in the late 50s & 60s, & I remember clearly how Cadillac completely dominated the luxury market then. If you walked through the parking lots of country clubs where the elite golfed & drank, you'd see a few Lincoln Continentals & a sprinkling of Chrysler Imperials, but most of the cars there would be Cadillacs (or Olds 98s or Buick Electras, both of which shared bodies with the Sedan de Ville). Cadillac's lock on that market segment was hugely profitable for GM. I recall reading in a 1960s business mag that 1 Cadillac sale was worth 5 or 6 Chevrolet sales to the corporation's bottom line. Given Cadillac's importance to GM as a whole, you'd think that the company would pull out all of the stops to keep outsiders - notably, the Germans - from stealing this business. Instead, it kept designing & building cars for the previous generation of buyers while BMW & Mercedes grabbed & the baby boomers. This was a colossal blunder that cost GM billions of dollars. Again, I'm a fan of the new CTS. But it could have been & should have been brought to market many years earlier.
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Replying to: jimbres (Jan 11, 2009 10:31 am) And then let's talk about the "entry-luxury" buyers. I've always liked smaller cars, but not CHEAP cars. For the past 20 years those cars were BMW, Audi, VW, perhaps Lexus, Acura - but NO CADDYS. Why couldn't Caddy have built the A4 rather than Audi in the mid 1990s? The 3-series rather than BMW in the early 1990s? Not only are these smaller sport sedans very profitable compared to a Cobalt or Cavalier, they gain the brand loyalty to more expensive "move-up" luxury cars for the future. GM squandered this market and was left selling rental-fodder cars while most Americans who had a choice bought foreign to get some quality. And part of the issue was GM de-contenting the cars due to high fixed costs brought on by UAW benefits. |
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Replying to: tlong (Jan 11, 2009 11:20 am) Excellent point, but not one that the UAW wants us to ponder. They would rather have us believe that the D3's current predicament is due entirely to forces beyond their control: currency manipulation, trade barriers, sunspots, Waco, etc. It will be easier for the UAW to sell us on the need for a no-strings bailout if they can get us to see the D3 as helpless victims. But once we understand that the D3 are their own worst enemies - that their blundering got them into this mess - then what little sympathy there is for a helping hand from the taxpayers will evaporate.
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Jan 11, 2009 8:43 am) Just when would that have been? I believe someone posted statistics showing that Wagoner was way behind the average CEO compared to the high paid UAW workers. If it weren't for the bail out, capitalism would have failed. I think you are very confused. The bailouts are a sign of failure. You will not find a true fiscal conservative that was in favor of ANY of the bailouts. Any good conservative will tell you that you do not reward failure. The liberals have pushed to bailout the banks, GM and their UAW millstone. They did it to cover up their failure to rein in their banking cronies that have given BIG donations to mainly Democrats. Don't kid yourself. If not for the politics of the UAW, GM would be out of business today. You can believe what you like. You are not convincing in your arguments for the UAW. Maybe your UAW local and bargaining unit are responsible and cognizant of the health of your Company. The UAW locals that are tied to the auto industry are totally out in LEFT field. |
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Jan 11, 2009 8:43 am) You do not understand capitalism at all.... In short - capitalism provides freedom to take risks, freedom to succeed and freedom to fail. The bail-outs are cutting off the "freedom to fail" part of capitalism and replacing it with the notion that the government will save you if you fail. THIS IS VERY WRONG. The failed ventures MUST be allowed to die so newer-better ideas can take over. Otherwise, our grandkids will be paying taxes for more and more losing ventures which our goverment was too corrupt to allow to die. The inevatable end to this spiral is a FAILED GOVERNMENT!!! This logic would be obvious to anyone who steps back a looks at things with an open mind.
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regarding the conditions of the GM-Chrysler-UAW bailout. Might Obama hire some knowledgeable auto industry consultants(many of us would fill that spot admirably, IMHO  )to help him keep tabs on how the UAW intends to get their grubbly paws on...uhhh...I...I mean work nicely with Daddy GM and Chrysler towards building product that the public actually feels like parting cash with? I read some of his latest comments on this and that sounds like his intent. But who is he actually going to hire to watch over this 14B large, eh? Valid question?
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Replying to: iluvmysephia1 (Jan 11, 2009 2:25 pm) It is a good question. I just don't think any executive worth a hoot would take on the GM mess without the benefit of bankruptcy. They need the latitude to shed all the waste, UAW contracts and monstrous debts they have incurred. I think as in 1979, Chrysler would be easier to save than GM. They need a Jack Welch type that will streamline the operation, into a money making entity. I see it becoming a nationalized industry that ultimately fails to produce anything the consumers will want. Just think about a car designed by Pelosi, Reid, Obama and Barney Frank... 
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gets the mind imagineering, don't it? I say it was already time to punt, but apparently enough important others feel otherwise. 4th down and about 99 yards to go with a bunch of Guv-Mint cash. Can anyone smell raspberry jelly donuts warming in the Company microwave? I noticed my old buddy's at The Boeing Company are finally joining the rest of the nation's manufacturer's and are layoff off some 4,500 workers. Here we go again. Boeing smells rotten socks with the sensivity of a hound dog. Anything close to tight pocketbooks anywhere in the world and they're brewing up the Starbuck's and buying the raspberry jelly donuts for those long, extendo excruciating Big-Boy meetings. With announcements following like this week's one.
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