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Automotive News & Views 2009 Predictions for the Auto Industry
76 messages, Last post on Mar 09, 2009 at 2:22 PM
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Any experienced businessman knows you can not predict the future of any business or industry when Congress is involved. Without their meddling and leaving the future to "Natural Economics", Chrysler would have a funeral and GM would beg Ford to marry her. The average hourly wage of the average taxpayer is $28/hour so why should those $28 an hour taxpayers bailout the $78/hour employees just so they can retain their vacation homes, motor homes, yachts, and planes? Middlefinger got them to where they are today and has not expressed any regret.
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1. Toyota and Honda face the fact that service bulliten is really a Recall 2. Richard Shelby is brought up on treason charges for giving away millions upon millions to the imports but won't budge one dime for American brands 3. Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru, and Kia pull the plug on all of their so ugly cars and failed attempt at trucks. now sell the GT-R and well, nothing else 4. GM, Chrysler and Ford back charge the American government for all of the tooling cost and lost revenue from 1941 through 1946 when they switched over to build tanks and planes to counter the surprise attack and killing of thousands in Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. 5. Americans , like me, find out that Toyota quality means sludge ridden engines, and failed transmissions from Honda. 6. We get our head out of the sand and start supporting our manufacturing base instead of buying Chinese made junk from Wal-Mart. |
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Replying to: euphonium (Dec 08, 2008 10:11 am) I think the average wage sans benefits is more like $18/hour. But hey, we'll spend at a bare minimum a trillion to bail out some gutless $7800/hr finance execs, so why not everyone else?   35BN is also only about 10 years worth of federal aid to parasite Israel alone, so looking at it that way, it's not such a big deal. I'd rather have autoworkers than a troublemaker supposed ally nation. |
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sees the industry consolidating to just six mega-automakers, in the next couple of years: The economic crisis will trigger a big cut in the number of global automakers, Fiat group CEO Sergio Marchionne said. Marchionne thinks there could be only six survivors in the global volume sector as falling new-car sales and rising financial losses lead to a wave of consolidation in the industry. "By the time we finish with this in the next 24 months, as far as mass-producers are concerned, we're going to end up with one American house, one German of size; one French-Japanese, maybe with an extension in the US; one in Japan; one in China and one potential European player," Marchionne said. "The only way for companies to survive is if they make more than 5.5 million cars per year," Marchionne told Automotive News Europe. At present, only five automakers -- Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford Motor and Renault-Nissan -- have that kind of scale. ......For example, companies such as BMW, which is 46.6 percent owned by the Quandt family, and PSA/Peugeot-Citroen, 30 percent owned by the Peugeot family, could be put up for sale if their fortunes decline. In Europe, PSA, BMW and Fiat are seen as most vulnerable if the downturn accelerates. That is because they are not big enough to enjoy the economies of scale of their rivals. Pieper expects VW, Renault-Nissan and Daimler to survive. "Size in the current situation is what matters," he said. Scale makes it cheaper to buy parts and also spreads the cost of research and development across many models and a greater number of cars. "Audi has been doing better than Mercedes and BMW over the last few years because it benefits from being owned by VW," Pieper said. These factors are key reasons behind Porsche's decision to buy VW. http://www.autonews.com/article/20081208/ANE03/812079901/1179 (registration link) It's something some here at Edmunds have been saying for a while. I wonder if the one U.S. automaker will be led by the execs of the former Ford company, or if it will just be Ford, with a few bits and pieces (Jeeps? Chrysler vans? some additional Chevy cum Daewoos? Corvette? Cadillacs?) it picked up along the way in the bankruptcy court. In Japan, Honda doesn't have the kind of volume Marchionne is talking about, but it has a healthy profit margin, so I think maybe two will hang in there, with the remainder of Nissan being swallowed up whole by the giant Reanult monster and Subaru being completely bought up by Toyota. What will happen to the others (Isuzu, Mitsu, Mazda) is anyone's guess. And of course, VW is a monster in its own right. It has limitless potential in the eastern European and Asian markets where most other major automakers have little presence, even if VW is permanently tainted in the U.S., FORMERLY the world's largest car market but perhaps not for much longer....
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Replying to: nippononly (Dec 08, 2008 12:33 pm) Oh man, if there was ever a company that could come along and steal the #1 spot from Toyota, it would be VW. They have such a strong position globally. I also doubt the U.S. market is as important to their bottom line as it is to Toyotas. Could make for a VERY interesting battle... |
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Replying to: rvictor (Dec 08, 2008 10:34 am) 2. GM, Ford, and Chrysler continue to lose market share in cars, but hold steady in Trucks until gas prices spike up again mid-2009 3. Fresh with all the information coming out of the Bailout talks, the average American buyer is increasingly disgusted with the Big Three requiring government $ due to multiyear incompetence and the grossly overpaid UAW workers. These 2009 buyers generally refuse to even consider the new products from the "New" Big Three. 4. GM consolidates to all it can support and the market is interested in: Chevrolet, Cadillac, and Saturn. 5. Also, due to the Bailout news and analysis, the understanding that an "American car" is one built by Honda in Marysville, OH just as one Detroit becomes prevasive and neuters the "buy america" sales pitch from Detroit and the UAW. Also, IMO The ugliest cars I have seen in the last 20 years are from Detroit And the big three had cost+ contracts during WWII - they were already paid for all tooling + a profit to build armaments. EVERYONE loved cost+ while it lasted.
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Replying to: rickwjenn (Jan 02, 2009 3:07 pm) Problem with that: Ford already accelerated fuel efficiency and hybrids, with the 2010 Fusion beating out the Camry. 3. Fresh with all the information coming out of the Bailout talks, the average American buyer is increasingly disgusted with the Big Three requiring government $ due to multiyear incompetence and the grossly overpaid UAW workers. These 2009 buyers generally refuse to even consider the new products from the "New" Big Three. Again lumping the Big3 together...Ford has not taken money and says it doesn't need any. They probably won't either, see response to #1. Chrysler, though, is a dead man walking. 4. GM consolidates to all it can support and the market is interested in: Chevrolet, Cadillac, and Saturn. That may be GM's best hope for survival; the max a successful car company seems to be able to support is 3 brands (Toyota/Lexus/Scion, Ford/Lincoln/Mercury). However, I'm not sure we have completely discovered the depths of GM's stupidity.
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Replying to: bpizzuti (Jan 02, 2009 5:25 pm) there will be some exceptions, audi/porsche/vw comes to mind. for gm, maybe chevy/buick/cadillac. hyundai. jeep, mazda, volvo, good brands, but who knows. btw, someone asked if the trade in on an 05 prius with 36k for 12,300 was too low. answer was, it's about right. the bloom seems to be off that rose, at least for now. |
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Happy New Year to the UAW’s prosperous officers Ron Gettelfinger, General Holiefield, Bob King, Cal Rapson and James Settles …from over 500,000 betrayed UAW retirees. These union officials call themselves negotiators. In the few short months of Gettelinger’s depressing tenure how much negotiating skill did it take for them to say yes when they should have said no as they gave back 70 years of hard won worker gains that are now lost forever? At Solidarity House these union officials promote the Reuther brothers who set the standard for working class Middle America. For a factual look at what the Reuthers actually thought of their bogus brand of unionism consider the second link below. It is the words of Victor Reuther talking about the new age concessionary UAW leadership at the huge 50th anniversary Rally of the UAW in Flint in 1987. I moderated this large historic event and it was sponsored by dozens of top UAW local leaders from across our nation. Today defenseless UAW retirees are being treated as America’s irrelevant underclass. They have been sold-out by government politicians, corporate leaders and especially these top union officials. As many of these elderly retirees suffer from cancer and other serious work related health issues related to auto production their “life and death health care benefits” have been labeled as sacrificial legacy costs. They have become negotiable political pawns. Retirees legally owned their health care benefits until these union officials went to court to attain the ability to negotiate them away. These negotiated benefits were paid for over a working lifetime of worker earnings deferrals and hourly contributions. Union officials refused to vest these negotiated monies and frittered them away into profoundly less important areas. Just as significant is the glaring facts that UAW negotiated 30-year auto pensions are overwhelmingly unequal. UAW officials refused to keep pensions up with the cost of living Increases over the years, which allowed older retirees pensions to fall dangerously behind. These UAW retirees who have given so much to our nation have become America’s elderly poor and are tapped-out with living costs. They have also been denied the pension building tools available to today’s retirees and simply cannot afford to buy healthcare on their meager pensions. It is an American tragedy that these elderly retirees would be targeted and betrayed. Share the following links… http://unionreview.com/insights-analysis-uaw-betrays-autoworkers http://westfallmike.tripod.com/Page12.htm http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/08/11/interview-with-whitey-hale/ http://www.umflint.edu/library/archives/westfall.htm http://www.speroforum.com/site/print.asp?idarticle=16991 http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/id6.html http://www.uawndm.org/ndmportal/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=157 http://westfallmike.tripod.com/Page14.htm http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/id17.html http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/id50.html http://westfallmike.tripod.com/ http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3A*%3AIE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7G- FRD&q=mike+westfall+uaw&btnG=Search |
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