GM's ignition recall issue explained.

jspence1 wrote:
How does an ignition switch kill people?

ignition switches don't kill people. runaway cars kill people.
bumpy

How does an ignition switch kill people?

bigdogger,

Go back and read my post and find the "competition freely" words. Not state controlled but true free! Very few countries even know what that means and would never let it really happen in their country. Sounds like you are a "beancounter" or a retired "Beancounter" making excuses for the existence of beancounters running and ruining so many businesses!

"Reconcile" is not remotely needed or even a part of the known histories as the failed beancounter run operation speak and spoken volumes about their gobs of business ruinizations. Beancounters very seldom even have a hint of how to design, engineer, manufacture a product, or market it but yet they seem to think they have all the answers for everything and how to run the business! Yup, right into the ground, that is! Then blame everyone else for their own failures! Again: Beans are not beans until they are beans! Cutting the roots off the "plants" to save a few bucks and cut corners assures there won't be nutrients to make any quality crops, NO beans, and the "plants" wil die too! Sound familiar?

Problem is no large corporation gives two craps about you after they get the check. I have always bought GM stuff because it is what I know and I am comfortable with it.
Not sure why they handled this one like this. No sure way any large company handles similar instances like this. Their mentality should be "What if my mom was driving this? What we would she do?"
I know my mom flips out over a burnt out light bulb.

Terryallan wrote:
Bottom line. The ignitions failed. GM knew it, people died. They didn't warn anyone, or have a recall, They didn't care.

Ford didn't care either over the Explorer rollover debacle. I remember a spokesperson saying it was cheaper to pay the lawsuits than fix the problem. Same idiotic mentality as GM. Over 200 deaths in the rollover accidents.

travelnutz wrote:
bigdogger,

You are a dreamer! Competition freely within a nation's market and economy is what spurs product development and innovation. Outside underselling prices kill innovation, a nation's market place for domestic made products, the dollar's value, and the nation's standard of living and makes a nation dependant upon where their dollars went which they now have to borrow back and pay interest in a downward spiral until failure. Beancounters are to count actual beans not what they "think" might become beans someday in a perfect world.

Beancounter's actions have ruined so many businesses and corporations with their lofty or decimating forecasts. A bean isn't a bean until it's a bean!

Then how do you reconcile the fact that the countries that have the highest standards ofliving are the countries with all those evil bean counters? Cost management spurs efficency, which in turn spurs inovation. I am reasonably sure North Korea doesn't have a lot of bean counters and it also doesn't appear that the abscense of them has vaulted their economy forward.

bigdogger,

You are a dreamer! Competition freely within a nation's market and economy is what spurs product development and innovation. Outside underselling prices kill innovation, a nation's market place for domestic made products, the dollar's value, and the nation's standard of living and makes a nation dependant upon where their dollars went which they now have to borrow back and pay interest in a downward spiral until failure. Beancounters are to count actual beans not what they "think" might become beans someday in a perfect world.

Beancounter's actions have ruined so many businesses and corporations with their lofty or decimating forecasts. A bean isn't a bean until it's a bean!

dwp619,

You got it right!

Quote from the dictionary etc:

"Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a year, or other given period of time. GDP per capita is often considered an indicator of a country's standard of living."


dwp619 knows but some other might want to look it up!

Notice the word "within"? It's the reason for GDP! Sending your dollars out of your country when purchasing a foreign made product, the assembly of, major components made or assembled elsewhere, and then imported into your country and sold using your dollars LOWERS your countries standard of living and dollar value which means for all! People seem to think they are raising their standard of living when it's just the opposite! It de-values your dollar and makes all good and or services more expensive within your country thru rising prices on the world market.

Ever hear of a manufacturer who moved off shore because they were making too much profit making their products here??? They only do it to survive when they must to lower the cost of making their products and getting away from business killing regulations etc. For most, it's a last resort to avoid closing down or going bankrupt. Guess where all those jobs went also. It's the result of our 50-60 yeras of increasing labor costs and mandated business stiffling regulations onshore and we haven't learned. Americans, by and large, buy the cheapest they can regardless of how or where it's built and who was employed to make the product or where the profit goes. Buy cheap, get cheap. Send you dollars and jobs out of the country and it's likely to never return unless borrowed. Borrowed means paying back with interest!

Why is it so hard to understand why we now have these issues posters complain about? The hand writting has been written on the wall in very bold letters for decades but reading must be an option to so many.

BenK wrote:
Bean counters and when they pervaded automotive and ruined corporate America

Love this article and once found reference it often...and what used
to take me pages is boiled down to a one pager...

Who else should be blamed for the decline of America's two remaining automakers?

MotorTrend wrote:


From the November 2006 issue of Motor Trend

editor-in-chief Angus MacKenzie

Wall Street hasn't done Detroit any favors over the years. The Street is supposed to be the hard-nosed arbiter of success for corporate America, the white-hot cauldron of capitalism that's made this country's economy the most powerful in the world, the place where the money talks and you-know-what walks. (Though having allowed Enron to happen, Wall Street seems no longer to see the difference.) And, yes, Detroit has hardly covered itself in glory over the past 30 years. But I can't help wonder whether Wall Street should share some of the blame for the decline of America's two remaining automakers.

Let's be absolutely clear up front: Few people buy stock in a company for any reason other than they expect a return on their investment, and stockholders in auto companies are no exception. But in an era where screen jockeys zap billions of dollars a day through the ether at the touch of a computer keyboard, Wall Street's institutionalized ADD has resulted in a feverish short-term view of a business whose lengthy product cycles and huge investment costs are just too damned difficult to deal with.

Maybe that's why many of today's most successful automakers--Toyota, BMW, Porsche, to name three--are those who've never had to sweat a quarterly earnings call with a posse of skeptical Wall Street analysts looking for an opportunity to make a fast buck and ready to trash the stock price when they can't see one. To these companies, the concept of shareholder value has a very different meaning: "I don't watch (the stock price)," Dr. Shoichiro Toyoda once told Toyota North America president Jim Press. "I'm not going to sell my stock. If I worried about that, the decisions that I make wouldn't reflect the fact my name is on the back of every car."

Most Wall Street analysts will tell you Toyota, famously stingy with dividends, doesn't treat its shareholders well. But its stock is worth roughly four times that of General Motors. Go figure.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist David Halberstam records in his book, "The Fifties," Bunkie Knudsen, who ran Pontiac and Chevrolet in the 1950s and 1960s, reckoned it all started to go wrong for Detroit when Fred Donner became president of GM in 1958. Knudsen was outraged that Donner would insist on talking about GM's stock price, and what the analysts on Wall Street thought about it, at his daily meeting with the heads of GM's divisions. Before Donner, those meetings were mostly about making cars.

Financial engineering quickly replaced product engineering as Detroit's primary business. GM and Ford essentially morphed into highly profitable finance companies with an auto business attached. That meant you could easily get a great deal on a new car. Only problem was, that new car wasn't always so great anymore. But the fat earnings on the loans and lease deals made the business look good and that kept the stock price pumped.

It's a sign of how entrenched this view of Detroit's business model has become that GM's decision to unload a majority share of its finance company, GMAC, earlier this year was treated by many as something akin to selling the family farm. But the sale is good news, because it means GM is shifting its focus back to its real business: designing and engineering cars and trucks. Meanwhile, over at troubled Ford, there are rumors the company may buy back its stock, now worth barely 15 percent what it was in 1999, and become privately owned. I hope the rumors are true, because Ford will then be free to concentrate on what it needs to do best: make cars and trucks.

Bunkie Knudsen, David Halberstam writes, believed in a simple concept: The people in Detroit had to make good cars, and if they did, the people in New York would take care of the stock. If only it were still true...

That was back then and now say the Japanese have caught up and/or
copied our corporate mentality of Bean Counter CEO's that manage
the bottom line...instead of their 'product'

Betcha if you ask any of the bean counters what their product is..exactly
that they won't know...

If it wasn't for those hated "bean counters" you would most likely be riding a horse today for transportation, because automobiles would be way too expensive. Henry Ford started it by developing the modern automotive factory which cut costs and put the hand made car manufacturers out of business. If suppliers could charge anything they want for each component on a car today the dang things would probably start at a half a million dollars. Do you think the auto manufacturers stop at the ignition switch? They demand the lowest price possible on every single thing on a vehicle, 10s of thousands of parts. And yes, often the part has to be less than the absolute best. Personally, I am fine that the clock is a cheap digital and not a Rolex Presidential.
As for the safety aspect of the current problem, it is pretty easy to blame GM with 20/20 hindsight, but in reality, it takes a lot of incidents to actually separate an ignition failure due to defect from ignitions failing due to the fact that someone abused the ignition by having 3 pounds of keys hanging from it, by trying to pry the keys out when they haven't actually turned the ignition to "off" , or when they accidentally whack it with a two by four they just bought at Home Depot and were trying to wedge into car to take it home.

MM49,

Nope, not like you! We are extremely happy and have no worries and live life to the fullest because we controlled our future and have avoided the cheapout scenario like most of our fellow Americans hadn't. We haven't and don't have home, vehicle, or RV problems as we knew what to buy and what not to buy. Learned how to pay cash rather than payments with interest for one after another item. Also, simple to win when you spend your entire working days seeing products designed and made from the design stage up thru being sold and know what's really in them that's so telling. Design and engineering rules and knowing what shortcuts were made in and for the manufacturing and the mis-reprentations made when selling the product leaves so much to be desired! Knowledge learned over so many years is why we avoid certain brands like the plague. Some would rather shoot themselves in the foot and hope it doesn't really hurt and some know better than to!