Why I am not Voting Obama

@farmerman,

The joke is you Formerman.

@H2O MAN,

I'd like to hear Formerman's version of why Detroit's best products seem to disappear...

Take the Saturn for instance, a car so good that the Japanese bought a lot of them, and which wholesalers say never break and never need anything other than detailing before being sold at auctions as 5 - 10 year old used cars. As I read it the UAW killed Saturn because something about the Saturn business model wasn't medieval enough for them but maybe Formerman has some better explanation.

Or the Neon and Stratus, two really beautiful cars which apparently weren't ugly enough for either the UAW or some ugly person at Chrysler and have been replaced with cars (Caliber, Avenger, Charger) nearly as ugly as the 1950s Volvos. I mean, all the Neon ever needed was some sort of an engine seal upgrade so it didn't leak oil and I'm not aware of anything the Stratus needed and again, anybody with any sort of aesthetic taste at all would pick the Neon or Stratus over the cars which replaced them.

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@gungasnake,

I don't think the UAW killed the Saturn. It was more like GM killed it.

Quote:

Results at Saturn were mixed. According to The Wall Street Journal, the project was too ambitious, as "everything at Saturn is new: the car, the plant, the workforce, the dealer network and the manufacturing process.

Not even Toyota, everyone's candidate for the world's best automaker, tackles more than two new items on any single project.

" While Saturn cars proved very popular with buyers, actual sales never met the optimistic projected targets, in part because of a recession in 1990."

It also proved cannibalistic as 41% of Saturn buyers already owned a GM car. Its separation from the rest of its GM parent, plus the fact that it drained $5 billion from other car projects, stirred resentment within GM ranks.

Also, Saturn opened at considerably higher cost than the Japanese transplants (factories that Japanese automakers established in the United States).

1 Reply

georgeob, Weighed against the two wars that GW Bush "induced" on our country, I'd rather see our tax money save our auto industry. No contest.

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@gungasnake,

Having had some crews work at the Spring Hill Saturn plant, they never quite got the "just in time " manufacturing down . We were sending geotech engineers down there to do the foundations analyses to resize and relocate stamping machines because the older ones (less than 5 years old) were leaking oil into the subsurface. Also They were buying specially made parts that held up lines .Ultimately,their entire profit margins began to strangle because of their manufacture and their sales network. (They went and built all new Saturn dealerships which required huge investments)
GM did kill the Saturn becuase of returns, no matter how well their units sold so really, they never achieved market expectations.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

georgeob, Weighed against the two wars that GW Bush "induced" on our country, I'd rather see our tax money save our auto industry. No contest.

Weighted agsainst Hitler, I'd rather have Obama. However that doesn't have anything more to do with the matter under discussion than your comment above.

Moreover our tax money didn't "save" GM. More or less the same result would have arisen from a normal bankrupcy procedure, except that the power of the UAW fo screw up th company would be reduced.

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@georgeob1,

We're talking about the US, not Germany or any other country.

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@georgeob1,

you know that a "normal bankruptcy" would have strewn the subs and the divisions to the wind.
It would NEVER have reassembled as it has.
If we wind up as a country that has to rely upon the rest of the world to make our ****, we would then be in big trouble as a nation.

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@farmerman,

It would have destroyed Michigan without the bailout, and those 1-million plus jobs adds to the tax coffers of both federal and state governments for the foreseeable future. That's a plus in liberal-speak, but conservatives hate to see Obama have successes.

Just wondering how much it would have cost the federal government if GM went belly up? $25-billion in unemployment, food stamps, and other assistance?

Don't forget; those lost income would have impacted all those businesses being "supported" by those workers.

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Tow idiots talking in liberal-speak (Ci & Formerman lying to each other)

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@H2O MAN,

watersquirt has to put his worthless blurb into this mix. Making claims he can NEVER back up with facts.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

cicerone imposter wrote:

georgeob, Weighed against the two wars that GW Bush "induced" on our country, I'd rather see our tax money save our auto industry. No contest.

Weighted agsainst Hitler, I'd rather have Obama. However that doesn't have anything more to do with the matter under discussion than your comment above.

The problem with your analogy is that you're not a supporter of Hitler. You were a supporter of Bush's wars. That means CI's point was fair game. You have lost your standing to complain about "the forces of a heavy handed government".

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@farmerman,

What about the Neon and Stratus? Why were those replaced with ugly-prize candidates?

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Ci is A2K's reigning Queen of fact less blurbs.

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@gungasnake,

I didn't think I've ever seen a Neon or Stratus in real life, so I googled them. I think that style of car is out-of-date. It probably was nice for the early 1980's, but it wouldn't do well now. Car styles evolve just like tie widths, hem lengths and hair cuts.

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@ehBeth,

Pretty and ugly don't change. The Neon and Stratus were pretty, the cars that replaced them are ugly.

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@gungasnake,

The Neon and Stratus were pretty well marketed low quality cars...

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@farmerman,

E.G. had a good one about a Santorum/ Brownback ticket. I forget how it went exactly but you get the idea.

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@sozobe,

saaaay no mawuh!! nudge nudge. Know wud I mean Know wud I mean?

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@Rockhead,

I've driven Neons and Stratuses with nearly 200K miles on them and still fairly tight and in reasonably good shape.

1 Reply

Why I am not Voting Obama

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