Aparently it’s a bit much to ask that companies produce cars people want to buy, in a cost-effective fashion . . .
I’d be happy to bail the Big Three out, provided they implemented the management techniques used by Toyota’s U.S. manufacturing plants (and produced, of course, a state-of-the-art hybrid flex-fuel Cruiser as my next set of wheels; I hear one can really burn rubber on methanol). This seems, however, to be somewhat unlikely.
h/t: AllahP at Hot Air, who refers to Peter Schiff as the “seer of economic End Times.”
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There’s a lot Detroit can learn from Toyota, but full implementation of the Toyota Production System requires a spirit of cooperation between management and labor which will be very hard to establish in the light of history, even given enlightened leadership on both sides.
Something also needs to be done about the dealer network–there are too many of them, they largely compete with other dealers selling the same stuff, and their approach to sales is pretty much “ours is cheaper.” State franchise laws & preexisting contracts make it hard to prune dealerships outside of a Chapter 11 reogranization.
I also think that GM, in particular, could benefit from more decentralization. If memory serves, Saturn was originally envisaged as a true business unit, with its own manufacturing and its own dealers, as well as its own engineering and marketing. The functional barons, of course, were horrified at this proposition, and immediately began making “synergy” arguments for recentralization. But if GM had stuck to the original vision, Saturn might have pioneered a new direction for the overall company.