Ludwig, wrong mate. You sound exactly like the ideology that destroyed the UK industry.

Routs were required to build a new factory in the wrong area, to employ workers of the failed ship building industry. Their end was just a matter of time.

Austin, & Morris were required to amalgamate, death was asured.
Leyland were forced to pick up the resulting BMC. Cars had to be built for export, death was hastened.

Any prescription of the type of product to be built is a sure way to guarantee failure. What you want to see built is not what the public will buy.

It cost GMH a billion dollars to develope the current Holden. I'm sure they, & Ford, & particularly Mitsubishi, wish they had gone smaller, NOW, but that was not the case, when development was strated. GMH will probably get most of that back in time, & get one more try, if GM is still there.

To develop a new smaller petrol car will have a similar cost, & should be viable, but something different, who knows? & what to develop? Should it be Fuel cell, Hydrogen powered, Natural gas, Hybrid, or perhaps full Electric? They will not get more than one go, so they had better be right.

If you watched Top Gear the other night you would have seen, what most of us car buffs have known all along. Hybrid, & hype are interchangeable, when it comes to cars. Almost as big a con as global warming, but who cares if they sell.

GM have spent a billion on fuel cell development, with no payoff & none likely now. They have a similar investment in battery development, for full electric comuters, with no pay off there either.

If they do get a bail out it's going to take some brave men to chose their direction with future products. I wish them luck, our future comfort is resting, to some extent, on those choices, in more ways than one.

Examinator, as I said in an earlier post, if GM go, so does our entire industry. Toyota are not big enough, in Oz, to support a components industry, large & diverse enough, to facilitate their production.

The break up idea has many problems also. Can Cadillac survive without Chev, or vice versa? Who owns the investment in Vaxhaull, GMH, Suzuki etc? Who picks up the huge overhead in the retirement benefits? Are there any more Chinese or Indian companies wanting a Rover, or a Jaguar, particularly now?

I suppose there are enough accountants & lawyers in the US to sort it out, but equitably? I would be surprised if all three of them have not been looking for some legal way to get out from under the responsibility of those retirement benefits, & some sort of bankruptcy deal, which does get them out, but keeps them trading, may be where all this is heading.

Hasbeen, I’m not quite sure what you say; “Ludwig, wrong mate” in reference to.

Of COURSE whatever is produced has to be saleable to the extent of making the companies viable.

So when I say: “Now they need to be compelled to fully analyse the best options of those sorts and get stuck right into them…”, saleability and company viability have got to be fundamental factors.

If the vehicles they produce are not as green as I would like because they won’t sell well enough, then fine, make them a little less green.

If the best option is to produce smaller petrol cars and just forego SUVs and steer clear of hybrids etc altogether, then that’s ok by me.

These companies have got to stand on their own two feet. So in the first instance, they’ve got to produce what they can sell and profit from.

But that doesn’t mean they should be pressured to make their product as green as possible.

Examinator, I hope this helps alleviate your feeling that I’m taking too much of a narrow perspective of this issue.

Ludwig,
Not really
I was refering to the post whereby you seem to advocate letting the market sort it out. In this instance crashing all three would end in disaster.

The problem with the market is that its so polluted and distorted I doubt that without help it won't be able or willing to sort it out.

Hasbeen,
when I said breaking it up I wasn't necessarily talking in terms of either continually making car or even by brand name. I was thinking in terms of opperative sub units.
I guess what I'm saying is that the old order has rusted into a situation/size that means unless they can dictate to the market in essence command economy mentality in reverse (which clearly they can't). The issue is that the market demand has an inate size limitation for a viable manufacturing corporation (this size varies industry to industry). In the economics /moral sense there IS a limit to growth

Examinator, it seems we have a miscommunication. I’m very strongly against letting the market sort it out. I’ve always advocated strong governance and I think that in this case government assistance, and insistence on rigorous reforms, is essential.

I agree that the market is “polluted and distorted”. And I agree that if these three companies were to crash, it would be disastrous.

.
A mistake in my last post: The second last line should read…

‘But that doesn’t mean they SHOULDN’T be pressured to make their product as green as possible’.

Hasbeen, you mean, ‘Rootes’ (Hillman/Singer/Humber) who built a factory at Linwood, outside of Glasgow opened in 1963 … after a gap of 30 years of previous car manufacture on Scotland and no local experience or production knowledge (but lots of part built car bodies running up and down the country).

It was an economic disaster even after Rootes were gobbled up by Chrysler and was closed in 1997.

It was typical of the arrogance of socialist governments at “picking winners” through sponsoring favoured businesses and funding stupid, stupid schemes with tax payers hard sacrificed taxes and NO ACCOUNTABILITY.

The Leyland / BMC shotgun wedding (with the socialist government holding the shotgun) was another disaster of epic proportions in which a successful heavy vehicle manufacturer was raped to drag an economic basket case, crippled with militant unionism, out of the pooh (could have been the model for the Australian “Button Plan”).

Ludwig “Now they need to be compelled to fully analyse the best options of those sorts and get stuck right into them, with great urgency”

The sales of more fuel efficient cars is the “reward”, that’s called “commercial success" and produces sustainable business.

The problem is ‘attitude’ and failing companies end uip with the traits of most human failures, that being an enlarged sense of “self entitlement” and belief in a god-given right to suck the life blood from the tax payer and thus survive despite their failings.

(in the case of GM a friend of mine who used to work for them in Illinois advised me the GM problem was they convinced themselves they could not make small cars because small cars would not bear sufficient overheads, like big cars… dumb-a$$ed thinking in my book)

I come from the different school, where “success” means

delivering and being rewarded for what your customers value,

without the intercession of governments or special dispensation.

That’s the “REAL” level playing field.

Examinator, my view is holistic. You are being blackmailed by the thought of immediate pain of surgery, rather than understanding how the economic body could die without the operation.