And Ford too...
First off, any industry that can spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists when they're crying for a bailout can kiss my hairy Italian ass.
Secondly, I've had my share of piss-poor experiences with GM especially to know that it's their own damn fault.
One of the most telling instances, and I am fully aware that it's merely anecdotal, was something that happened to me in the mid-1990s. I was in the market for a new car as I wrapped up my graduate career and started looking to the future. I had secured a position at the local manufacturing plant as an industrial chemist, working on developing novel cleaning, oiling, and degreasing fluids for market. I was established.
I decided I wanted to get a pickup truck - I was newly married and we had family land to build on; it was only a matter of time before we started building our house and having something to haul stuff in would be really handy. I had owned trucks on the past - in particular, a bone-stripped Dodge Ram that I bought when they rolled out the new body style in 1994 and were just about giving away the old body style trucks - and wanted something of similar utility. Nothing fancy, a standard transmission was fine, no A/C needed (it's a pick-up, just put a sliding rear window and you're good to go); the only caveat was four-wheel drive.
I stopped into a local Chevy dealer and started looking at the S-10 pickups (the compact trucks). One of the sales pukes sidles up and asks what I'm looking for, so I explain what I want. Stripped truck, 4WD, nothing fancy. He asks what my budget is. I response, oh, somewhere around $15K or thereabouts.
He walked away from me without saying another word.
I'd looked at the going rates for new trucks, and $15K for a stripped compact was not unreasonable. I wasn't looking for a new $10,000 Corvette. Now, I understand that this was only one dealership (which, BTW, went out of business not too long after, for a lovely touch of shadenfreude...). But I found that attitude to be pervasive - going to a Ford dealer, they had a bone-stripped Ranger 4X4 - not even a radio - that they wanted $18K for. In 1997.
And even at that, they weren't interested in selling it to me.
Now, I'm 25-26 years old. Professional. Just married, looking to build a house and start a family. This is exactly the demographic they want to court - these are the people that you want to cultivate a long-term sales relationship with, as they'll be back for a family car in a few years, then a minivan, then a new sedan, and then down the road the shiny red convertible. And yet my experience was overwhelmingly negative. (And I'm not even getting into the other idiotic things GM has done, like, oh, completely and utterly conceding the large car market *and* the sports car market to Ford by phasing out the Caprice and Camaro...)
Made. Of. Fail.
That is all.
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11 comments:
Dealers only want to sell vehicles with high margins. This is one of the reasons that dealers demand that Ford and GM make lots of SUVs. Unfortunately due to some antiquated laws they basically can force Ford and GM to make them.
It has to be a dealer thing. I had the same issue when buying my truck at a number of dealers. I finally found one that asked my budget, hit the computer and came back with a truck that fit if I could wait a few days for him to get it delivered from another dealer. . . . guess what, I now am on my third car from them and would not go anywhere else if I can avoid it. Happens to be a Pontiac place. . ..
The dealer makes or breaks the car buying experience. That being said I think the union wages are going to kill American car makers so if there is a bail out they need to hit the union too. . .
I went to one factory for work, to demo a printer on a wire line for GM. I had to wait for the carpenter to un-box it, the electrician to plug it in, and the fork lift guy to move it. All while watching a worker sleep behind a bunch of boxes. Manger knew he was sleeping but if he says anything they file a grievance. . . Unions force up the cost with no gain to the product. . .
Pat Buchanan disagrees with you. In litany of stupid things he's said over the years, this is a top two. He essentially said that it's every American's duty to buy inferior US made products to keep the Big Three in business. To make American products "competitive" he says that the same tariffs that were used in the early 19th century should be reinstated.
He seems to think that the only reason that the Japanese can sell cars is because they can use slave labor or something. Apparently he missed the memo that all of the Japanese and many of the European car manufacturers make vehicles in the US, using American labor to do so.
GM and Ford on the other hand make a lot of vehicles in Mexico and Canada.
The dealers are at most a symptom, the are not at the root of the problem. The manufacturers and the UAW are responsible for overpriced, under performing vehicles, that fall apart long before their foreign counterparts do.
If the UAW and the Big Three want loans guaranteed by the taxpayers, they have to be willing to change their business models. Of course Pelosi and the rest of the Communists in DC want to tell the auto makers which vehicles to make, how much to sell them for, and how much executives can make. What they won't do is tell the UAW that it has to get with the program. Can't do that because the unions are a key Democrat demographic.
WTF? I paid $17,000 for my Ranger EDGE in 2001! (Essentially the Stripped 4X4) and that was with the optional 4.0L V6, and supercab!
And these days you can't get a Ranger WITHOUT:
-Cruise Control
-AC
-CD Player
When Weer'd-lings come into the picture I'm trading it in for an Explorer, as its more-or-less the same truck just with more seating.
No matter what happens there will be that SUV for me....it just might be called a "Mazda" Somthing-or-other
eriko,
Thing is, like the next year Dodge was selling the base-level Ram 4X4 - with cloth interior, tape deck, and 5.2L V8 - for $17,500.
And the Dakota extended cab base level was selling for $14,995.
There's a market for entry-level trucks - one need look no further than the Tacoma for that.
But neither Chevy nor Ford wanted to work with me in the least. And that left me dumbfounded.
Much like Toyota wouldn't work with me last year when I bought the Ram instead of the Tundra...
JD,
It may very well be a dealer thing, but it's more than one dealer, to be certain.
(FWIW, I had a VW dealer not even call me back on a GTI and a Nissan dealer give me such a ration of crap about a test drive I won't even think about Nissan, so it's not limited to GM/Ford)
And you hit the nail on the head. You're on your third car there.
I ended up going to the Dodge dealer where I bought my last car. I've bought like 6 cars from them now (including two for my wife) because they've treated me well.
And don't get me started about the unions...
TOTWTYTR,
In this particular instance, I'll have to respectfully disagree with Mr. Buchanan.
Tariffs won't solve this problem - they certainly didn't solve the motorcycle issue in the 1980s. Harley had to stop making unmitigated pieces of CRAP, that's what put a halt to their decline.
weer'd,
Yup. $18K for a bone-stripped 3.0L Ranger. Regular cab. Might have considered it had it been an extended cab.
That and if it hadn't been CRAMPED with just me and the sales dude on the test drive...
Both Ford and Chevy dealerships made me feel like they did NOT want my business.
And that is a business model for FAIL.
Definitely let the US auto companies fail. They're not kept up with the times. They simply can't compete. Their leadership is just plain wrong on so many counts.
Case in point:
*Ford on selling 65MPG Euro-diesel car in U.S.: Nah, Americans won't buy it
*The 65 mpg Ford the U.S. Can't Have
*Over 24mpg is Fuel Efficient? According to the big 3 it is, but to impress me you need to get near or over 40mpg.
*Big American automakers were bailed out within the last 30 years. Is this going to be a every 30 years occurrence? Unacceptable.
Can we have a "Bailout The Taxpayer" too?
elizabeth: Yeah I wish we could get some small vehicle oil-burners here in the US. This goes double for the search for Alternative fuels. I've looked into it a LOT, and Electric cars wont' work unless we get a TON of nuke plants nationwide, and I don't see that happening, Ethanol and Hydrogen both WORK, but the amount of chemical energy in either fuel is not nearly as dense as petroleum. What CAN work is Bio-Diesel! It has a similar burn rate to petro-diesel, can be put into conventional diesel engines with little fuss, it can be winterized fairly easily so it works in all climates (Maybe Alaska and Minnesota might have SOME problems in the dead of winter, but they already have lots of problems getting their cars started) and it can be produced on a massive scale given we recycle our fry grease AND start large-scale algae farming which would work very well in desert parts of the US that is land that is unusable for conventional farming, so it won't compete for food supplies like Ethanol does.
Of course the way our government works, they'll do ANYTHING they can to make it not work...
I bought my Ram solely because the dealership was fantastic to me years before when I was a starving fisherman/grad student and needed a gay little neon to commute to/from school and my job, which were 130 miles apart.
After I bought my ram, Daimler/Chrysler closed the dealership because it was too small (also, 6 months after the dealer finished a $3 million expansion paid out of his own pocket). My Ram, which I love, is the last one I'll own. Loyalty goes both ways. A Tundra or an F250 is next.
I agree with TOTWTYTR about the negative influence of the UAW. Being a union man myself, it pains me to see such mob-style greed flourishing amid the wastelands of the midwest. My industry (shipping) lives with COLA adjustments to our 70's-negotiated wages in order to help keep the few American shipowners solvent. It's utterly ridiculous that a man armed with a GED and a screwdriver earns 70k/yr, on par with our 3rd mates, who watch over $100 million ships carrying billions of dollars in cargo.
Now look what they've done.
Agreed. No bailouts for GM, Ford, Chrysler. None for AmEx. None for billionaire bankers. None for Wall Street. Enough of this horsesh*t.
The magic bailout was supposed to save us from DOW 8000 -- which we got within weeks anyway.
Disband the UAW BOOM, problem solved.
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