[Norm Peterson]

Originally Posted by Number 3

And Norm sorry for using your reply to tee this one up.

No offense taken.

We will only have to embrace something outside of EVs and autonomous when our market share for ICEs is to small to support with a business case for an OEM. Or we will simply have to pay more for it.

Perhaps you meant "outside ICE and human-driven"?

Merely accepting the amount of change from ICE/human to EV/autonomous would be a tough enough row to hoe for anybody not predisposed to want such changes. Actually embracing such change could be damn near impossible. I know I didn't live my life with the notion that my choices in retirement were going to be limited and micro-managed by others.

And way down the road can you imagine someone bringing up the statistics that almost all traffic deaths are now the result of having a non-autonomous vehicle and that they should be removed from the road?

This is where the market (and GM) are heading.

Could they be wrong? Very possibly.

I won't be surprised if I hear of some serious difficulties with fully autonomous first. I'd hate to be the one predicting some lemmings-over-the-cliff disaster, but if enough autonomous vehicles all make the same mistake along the same stretch of road at about the same time because their control systems don't know any better . . . wasn't there a 737 recently that kept insisting on making stall corrections until it finally managed to crash the plane?

But no one should be thinking the Government bailed out GM and FCA (ooooops foreign owned now, what about that money and shutting down production of Dart and 200 and more to come) to have it be exactly they way it was in 2008/9. That wouldn't be possible.

Opposition to those bailouts is directed more at the attitudes of those companies, where they believed that they were "too big to fail", or at least "too big to be allowed to fail".

Oh and as for that future? How many cars on the road will have been built in China 10 years from now? No one bats an eyelash about every Samsung and Apple phone coming from over seas. Your Television? Your laptop?

If they're no better than the Mustang's MT-82 transmission, China's going to be in for a rough spell economically.

Now GM is taking proactive steps and everyone wants to hammer them.

Pro-active for the company doesn't necessarily line up with the interests of their customers.



Just so you know I understand what being RIF'ed after reasonably continuous long-term employment means, I got laid off at about age 64 + 8 months. Less than a year later, the whole regional office was shuttered. I've lost track of what happened to what was left of the company, beyond its being sold off from the first entity that bought them.


Norm