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Old 12-08-2018, 01:12 PM   #267
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Originally Posted by Bongos2U View Post
FCA just announced they will be firing up an old Chrysler plant in Michigan to build the new three row Jeep. I read that FCA factories in North America are currently running at 92% capacity."

Sounds like FCA is pretty good at plant utilization, unlike GM.
Their Jeep line is #1 in SUV sales, and other than the Fiat 500 and Chrysler 300 they are basically out of the passenger car business in the US, the same direction that Ford and now GM are headed. Sadly, that seems how to keep plants operating at capacity these days, at least for now....
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Old 12-09-2018, 02:53 PM   #268
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Any truth to the Tesla interest in the vacant factories coming?, that would be good for obvious reasons, not that i think the electric vehicle is going to displace the majority of highway travelling types of people like myself
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Old 12-10-2018, 09:25 AM   #269
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that's what Elon said on 60 Minutes
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Old 12-10-2018, 10:24 AM   #270
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I think the reality is people can no longer expect to leave high school and go earn a good living at the local factory like perhaps their father or mother did. Be it GM or any other factory type of work. There will be more of this sort of thing. I suspect this is only the beginning of it.
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Old 12-10-2018, 10:56 AM   #271
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All anyone can do now is to pressure GM to allocate the next generation of SUV's and crossovers currently foreign produced to Detroit and Lordstown. Everyone of course is seeing GM outsourcing the products, and yet not a single product is moving to a foreign plant. GM is just killing the products these plants produced. What do you expect GM to do with these plants with no product? They aren't going to retool them for the current gen of Acadia, Equinox, Terrain, etc. That's just inefficient use of funds since they don't need the extra capacity to meet demand. The decision to have Blazer produced in Mexico was years ago before the total collapse of sedan sales.



What you can do is pressure GM to produce the next gen Blazer, Terrain, Trax, etc in these idled plants or even the EV's and autonomous vehicles GM is claiming the move is for.
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Old 12-14-2018, 10:43 PM   #272
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A view from a salesman who has sold Chevys since the day I graduated 31 years ago.
I've watched foreign cars enter our town of 2600 in rural Oklahoma.
The thing is, everyone wants to look different, and drive something unique. The Impala was the best built car, cheap to buy, great mileage and cheap to maintain. But who wants to drive a cookie cutter car that everyone else has?
And as for the good ol patriotism, it's long gone. Alot of my good friends and customers went out and bought a lousy foreign job with a CVT transmission that dumped on them at 55,000 miles. But they looked "different" driving it.
They shell out 6,500 for a tranny, while I sell a car that goes like the Energizer bunny for cheap. Doesn't matter, the Kia Soul, the Jeep Liberty and other disposables still sell. Alot of them had crummy credit, so they went to the big city to get special credit, not caring about durability.
As for GM, I believe a company should stand on it's own, or fail and let the next guy, leaner and meaner, take the reins. When the good ol 21 trillion broke ass U.S. government strolled in 10 years ago to save GM, it really ticked me.
Then I watched ol Uncle Sam do "Cash for Clunkers", and pay US taxpayers to buy a new, more fuel efficient car, while they crushed perfectly good running cars and shipped the scrap to China to be melted down to build more "crap" for the US taxpayer to buy. What a joke.
And the bigger joke? The #1 car that the government paid people to buy was the HONDA FIT.......BUILT 100 percent in JAPAN!!!! BRILLIANT !!!

Here we are 10 years later....My #1 seller?? The mighty Silverado half ton crew cab......built in Mexico. As I said, no one cares. Would they buy a Toyota truck, built in San Antonio Texas? Nah. Grab up a Mexico built great American bailout truck.

On the bright side, anyone realize GM sold 4.1 million cars last year.....IN CHINA!! More than they sold in the US!! Far more Buicks and Cadillacs than US Citizens bought.

As for our President, he needs to hold GM accountable. Get government subsidies, play ball with the government when US jobs are fading away. The demolition of the Janesville WI. 100 year old plant made me sad to say the least.

We had a GM plant here in OKC when I started selling cars. GM closed it 15 years ago. Thousands of good jobs. Gone.

Say what you want, but no one looks for the made in the USA label anymore.
On anything. 93 percent of our 4th of July fireworks are made in China. Need I say more.
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Old 12-15-2018, 12:02 PM   #273
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Yeah, that's a great way to eliminate by attrition those pesky US plants is to have the same cars or trucks built in Mexico or China...Then when sales slump, the US plants can close, but the Mexico or China plants can export the same cars and trucks to the US....

Look for the Silverado to go the same way as Cruze and others, with US production ending, but the same vehicle being sold in the US imported from Mexico or China.
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Old 12-15-2018, 02:13 PM   #274
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Say what you want, but no one looks for the made in the USA label anymore.
On anything.
Because it pretty much doesn't exist because as much as people pay lip service to buying American they still shop price.

Manufacturing something with highly paid American labor cannot compete with that same product made by nine-year-old Chinese kids.
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Old 12-15-2018, 09:33 PM   #275
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I agree. We have worked our way in to a dependency with foreign labor. The goods are no longer cheap but we have no comparison so we are forced to go along with it and blindly pay whatever the price. I would hate for it to become like that for cars. I mean my new Ram diesel is built in Mexico but it ain’t in no way cheap. In fact the prices are pretty comparable to the other two diesel trucks in its market but they’re made in the US.

The textile industry is a good example of what I’m talking about. 99% of clothing was made in the USA up through the 1970’s. All facets of garrment manufacturing were done in the states. The only clothes that weren’t made here came from Italy or France and were considered exotic and therefore desirable. Most of the garment manufacturing was unionized. Most of the garment industry in an effort to be more competitive shut down its union shops and moved south to reopen non-union. That still didn’t seem to be enough so almost overnight the garment manufacturing industry moved outside the US. Now as we all know 99% of clothes are made outside the US. Problem is.... the clothes aren’t really cheap are they? Today I had on a pair of Levi’s, $55..... I had on an under armor t-shirt, $25.... an under armor 1/4 zip, $60.... Nike socks, $6.... Nike sneakers $95

I don’t call any of that cheap but you’re right they were all made by a 9 year old Chinese kid. But we gotta pay Colin Kappernick somehow since he’s unemployed and all.
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Old 12-25-2018, 12:22 PM   #276
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I agree. We have worked our way in to a dependency with foreign labor. The goods are no longer cheap but we have no comparison so we are forced to go along with it and blindly pay whatever the price. I would hate for it to become like that for cars. I mean my new Ram diesel is built in Mexico but it ain’t in no way cheap. In fact the prices are pretty comparable to the other two diesel trucks in its market but they’re made in the US.

The textile industry is a good example of what I’m talking about. 99% of clothing was made in the USA up through the 1970’s. All facets of garrment manufacturing were done in the states. The only clothes that weren’t made here came from Italy or France and were considered exotic and therefore desirable. Most of the garment manufacturing was unionized. Most of the garment industry in an effort to be more competitive shut down its union shops and moved south to reopen non-union. That still didn’t seem to be enough so almost overnight the garment manufacturing industry moved outside the US. Now as we all know 99% of clothes are made outside the US. Problem is.... the clothes aren’t really cheap are they? Today I had on a pair of Levi’s, $55..... I had on an under armor t-shirt, $25.... an under armor 1/4 zip, $60.... Nike socks, $6.... Nike sneakers $95

I don’t call any of that cheap but you’re right they were all made by a 9 year old Chinese kid. But we gotta pay Colin Kappernick somehow since he’s unemployed and all.
You can buy jeans on Aliexpress for as little as $4, and that's you as a single buyer buying one item. And they're making a profit selling it to you at that price. Now imagine you're buying thousands at a time, what's the price in those quantities? Probably about $2 each, so those 'brand name' jeans you paid $55 for probably cost them $2 or perhaps even less, depending on the quantity they ordered.

Yes they can make products cheaper over there but they're not doing it to provide cheaper products for you; they're doing it for profit. The management needs bigger salaries and bonuses! Stock holders want more return on their investments; more and higher dividends! The people who pay the price are the employees; the American workers who thought being loyal to their company was going to provide them with job security.

The problems as I see it starts at the top; management and their attitudes. They always give themselves grand salaries and benefits, while paying their employees as little as they can unless forced to pay them more by law or union. Rather than value their employees who are largely responsible for helping to bring in the money from which their grand salaries and benefits come from, they are constantly trying to figure out how to cut labor expenses. Using the term "labor expenses" allows for an emotional disconnect from the fact that these are people; people with real lives and real families. If they put names to that term so instead of saying labor costs or labor expenses, they said "let's figure out how to pay Charlie, Bill, Mary and Sarah less money this year, shall we?" That would make it a bit harder. It would be even better if pictures of their faces and families were attached to their names so management would see who it was they were putting out of work; all so they could have a bigger bonus for themselves at the end of a year.

All too often people who become managers are simply aggressive; that doesn't make them necessarily smart, wise or intelligent. They always want to blame the customer for sales problems, but it always comes back to them and the decisions they've made.

The way to fix American industry and manufacturing isn't to take those things out of the country; we need to fix American management.
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Old 12-25-2018, 02:43 PM   #277
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Doc, this article makes a lot of good points....

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-cul...039/ev-future/


US plants will likely never see any EV production.....China has made that a certainty....and GM is being a good comrade and playing right along...
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Old 12-25-2018, 05:39 PM   #278
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Doc, this article makes a lot of good points....

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-cul...039/ev-future/


US plants will likely never see any EV production.....China has made that a certainty....and GM is being a good comrade and playing right along...
That is a GREAT article and really pulls the curtain back on what's going on and why. The push to EV has nothing to do with the environment or "climate change". It's all about one thing; money. The same thing it always is and has been. The same reason why the fuel industry pushed us away from leaded gasoline to unleaded. It had nothing to do with the environment; it cost less to produce unleaded, and by conning everyone into going along with the "environment" issue, they managed to convert us all over to unleaded and NEVER LOWERED THE PRICE. Same thing is going on with EV. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes power plays going on here.

This whole article points out in a roundabout way what I've been saying in here for years. If GM or any American car manufacturer wants to fix sales, make a car people want! Make a fun car that's affordable. The 5th gen Camaro reignited the old 'pony car' craze, but just like George Lucas did with the Stars Wars sequels, they didn't realize what made it popular. It wasn't the special effects; it was fun. The 5th gen was fun and affordable. Rather than understand that and make sure they still had a model that fit that description, they added 'special effects' and drove up the price. The sales have gone down in direct proportion.

The main problem with the Camaro and its slide in sales is management and their decision making. If you design and build a great looking car that's fun to own and drive, and it's affordable, the customer base will buy it. Doesn't matter what else is on the market. People nowadays are not single vehicle customers so it doesn't matter if they bought a truck or SUV; they're still in the market for an additional vehicle. By abandoning that opportunity, both GM and Ford are making a huge mistake from which they may not be able to recover.

The Chinese aren't stupid. They are more than capable and have the means to produce exactly what I described above. Somebody is going to do it. Mazda is zeroing in on it and they've already shown a really good concept car. Alfa Romeo with their new Giulias is showing a surprising amount of sales, and they only have 170 dealerships in the U.S. instead of the thousands that GM and Ford have. Imagine what they could do if they had 3,000 dealerships. Alfa's sales are up 36% so don't tell me that sedans are dead. Sales of boring corporate me-too designs are dead, but that's a problem with the decision makers, not the market.
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Old 12-25-2018, 06:15 PM   #279
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This...from June, even before the announced US plant closures, including Volt, and "big move" to EVs...

Electric Car Models In China To 20

June 6th, 2018 by Steve Hanley

In the US, General Motors has two EVs for sale — the Chevy Volt and the Chevy Bolt. But in China, it has just doubled down on its electric car plans. According to Reuters, Matt Tsien, head of operations for GM in China, told the press in Shanghai this week the company plans to launch 10 more heavily electrified vehicle models in China between 2021 and 2023. It has already committed to offering 10 electrified models by 2020. “Clearly, we have a strategy in place and there is an implementation in place to do that,” Tsien said.
The South China Morning Post reports Tsien told the press, “China plays an essential role in the world’s drive towards a zero-emissions future.” He added that GM will continue to work with the government and suppliers to create higher awareness of electric cars in China. Even though China announced recently that foreign manufacturers may now build factories there without a local partner, GM says it is quite happy with its current partnerships with SAIC and Liuzhou Wuling.
Before the change in Chinese policy was announced, Tsien said, “We are very pleased with our partnerships. Our partners have a huge amount to offer in terms of their understanding of the market and their abilities as well to work with us to make our joint ventures successful.” GM has reinvigorated the Buick brand in China, where it is seen as a premium label by Chinese consumers. A version of the Chevy Volt is sold in China as a Buck product. GM also sells its Cadillac CT6 in China as well as the diminutive Baojun E100.
The company will unveil its new Super Cruise driver assistance technology at the CES Asia 2018 show that opens June 13. GM has recently secured a $2.25 billion dollar investment in its Cruise Automation division from SoftBank Vision Fund to further develop autonomous driving systems. GM sales in China are up a healthy 8% so far this year versus 2.9% for the industry as a whole.
The stark contrast between GM’s embrace of electric cars in China compared to its mulish refusal to do the same in America is shocking, no pun intended. In the US, it is leading the charge to roll back fuel economy standards so it can continue selling highly profitable light duty pickup trucks and SUVs. “Two faced” is about the kindest thing one can say about GM’s bifurcated priorities. It appears the profits it derives from selling cars to Americans are being used to subsidize its push into the Chinese market.
The result is China will get the crème de la crème of low emissions vehicles while one of America’s largest employers will continue to deliberately poison its customer base in pursuit of profits. That’s the thanks America gets for bailing out The General during the last global economic meltdown. Here’s a note to Mary Barra and the rest of the GM board: “Thanks for nothing, GM.” Signed: American taxpayers.
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Old 12-25-2018, 07:41 PM   #280
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You can buy jeans on Aliexpress for as little as $4, and that's you as a single buyer buying one item. And they're making a profit selling it to you at that price. Now imagine you're buying thousands at a time, what's the price in those quantities? Probably about $2 each, so those 'brand name' jeans you paid $55 for probably cost them $2 or perhaps even less, depending on the quantity they ordered.

Yes they can make products cheaper over there but they're not doing it to provide cheaper products for you; they're doing it for profit. The management needs bigger salaries and bonuses! Stock holders want more return on their investments; more and higher dividends! The people who pay the price are the employees; the American workers who thought being loyal to their company was going to provide them with job security.

The problems as I see it starts at the top; management and their attitudes. They always give themselves grand salaries and benefits, while paying their employees as little as they can unless forced to pay them more by law or union. Rather than value their employees who are largely responsible for helping to bring in the money from which their grand salaries and benefits come from, they are constantly trying to figure out how to cut labor expenses. Using the term "labor expenses" allows for an emotional disconnect from the fact that these are people; people with real lives and real families. If they put names to that term so instead of saying labor costs or labor expenses, they said "let's figure out how to pay Charlie, Bill, Mary and Sarah less money this year, shall we?" That would make it a bit harder. It would be even better if pictures of their faces and families were attached to their names so management would see who it was they were putting out of work; all so they could have a bigger bonus for themselves at the end of a year.

All too often people who become managers are simply aggressive; that doesn't make them necessarily smart, wise or intelligent. They always want to blame the customer for sales problems, but it always comes back to them and the decisions they've made.

The way to fix American industry and manufacturing isn't to take those things out of the country; we need to fix American management.
Not sure if you’re trying to counter me or not but I am saying exactly what you just said. Or trying to anyway.
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