oldtvman said:
There is an interesting similarity going on right now with Ford and Gm. Think back a few years when both RCA and Zenith were made in the states, and consistantly held the one, two positions in sales. Both of them are now a shell of there former shelves owned by foreign companies. The same thing is now going on in the car industry, with a glut of foreign models coming in from Japan, Korea and soon china. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
I'm missing the similarity. TV manufacture went overseas to get reduced labor. When it happened, the industry dried up in the USA.
Unlike the television industry, the car industry in the US is alive and well. Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Subaru, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes Bends and most other “import” car companies all make a lot of cars here. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of Camarys, Accords, and Altimas sold every year are all made here in the good old US of A. Toyota, Honda and Nissan build the vast majority of the cars they sell in the US here in the US.
The reason the big three US car companies are failing is because their stock holders suck off he profit and these companies don’t plow enough cash back into the business to keep competitive. The Japanese companies have done a very good job of finding out what the American public wants in a car and they deliver it with excellent quality and durability at a competitive price.
To do this you also need to have very efficient factories. The Nissan, Toyota and Honda plants in the US are models of manufacturing efficiency. They regularly give tours to GM, Ford and Chrysler officials seeking guidance on how to do it.
Nissan was almost bankrupt in the mid and late 1990s. Renault bought a big piece of them and brought in a guy named Carlos Ghosn. The first thing he did to get Nissan out of their death spiral was turn the car designers loose. The results were dramatic. The cars went from boring to cutting edge and car sales went through the roof.
If the US car companies want to survive, they need to increase their efficiency, make good cars that people want to buy, sell them at a realistic price with minimum of rebate incentives.