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May 8, 2005
Ford and GM bonds dropped to junk status
As a young boy I looked at Ford and GM as the Gods of the business world. My grandfather used to sell buses for GM and my uncle had a Pontiac dealership. I can only remember one car that my parents bought that was not a Pontiac. My Grandfather had a new Cadillac every year and my grandmother always had a nice Pontiac, at most two years old. I was so attuned to car sales that I would check every year at the car sales ranking to see if Pontiac was catching up to Ford and maybe, just maybe it would one day pass Chevy as the best selling car in the United States and the world. Boy, have those times changed.
My first car was a Chevy Impala convertible that my uncle had in his lot. What a wonderful car, unfortunately I didn't know much about cars and my father was fairly non-existent. There was a little problem with adding oil that I missed and the car died. Since then a German or Japanese company built every car I owned. American cars became big and sloppy to me and to many others in the U.S. I realized they were poorly made, stuffed with accessories that often broke, and generally fell apart long before their overseas competition. And this was at least twenty-five years ago.
One would think that they would have gotten their acts together and started to compete, but they haven't. Ford and GM moved into the minivan and SUV market where they could make big profits and not have to compete with the Japanese and Germans. They fought every attempt at Federal safety standards citing expense, and they have lagged behind in developing new technologies for innovation, fuel economy or alternative energy engines. From a design standpoint their cars are pretty boring. That is not to say that a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry are flashy, but you know when you purchase one that it will run for 200,000 miles. Now the price of oil is very high, people are looking for alternatives to expensive SUVs. Ford and GM left the market to the competition. I don't want to dismiss the financial burden that their companies have with their retirees benefits, but they have made some very serious errors for a very long time. We are the most technologically advanced country in the world, at the moment. You would think that these companies could have developed a set of cars that were at least as good, if not better than Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW, etc. They have no one to blame except themselves. They have been idiots and are clearly getting their clocks cleaned in this game.
Posted by Chip Spear at May 8, 2005 10:02 PM
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