The Car Industry Of Tomorrow?
I'm not going to pretend to be some sort of expert on the U.S. auto industry, or that I have any idea how to solve the present crisis plaguing it. But I do intend to write about it here.

In the interest of full disclosure, my primary car at present is a Nissan Sentra, and I have to say I have been as pleased with it as I have nearly any automobile I've owned, with the only rivals to it being a 1995 Grand Am Sally and I once owned, and the late 70's model Dodge pickup truck my Dad had during my teen years.

First of all, I have to say that the very idea of a taxpayer-subsidized bailout of the auto companies is an idea that is anathema to me, as it should be to anyone who rightfully considers himself or herself to be a capitalist. I was extremely against the bailout of the fatcats on Wall Street as well. I'm Darwinian when it comes to these sorts of things. If you're viable, you'll make it. If not, then you won't. Heartless? Probably. But it's hard to argue that the automakers are anything but victims of their own actions. Sure, there are exacerbating circumstances. The credit crunch hasn't helped things, nor did record gasoline prices over the summer, but these are things that have happened to everyone. The Japanese automakers have recorded substantial sales declines over the past few months. The only difference is that, by virtue of saner business practices, these guys are better able to weather the storm. Toyota's market capitalization, by one estimate I read, is roughly 25 times that of General Motors. These sorts of things make differences.

So what's the solution?

I think several things need to be done.

First of all, the cars just need to be made more fuel-efficient, by any means necessary. When the Big Three respond to California passing a law calling for greater fuel efficiency in automobiles in that state by suing California, they're indicating they have no real interest in changing the status quo. When I open up a copy of a magazine, as I have recently, and see an ad touting the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid, I see a company with no real interest in saving itself. A hybrid of a monstrosity like that? Why bother? Until the automakers realize that a big part of their problem is that their cars are just inefficient, they won't get anywhere.

The Big Three also have a problem from a branding standpoint. These sorts of things are important. GM in particular just has too many brands. They killed off Oldsmobile a few years ago. Who noticed, besides Olds aficionados? The craziest part of this multiple branding thing is that, for the most part, these cars are the same. Quick, what's the difference between a Chevy pickup truck and a GMC truck? The nameplate! A Chevy Tahoe and a GMC Yukon? The nameplate! By making all these similar cars with different names, they're really doing nothing but putting an absolute glut of indistinguishable automobiles out there. Ford's done it too, with all these Mercury cars that are completely the same as the Ford model save the nameplate. On top of that, they take names of cars, cars we've come to identify as looking a certain way, and put them on platforms that create cars that bear no resemblance to what we've come to expect. Witness what Ford has done with the Thunderbird and Mustang over the years.

I'd suggest that GM in particular start slaying brands. Hummer? Gone. Don't come to Congress begging for money if you're going to continue to produce a vehicle that is as inefficient and patently unsafe as Hummers are. Buick, Pontiac, Saturn, and Saab? Do the guys at GM really need all of those, especially given how indistinguishable they are from one another? On top of that, within each particular one, they could stand to cut back. Pontiac makes the G series cars, the Grand Am, and the Grand Prix, and the reality is that there is little to differentiate them from each other. The only truly distinctive car Pontiac produces is the Solstice, which with its lack of seating capacity and 18-inch wheels make it highly impractical. My research tells me that the car also shares parts with eleven other different cars in the GM pantheon, making this some sort of Frankenstein's monster of a car. How efficient can it be to produce if it's taking parts from everything from the Hummer H3 and GMC Envoy to the Cadillac CTS and Fiat Barchetta? I don't get these automakers at all, really.

The main argument I hear for the bailout is that the economy will plunge into recession and woe if the Big Three are allowed to fail. This might mean something to me if the talking heads on television got their heads out of their backsides and realized that for much of the real world out here, the recession is not a myth or some newly-minted phenomenon. Some of us have been struggling through the entirety of the Bush years, and never really recovered from the days that followed 9/11. There are those of us who have watched as gasoline prices skyrocketed, and those of us who have watched our grocery bills inflate on an order of 100 to 150 percent over the past half-decade. Oh, but there's no inflation, say the talking heads on television. And why? Because the index used to gauge inflation neatly removes both the costs of fuel and food from their equation, which is insane given that those are easily the two things on which most of us depend the most. I've watched these costs severely outpace my wages, and watched as we went from being able to do a modest amount of saving, to having to watch every cent literally during the past two to three years. So talk of impending doom doesn't really faze me. I've been staving off financial calamity for the bulk of the decade after living pretty damned good during the first year or so of it.

And as someone who works for a company that is emerging from bankruptcy, I don't find the arguments that bankruptcy would harm the Big Three more to be that persuasive. People say that folks won't buy a car from a bankrupt company, on account of worrying about warranties and things of that nature. Simple. Set up a fund to ensure that the warranties are taken care of by some third party if need be. But the notion that the company's financial well-being is having a bearing on whether people purchase or not is asinine. People stopped buying the cars first, and then the financial calamity followed, not vice versa. Besides, the airlines have all had their dalliances with bankruptcy and people still get on airplanes, right?

Bankruptcy is the only way to achieve real change here. When our company went into bankruptcy, the hard decisions were made. Plants were closed down, and consolidated. Work was shifted from the plants that weren't as productive to the ones that got the job done. Yes, mine was fortunate in that we're one of the productive ones, one of the places that has several of the linchpin jobs of the company, so I can sit here and talk, but the reality is that even if the ax had fallen on my particular plant, I could only ascribe it to the company taking the steps it had to take to survive. After all the consolidation is done, and the company has taken steps to reduce its costs, particularly with paper, which is by far our biggest expense and has trended upwards sharply in price over the past decade, the company on the whole is much healthier. Bankruptcy makes a company make these hard decisions. One critic of the bailout noted that the only thing that would be bailed out in this sort of scenario would be the UAW's health care, and to a large extent, I believe this. I'm not suggesting that the unions are any more culpable than the CEO's that have made the staggeringly bad decisions that led to this point. I guess I'm saying there's plenty of blame to go around. Have the unions made concessions? Sure they have. Probably more so than the CEO's have made any sort of effort to drastically remake and retool their companies in a meaningful way. As long as the automakers continue with stunts like having the CEO's drive hybrids from Detroit to Washington as a way to atone for having the audacity to show up to panhandle the taxpayers via private jets, they'll demonstrate they don't get it. It's all PR. And stupid PR on top of that. Yeah, I get the symbolism of the driving the hybrids, but that's all it is. Symbolism. And on top of all that, wouldn't flying commercial have been cheaper and quicker?

Opponents of bankruptcy argue that in bankruptcy, creditors won't get paid which means that people like suppliers could go belly up, unintentionally creating a nasty side effect. I don't really know what to say to address that. The problem here is that the way the automakers have done things is outmoded. That's just the way it is. Again, I have to speak to my own experience in my line of work. In the late nineties and early 2000's, the printing business as a whole was a lot healthier. September 11th in a large way changed that. The economy contracted and if you noticed, magazines and catalogs got a lot smaller. Some mail-order businesses got out of the catalog racket altogether and went to exclusively online ordering, and more may yet do that. Some of these companies just went bankrupt. We had two occasions where we literally stopped production on a particular catalog because the customer's checks bounced. The magazines got smaller as a result of far less ad revenue, because people were buying far less. Some of our magazines, particularly the ones we produce for the airlines, which were hammered by September 11th, shrunk by as much as three-quarters in terms of pages. This meant less work, and it also meant that we had to find more efficient ways of doing the work we did. Different departments were retooled, and yes, positions were eliminated and consolidated. People lost jobs. It happens. Our business is much more streamlined than it was in 2000. We found ways of doing things with less hands, less bureaucracy, and less time, and found in the end that it didn't substantially increase our own individual workloads or decrease the quality of the product. When you're forced to figure out how to improve your ways of doing things, you're often surprised by how much waste goes into making something. If the automakers and the unions and all the stakeholders sit down and ask the hard questions, and really set about trying to make the changes needed to be viable, then the change will come. It may not be pretty for all involved, but the end result may be an industry equipped to handle whatever's coming next. And with all indicators suggesting that nearly every oil-producing country is reaching or has already reached the point where production is declining, maintaining the status quo just isn't an option. Any automaker CEO with any sense would be attempting to look ahead, play the role of visionary, and set the agenda for the post-gasoline engine automotive era, rather than feebly clutching to what is soon to be a relic anyhow.