Oldsmobile joins Plymouth: RIP

And electroluminescent gauges mounted in pods, rear bucket seats with
rear console in some models, tons of chrome and machine-turned steel,
etc. etc. etc.

<resisting the obvious comment....>

 

Pontiac SHOULD have been the second GM division against the wall before
the firing squad with Chevy being the first. Its actually even more of a
non-entity than Olds and has been so for longer. When was the last
Pontiac built with a Pontiac engine (not counting the iron puke
4-banger)? Maybe 1984 or so? If GM were pared down to Buick, Olds,
Cadillac, and GMC truck, they might be able to produce decent products
for all divisions.

 

MBA's are also increasing the profitability of companies. That being
said, It think the MBA mind set has done enormous harm to the United
States.

 

Any idiot can create short-term profits. It's only long-term profits
and viability that count - that's the challenge, and in my experience,
MBA's are not up to that task (but don't know enough to realize it).

Bill Putney
(to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with "x")

 

And yet they fail. Why? Because the very people who made the
company great are all fired and replaced with trainees.

I read a report a while back that showed how 80% of all companies
who go public eventually fail. It's the worst thing you can
do to a promising company as the stock dividend/board of directors/
CEO/MBA cycle begins.

 

You probably know that there is no such thing anymore as Lockheed, per
se. About 10 years ago (give or take), what was Lockheed and Martin
Marietta combined (the latter bought the former if I'm not mistaken, or
maybe it was another one of those "mergers of equals"?), and is now
called Lockheed-Martin. Guess who built the Titan missile that I worked
on?

Bill Putney
(to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with "x")

 

Cars previously owned by old guys are some of the best bargains on the road.
They haven't been abused, they're usually clean, require only some routine
maintenance to be kept in top shape, and if you get the car for under $2000
it doesn't matter if it uses a lot of gas. You have a lot of gas money from
what
you saved on that new Hyundai...

What you need is a compromise. My '80 New Yorker [an ex-old guy car]
was great! 16 MPG on the open road with about twelve in town didn't
matter because I got the car at a reasonable price. I converted it to
propane
when it needed a new carburetor and sender unit. The propane conversion
was great for around town and paid for itself because propane was half the
price of gas at the time, but it was a hassle to find fuel on a
cross-country
road trip from Vancouver to New York City. I sold it after that trip...

I later got an Oldsmobile Omega. It was cheap. I drove it a couple of years
and would have kept it but didn't like the front wheel drive. It was kinda
light on the highway and much better for town driving. I traded it for a car
that I was looking for for many years, and didn't have parking space for
both...

My compromise is an '87 Plymouth Caravelle. It's the 318 RWD Diplomat
clone, about halfway in size between the Chrysler and the Olds. I traded
my Cadillac in for it, which was nothing but a money pit. The Plymouth
is also an ex-old guy car. It had 60,000 miles on it and looked like new
when I got it except for the saggy headliner, and it's given me good service
for a couple of years. It gets about 14 MPG in town and easily 20 on the
open road. Gasoline's about $3 US a gallon here, and filling that 16 gallon
tank isn't cheap, but that tankfull lasts me a month with the little bit
that I
typically drive. It wouldn't make any sense for me to make payments on
something more late-model just to get better gas milage...

-'dreas

 

Gee, whiz, Steve, you'd kill Chevrolet? My goodness. That's the one
everybody knows about!

GM spends too much time competing with itself. What it should do is refocus
the brands on what they do best. Cadillac shouldn't be making pickup
trucks. The bread'n'butter car division shouldn't dabble in near-luxury
cars. And the truck division ought to just make the best trucks the
corporation can deliver. I'm not sure what you should call them, but I
think the divisions should be realigned as follows:

o Luxury car division
o 'Standard' and performance cars division.
o Truck division.

The big question is: do you separate the trucks from the Chevrolet brand
name? Chevy trucks have a lot of fans, and a lot of loyal, repeat
customers. Unfortunately, Chevy cars, excepting the Corvette, are pretty
lackluster, but clearly the brand is still capable of moving them. The
problem: Chevy tries to be too many things to too many people. GMC has only
produced trucks, so far as I'm aware--it has a much clearer brand identity.
But most people understand that a GMC is just a more expensive, rebadged
Chevy. So one or the other needs to go out of the truck business, which in
GMC's case, doesn't leave much. It's quite a conundrum.

Cadillac has the clearest identity as a brand. Its new styling, which I
consider horrible, is working well in the marketplace for some reason. (I
guess I'll never understand the upper-crust.) I wouldn't change the
division much, except to take out the truck products--at least the pickup
truck. (The Escalade SUV--what a strange success that has been.)

In a perfect world, nobody would have these brand attachments, and GM would
be free to wipe the slate clean and start over. I think that was at least
part of the idea with Hummer (great!) Saturn (not great!) and Geo (RIP!).
You might also make the argument that GM should be pared down to two
existing brands: Cadillac and Chevrolet. Cadillac gets the luxury
products -- even a large luxury SUV. Chevrolet gets everything else, with
none of its products costing more than 2/3rds of the least expensive
Cadillac.

GM is like the rambling old house that was added onto repeatedly over the
years, until the kitchen was on the opposite side of the house from the
dining room, and the bathroom was the central living space. Either you go
in and make some hard decisions and start knocking down the stuff that
doesn't make sense, or the whole thing will get bulldozed because nobody
wants to live there anymore. I think GM's engineering, factories,
information systems, etc., are still sound. Everything else needs to be
rethought. I don't think the country can afford to lose GM as a viable,
going concern. If they don't fix the brand problems, it will tank.

I hated to see Oldsmobile die; I would rather they killed Buick, Pontiac and
GMC first. But something has to be done.

--Geoff

 

I wouldn't drive a Hyundai either.. I drive a Jeep Grand Cherokee 4x4, and
the only reason that I gotten into this thread was because my F-I-L drove
Olds cars all of his life..

 

GM should do the following:

Vehicles: Buick for higher-end vehicles and Pontiac for budget
and sporty ones. No overlap at all.

Cadillac remains mostly unchanged. Move the SUVs out. Gone.

Trucks are all merged into the GMC label.

Chevrolet retains one and only one purpose - the Corvette
and simmilar cars. The entire line drops to 1-2 cars.
Basically, it's a "Chevrolet" only on the nameplate because
that's what people assiciate the GM musclecars with.
(simmilar to the new "GTO" - it's placed under Pontiac
for simmilar reasons).

GM currently has tons of overlap and a total lack of focus.
They should take a cue from Toyota. A good lineup and
not a lot of overlap(the bastard child SCIONs aside).

Better yet would be to consolodate into 20 or so cars more
along the pattern Volvo did in the past(although larger).
That's all they would make - 10 or so cars, 5 SUVs, and
maybe 5 sporty cars. Trucks are moved to their GMC line
and marketed at commercial use.

 

Occassionally, the MBAssholes do get it right. After VE day, in May of 1945,
someone proposed redeploying all of the B-17 and B-24 bombers to the Pacific
Theater of the war. However, someone calculated the cost of adding two
extra supply streams and realized that the money would be better spent on
supplying more B-29's.

 

Long term profits do not count. Corporate officers are rewarded for keeping
the stock valuation high, and it is very hard to do that if you do not
maximise the short term profit. The way to change this would be for the
corporate officers' stock options to vest in a longer timeframe, say ten years,
not the current immediate, or over the next four years.

It is not that an MBA is not up to the task of running a company for long
term profits, it is that there is no incentive to do so.

 

Its the mediocre lowest-common-demonimator division. Yeah, everybody
knows about it, but its by far the lowest standard of quality of all the
GM divisions.

I don't have anything against the Chevy NAME- if they put Buick and
Olds-designed engines in them, that would be fine.

But Buick and Olds both have a longer and more colorful history than
Chevrolet. Ransom E. Olds is spinning in his grave. So is Charles
Kettering. :-( So maybe there is more to the name than I first implied.

 

The best truck motor GM could have built IMO would have been a

The Olds 455 was best in class. In 1972 we had an Old's 98 with 455
and a Pontiac Gran Ville with its 455. Pontiac was 9 mpg city, 12 -
13 hiway. Olds 14 city, 18 hiway. Our olds outlasted the Pontiac
almost 2 - 1. The Olds had no problem pulling a 19 foot trailer (very
heavy in the day).

But the Chevy 454 has its place - it is cheaper to buy, cheaper to
repair and has a lot more power than anyone needed.

Mike

 

This is the main problem of going public. You work hard to create
a company, often taking decades to become great at what you do.
Then you go public and the almighty stock price and dividends take
over. Deceades of planning are replaced with months of planning.

With predictable results.

 

Long term profits do not count. Corporate officers are rewarded for

No doubt that's how they think, but if they would concern themselves with
long term profitability and the future, then when the future gets here,
which it does every second, their stock prices will go up. It's easier to
keep your company strong and profitable, if the asshole MBA's who were at
the co. 10 years ago would have thought of the future.

 

Big Pontiac engines never won any reliability awards themselves, but I'd
prefer a Pontiac 455 to a Chevy 454.

Makes a great boat anchor too, given how overweight it is.

 

Should we ask how your wife found this out before she told you? |>)))

Dan

 

Well, as long as the MBAssholes get "golden parachutes", and can just
walk out and get hired somewhere else with another high salary, stock
options, and another "golden parachute", then, yes, there is no
incentive to do so.

If, however, the MBAssholes had to suffer with the rest of us when
their hair-brained short sighted shit hits the fan, then perhaps they
would learn to re-focus.

It seems to me that this is indicative of a major problem in society
as a whole. Govenments are in the tough spot now because in the past
they borrowed money to do 'nice" things for voters. The voters
rewarded them. So NOW governments cannot do that any more because we
have HUGE debit loads! They simply cannot borrow any more $$$, and the
time when we all have to pay the piper is coming - and non of the
politicians wants to be the bearer of the bad news - because it will
be political suicide - not to mention likely to trigger riots across
the country.

The problems the country has are going to take 50 to 100 years to fix.
But as long as government has a 5 year mandate, the problems will
NEVER get fixed - just patched enough to get through the next
election.

This is very similar to the problem companys face. The MBAssholes are
strickly looking at the short term - maximizing stock values so that
they can exercise their stock options, cash in their shares, make
their money, and move on - leaving the rest of us to hold what is left
of the bag.

So I guess the MBAssholes are just folowing the governments lead.
Scarey thought - isn't it!