What ARE we going to do, Chrysler?

The 4.0 engine, despite Lloyd's funeral for it years ago, is still
powering Wranglers.

Obviously, Lloyd, you have never driven a 4.0L Cherokee. It's hardly slow.
As a matter of fact, out of all the different non-V8 SUVs and light trucks
I've driven, the 4.0L Cherokee had the best seat-of-the-pants acceleration
of the lot. It even felt strong enough to whip a V-10 powered Excursion,
although I've not compared the two back-to-back. And it's sure as hell
quicker than any Ram I've driven, although I've not sampled either an SS/T
or a Hemi. I'd hazard that it's close in acceleration to the '03 5.4L F150
Supercrew I had for a few days last summer, although I was really impressed
with the torque that thing put out.

"It doesn't rev?!?!?" What the hell kind of criteria is that for an SUV
motor? You don't think that the typical SUV driver makes purchase decisions
based on what RPM the red line is at do you? For the few that buy them as
off-road vehicles, it's low-end grunt that makes the sale. 4.0s have plenty
of that. That it happens to excel in the SUV stoplight races is a nice
ancillary benefit. But you've bought the marketing line that what's
important about an engine is the redline, eh? Not surprising for a
magazine-educated fool.

As to crudeness and noisyness, that's an interesting comment. Jeeps aren't
intended to be pussy SUVs (well, up until the Liberty) like the X5 or Lexus.
They also aren't priced like an X5 or a Lexus. People with a taste for your
brand of 'refinement' shop elsewhere, as well they should. They also need
to carry a AAA card when it snows heavily or if they by some chance wander
too far into the back of the unpaved parking lot at the cider mill. But
then again, I doubt the typical X5 driver ventures forth to rub elbows with
the common folk noshing on cider and donuts.

For the blue jeans and t-shirt crowd, your standards of refinement and good
engine design don't amount to a hill of shit.

Thank God.

--Geoff

 

I remember one T.V. ad for the Dodge Spirit. It featured Iacocca
touting that the Spirit was as good as Honda Accord, only safer
because of the driver side air bag. There was a variant of the ad,
featuring a Spirit R/T, proving that Chrysler was also a *peformance*
company.

Kirk Matheson

 

And why do you think we want to read your racist, bigoted slurs here?

 

Huh? BMW is independent. GM bought SAAB, and has part of Suzuki, Subaru,
Isuzu, and Fiat.

 

The S & P could have changed their rules. DC stock is still listed on the
NYSE, as is no other stock of a company not headquartered in the US.

 

Really? Compare a Grand Cherokee 4.0 to any other 6-cylinder SUV.

Since most drivers drive them on the road, yes, an engine that revs willingly
and easily is better for acceleration, passing, quietness, etc.

And continuing to cater to those few may be why Jeep sales are low compared to
what Ford and GM SUV sales are.

Or an Explorer, Trailblazer, 4Runner, Pathfinder, etc., apparently.

Also aren't selling all that well compared to Ford and GM, are they?

 

Ah, Lloyd, not more of your misconceptions,

OK, now your falling for the idea that the only efficiency that counts is on
the
production line. You and a lot of other stupid managers.

What matters is how much factory man hours are spent on the car during BOTH
manufacture AND the warranty period - since the factory foots the bill for
warranty repair.

If the extra man hours they are spending in the factory to build the car are
being
spent in doing a better job putting the car together and better job of
designing it
and testing it, there's likely to be fewer problems during warranty, so the
savings
on spending money on warranty work will greatly offset the additional man
hours
spent building the car.

Now I don't know that in Chryslers case during that time period that the
extra
hours they were spending resulted in less warranty claims paid out.
Considering
that the data for this is probably just starting to become available now,
nobody
really knows the answer yet.

This is 20-40 year old ossified thinking. Today the global economy is so
tightly
tied together that the scenario of a depression in one country and a boom in
another doesen't exsit anymore. Today if your US sales go down due to
depression, your overseas economies are all going to go into depression to,
so
having overseas sales doesen't provide any cushion. Certainly, Damlier
buying
Chrysler (and overseas company for Damlier) didn't help them any.

No question there, but the point is why does this management have to come
from Damlier? For starters, why didn't DC promote someone from within
Chrysler? You are obviously operating under the mistaken assumption that
the entire management team at Chrysler had bought off on the same vision,
and were all incompetent. In reality no management team is like this.
There
were probably plenty of people in the management team at Chrysler that were
pissed of at the stupid decisions their bosses were making. Those people
have
far more expertise at what not to do with Chrysler than some DC execs that
have never worked a day at Chrysler in their lives before.

And furthermore, past performance is no indication of future performance.
Those DC execs may have done well where they were, but that does not
guarentee that they are going to do well at Chrysler.

Cost cutting is not the only way or even the best way to bring a company
into profitability. Sure, if there is some gross problem, you have to cut.
But it is always much smarter to spend your attention figuring out how to
increase sales than to spend time cost cutting.

The problem is that spending time and money on increasing sales does not
have immediate payback. Cost cutting does. But in the long run, cost
cutting generally does nothing to help increase sales, your mortgaging your
future for the present.

Ted

 

Personnally, I think Chrysler was obviously in trouble with the second
version of the LH cars. Although high in quality, except for perhaps
the 300M, none were as nice looking as the older versions and the new
Concord, Intrepid and LHS were too similar. For some reason Chrysler
went for revolutionary changes instead of evolutionary improvements
like the Japanese. If Chrysler had kept the old LHS body design and
fixed its quality problems, I would have one in the garage next to my
300M instead of a Toyota Avalon.

 

Joseph Oberlander wrote:

<<snip>>

I am not sure if I have misinterpreted your statement "BMW(still can't
believe they let GM buy
them out)" or whether I have missed an announcement.

Did you mean to imply that GM own BMW, if so when did that happen?

All I can find is a reference to a joint development agreement on Hydrogen
fuelled engines.

 

From my reading on various forums (including this one), they cut costs
on the line *and* in the warranty end (no reimbursement for diagnostic
time, below subsistence compensation to the dealer for actual repairs),
so in effect the customer got it at both ends - in intial quality and in
getting those initial problems remediated, and dealers suffered and
lacked initiative to genuinely take care of the customer (there are
exceptions to that).

Oh, Ted - You'd never make into today's business world! Don't go for
that MBA! (That's not a criticism of you, but it's reality.)

Yep anyone can create short-term gains - but for how long?

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

 

What's a "pussy SUV", and where can I get one?

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

 

(checked) - my bad. Just some joint-ventures. BMW is still good to buy

 

The S&P rules have served it well.

Lloyd, that's not true; you are incorrect once again. Many companies not
headquartered in the US are listed in the NYSE. Some examples of NYSE
listed companies include:


SYMBOL COMPANY HEADQUARTER COUNTRY
-------------|------------------------------------------------------------------

NYSE: FTE France Telecom FRANCE
NYSE V VIVENDI UNIVERSAL FRANCE
NYSE: TI Telecom Italia ITALY
NYSE: BAB British Airways PLC UNITED KINGDOM
NYSE: BGY British Energy PLC UNITED KINGDOM
NYSE: SNE Sony Corp JAPAN
NYSE: ASX Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. TAIWAN
NYSE: AUO AU Optronics Corp. TAIWAN
NYSE: TSM Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd. TAIWAN
NYSE: CHA China Telecom Corporation Ltd TAIWAN
NYSE: CHT Chung Hwa Telecom Co Ltd TAIWAN
NYSE: DB Deutsche Bank AG GERMANY
NYSE: DT Deutsche Telekom AG GERMANY
NYSE: SI Siemens AG GERMANY
NYSE: CNI Canadian National Railway Co CANADA

There are many more.

 

Because your obviously reading it since you responded to it, you goofball.


Ted

 

Not true, Bill. You need to keep up with your reading. There's a lot of
people
now who have been looking at this over the last decade and are starting to
point this out. They have researched all of the companies that have gone
bankrupt or been forced to sell out to a competitor and they have found
a huge number of them have had layoff after layoff and product reduction
after product reduction in a vain attempt to get the company into the
black. While this doesen't prove that spending more money when the
company is in the red is the right answer, it seems to show that cost
cutting only delays the end, not reverses it.

The problem with cost cutting is that it starts out by cutting fat, and
that's good.
A company that is running in the red does not need to be financing "morale
improving" trips to Hawaii, or new desk furniture, or some executive's pet
project that has run for 5 years and "I know next year it's going to make
money"
But what can happen is that managers get positive strokes for cutting
costs over and over and it seeps into the culture and gets
institutionalized.
Eventually they run out of fat to trim and they start cutting in places that
aren't
really losing money, but aren't really making money. Over time it's a
viscious
circle that makes the company smaller and smaller.

This is why back in the bad old days most CEO's came up through the ranks
from the sales end. Our fathers and grandfathers in the old boys club
understood that making your sales numbers was always more important
than bean counting. It wasn't until it became out of fashion to promote
people from within (based largely on a generation of moron "feel gooder"
personnell people who have chanted the mantra of let's not hurt anyone's
feelings by promoting their coworker over their head) and companies
regularly embarked on these circus "executive searches" that you started
getting
a lot of these moron CEO's who were out of touch with what their customers
really wanted and instead concentrated on "remaking the business" and you
started seeing a lot of these non-sales types getting control of companies
and
their navel introspection running them into the ground.

Show me a company that is fixated on cost-cutting and I'll show you a
company
that has a CEO and exec staff that are a bunch of control freaks who spend
more
time inside the company trying to get inside the heads of their employees,
than outside among potential customers in their market trying to get inside
THEIR
heads. While they may be able to hold the line on sales figures, every year
their
market share gets smaller and smaller.

Exactly, and one more item in my personal rant against non company types
running a company. When companies bring these CEO's in from competitors
they have absolutely no loyalty to anyone but themselves and all they do is
milk the company for what they can get out of it then skip off to the next
company the year before the one they are in smashes up. People are deluding
themselves when they think that just giving the new CEO a bunch of stock
is going to buy loyalty, that's a joke. All the CEO does is milk the
company
dry then quit 6 months before it smashes up, then once he's officially out
of the
company the SEC regulations don't hold him anymore, and he just dumps all
his stock and that is that.

Ted

 

The REAL problem isn't this so much as they are cutting their long-time
employees who know how to fix their problems the best and not make mistakes
doing it and also getting rid of the very employees they need to grow out of
their problems.

Fact:
No company ever "downsized" its way out of a long-term problem - true
solutions require growing out of your problems or dying off.

That requires talent.

Also, if you stiff your top talent for cheaper new hires, you can guarantee
that your competition will LOVE to grab up them and milk them for all the
info and innovation that they can.

It's a double-edged sword - if you are #1, you have to watch out for #2,
and if you aren't #1, you just put yourself farther back in the race.

I call it the MBA problem. If I was running a company, I'd not *touch* a
single MBA corporate suck-up. All theories and pencil pushing and motivational
crap and not enough real work.

Plus, it pisses off your employees to work for years and know their jobs
have zero potential for upward mobility. They know it inside and out and
yet have some just hired MBA moron preaching to them and ordering them
around and at the same time they have to hold the manager's hand until he
gets up to speed with the products and customers.

Efficiency? Talk about a real time and productivity waster. What you
end up with are a bunch of DMV employees who do their job and nothing
else. Work as little extra as possible once their goals have been met.
Look for work elsewhere. Steal from you. Look for a quick buck.

If employees need motivation, you're fu**ing up as a manager and owner
already. You need to re-educate and motivate yourself and not them.

And you wonder why so many are dying every year? Can't be the owner's
fault, can it? No, of course not.

 

All good points.

To repeat a previous rant of mine on this ng, I also observed that the
catastrophic cost-cutting myths trickle down (more correctly, are
*RAMMED* down) thru the supply chain.

Just to give one simple example: Ford's mandating 5% (some years I
believe 8%?) reduction in prices of supplied parts each and every year -
they don't care how you have to do it, and pretend not to realize that
certain overhead costs (health insurance, etc.) continue to rise. They
even publish quotes in the trade journals that their plan is to run all
but one or two suppliers of any given commodity out of the market with
their price cutting.

In addition, they mandate new (in many cases completely non-value-add)
quality controls onto the supplier which are more designed to shift
blame and financial responsibility for quality spills onto the supplier
and have little if nothing to do with actually improving quality (hell -
the customer themselves even fake the design FMEA's right in front of
you because they don't have the manpower to do them, but wink at you and
insist that you do your FMEAs on the same product even though that's
absolutely impossible to do without their design FMEA's as a starting
point for your FMEA's).

The supplier is forced to either quit doing business with Ford (can't do
that when you only have three primary customers who are playing their
own dishonest cost-cutting game with you - for example GM's "PICOS"
process), go out of business, or go into the same cost
cutting-even-if-it's-cutting-something-useful mentallity to achieve that
impossible 5% cost reduction each year, and eventually the only thing
left is to cross your fingers and fake the quality checks because you
can't afford to hire the 10 new quality people you needed to administer
the new programs - I give you Firestone/Ford. Then you get a quality
spill, Ford backcharges your invoices $400,000 for their troubles on a
$0.10 part. More cost cutting to make up for that loss, and more
quality spills - it's a downward spiral from there.

I hope things do change in the MBA world, but I did personally witness
what they did industry over the last 20 years.

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

 

What is needed is an immediate revocation and cancellation of all MBA
degrees issued in the last 25 years and a no-exceptions moratorium on new
ones for the next 25 years.

DS

 

Heh heh! I guess everyone's seen the Fed Ex TV commercial that is currently
running in which the new hire has an MBA. A woman asks him to ship something
out by Fed Ex, and he replies that he doesn't "do shipping". She tells him
again that he needs to get this shipped out today. He says "I'm sorry, I
have an MBA - I don't do shipping!" She says "Oh - you have an MBA - in that
case, here I'll show you how" as she sits down at the computer.

Everyone where I work was talking and laughing about that commercial.

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

 

Oh, that's *good*. Almost good enough to make me start watching TV again.
....almost.

DS