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Okay, so it's a weak analogy. Shoot me.

2007-09-14

Good morning Boys and Girls.

I work on the periphery of the car business. I have, off and on, since I was a kid. I've never sold a car, or done an oil change, or done anything truly necessary to any transaction. Nevertheless, my work has kept me keenly aware of how the American auto industry is doing; when they're doing things well and when they've screwed up; at least with regards to minimally satisfying the customers who buy both new and used cars. I've always enjoyed that aspect of my work.

While I watched President Bush deliver his speech last night, I was reminded of the first time I came to realize independently that GM had screwed up big time on a model.

I was about eighteen working here in Grand Rapids, and I'd been in business for myself for less than a year. One day I arrived at a dealership where I was scheduled to work for the day just before seven o'clock in the morning. The service department wasn't quite open yet and five cars were in line outside the drive-through waiting for the doors to open.

Four of the five were current-year-model Chevrolet Vegas. It struck me as funny at the time, but as it happened, that day, the reason I was there was to do my job on fifteen brand new Vegas out in the back lot. I knew it was at least a full day's work and I'd wanted to get started early.

So there I was, enjoying the morning, cleaning the cars a few at a time so I could do what I needed to do. Now remember, these were BRAND NEW cars.

On one of the cars I noticed that there was a tiny little rust spot on the painted sheet metal right where the front bumper protruded through. Odd. It didn't affect what I was going to do so I didn't think much of it, but a few minutes later I noticed the same thing on another one. Wow, I thought, that is really weird. So I went looking.

Yep. All of 'em had exactly the same little rust spot.

Now this would have been 1974, fully three years after the Vega had been introduced, though it was just the second year the new impact resistant bumpers were required - (back then, in '73 I think it was, new Department of Transportation rules mandated that cars needed to be able to sustain a five mile-an-hour crash from both the front and rear without being damaged, a great idea that for some reason was done away with later.)

Well, the point is that the design flaws in the Vega - a model rushed into production to compete with the the new Japanese small cars that were just beginning to take a big bite out of the market - made themselves obvious very very quickly. -And the motors and drive-trains were just as bad.

Eventually, GM realized there were so many things wrong with the Vega that they simply couldn't fix, that five years after it was introduced, the Vega quietly disappeared. It didn't kill G.M. and God knows they've had plenty of boo-boos since, but they were smart enough not to try to continue to sell a poorly conceived product that only rarely lasted through its brief warranty period without having serious problems - which, back then was only twelve months or twelve thousand miles.

I thought to myself last night, no wonder this Bush guy never ran a successful company. No wonder the only way he could make it was to trade on his father's name.

No wonder he thinks he can turn his Vega around.

And then I realized something else. By the time the Vega went away, even during that last year when its reputation was already pretty well known, there were still lots of people out there stupid enough to buy'em.

If George Bush was running GM back then, he'd have just repeatedly renamed the car and kept selling it until they either fired him, or he retired, and he'd have claimed that ending the production of the Vega was cutting and running - a sign of weakness.

And you know the worst part? -If Bush was in charge, he'd have tried to disallow the warranty claims too, even as those tiny rust spots turned into full-fledged body cancer over the course of a year or two, and the aluminum engine blocks seized prematurely.

Meanwhile, any designers who warned him ahead of time that there were serious design flaws would have long before been fired and called traitors to his glorious and doomed marketing cause.

I want to make some bumper stickers: "Iraq; George Bush's Vega. Are you a buyer?"




Be good to everyone.

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Barnabus (2007-09-14)
Haha Love it!!! but you know...he has to bankrupt this country, to kill the dollar as a world's currency!! There are Billions and more billions coming, yet nothing for the Social Security they have raped 1 Trillion dollars from...just pay a billion or so back!!!

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