When I saw the headline of an article “The Big Question: Who Wrecked the US Auto Industry”, at Bloomberg, I was obviously interested, although the subtitle: “A Q&A with author Kenneth Whyte on how Ralph Nader brought down General Motors — and poisoned the American public’s view of business forever” instantly gave me pause. Oh no; he can’t be serious. And of course there’s a Corvair on the cover.
What a load of rubbish. The Mustang killed the Corvair, dude! By the time Ralph Nader’s book “Unsafe At Any Speed” came out in late 1965, the Corvair was already toast. And even if Nader had killed the Corvair, GM was hardly the worse for it, given that the Corvair represented a tiny slice of the behemoth’s total sales. What about the Vega, X-Cars, and all of its other Deadly Sins? Have I been totally wrong? Apparently so, as the author claims what killed GM was Nader, tort lawyers, regulations, and a deep-seated anti-business climate that appeared in the sixties, with GM as their target. And of course the imports were all exempt from all that, right?
And yes, American enterprise ended with the decline of GM. Never mind Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and so many other high-flying… American enterprises.
Here’s a few choice excerpts:
Joe Nocera (interviewer): Your book is about what happened to General Motors in the mid-1960s, and how that not just damaged the American automobile industry but set the U.S. on an anti-business path from which it has never completely recovered. I guess if I were to sum up your thesis in one sentence, it would be, “It’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.”
Kenneth Whyte: Something semi-disastrous happened to General Motors in the sixties and its repercussions are still with us today. Ralph Nader was at the fore of that phenomenon, but he wasn’t alone. He was part of an intellectual movement that was interested in reducing, if not denigrating, the role of business in American life. He was closely associated with people in the higher reaches of the American government, along with the tort industry and a lot of intellectuals sympathetic to an anti-business message. And the fact that they were all in this together created the momentum for what befell Detroit.
Me: Aha! It was a left-wing conspiracy to destroy GM and American business. The fact that GM and other car manufacturers (and many other businesses) felt free to build flagrantly unsafe and grossly polluting products of all sorts until the government regulated those aspects of their products is of course irrelevant. And why weren’t high-flying IBM and so many other companies targeted that weren’t creating negative impacts on health and the environment?
Nocera: … you focus on the Corvair, the GM-made car at the center of Ralph Nader’s book, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” How did this controversy swing public attitudes against business?
Whyte: Nader launched a safety crusade that blamed Detroit for making unsafe vehicles and killing 40,000 people a year on the highways. The crusaders argued that drivers weren’t responsible for highway fatalities; Detroit was, because Detroit was making unsafe cars and foisting them on an unsuspecting, unwary American public.
Me: He also targeted VW, as a matter of fact.
Nocera: I’ve always taken it for granted that some of these measures needed to happen — that these outsiders who said the cars weren’t safe enough were actually right. Are you saying that they were wrong?
Whyte: Yes. They were wrong in 1966 because in 1964 most of the major problems with car interiors had already been taken care of. The federal government had used its purchasing power to insist that all cars that it bought would have safety steering wheels and padded interiors and so forth, and all of the concerns of the American medical establishment about the interior of Detroit automobiles had been taken care of by this time.
Me: Wow! Turns out 1964 cars were as safe as cars ever needed to be! Who needed anything safer than than a set of lap belts, which never got used anyway? If this guy had his way, we’d all still be driving cars with just lap belts and nothing more.
Whyte: The rate of progress in improving auto safety declined after Nader’s intervention. Putting the focus on the car, rather than the driver, and blaming Detroit rather than the people behind the wheel was counterproductive to the cause of auto safety.
Me: Yes, it’s all the drivers’ fault. Now if we could just fix all the drivers, magically make them all attentive and sober and safe drivers, we’d solve all our problems with vehicle deaths and injuries. That should be easy enough… Oh, but then there’s also the fact that most crashes involve innocent passengers as well as innocent occupants of other cars involved. But that’s just their bad luck.
Nocera: So how does this effort in 1966 lead to the decline of Detroit?
Whyte: The Corvair was Nader’s exhibit number one in his prosecution of Detroit. He said it was a one-car accident, unsafe at any speed, prone to going out of control and flipping over and killing people for no reason. By leveling these accusations, he managed to kill the Corvair business for Chevrolet and General Motors. I found a lot of internal General Motors documents that show that the safety crisis also did deep damage to the General Motors brand and to the company’s finances. Basically, Nader and his friends in the Senate and in Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House did manage to convince Americans that Detroit’s cars and General Motors’ cars in particular — GM at the time sold half the cars in America — were unsafe at any speed. And as a result people rationally stopped buying them and began turning to import cars. Detroit had been doing an excellent job of beating back imports up until the mid-sixties. Then the safety crisis hits, and within five years import automobiles went from an afterthought in the American market to almost 25% of vehicle sales.
Me: Yes, the Corvair just liked to flip over randomly, at any speed. Even sitting still, presumably. And I see now! It was GM’s reputation for selling unsafe cars that killed it. Wow; and here I had it all wrong for all these years. And it was actually the safety crisis, not the energy crises and the mediocre small cars that the Big Three built that propelled imports sales! How could I have been so wrong all these years?
Nocera: The third part of your thesis is that what happened in the mid-sixties, where General Motors became vilified and Nader became a hero, was a seminal moment in American business history. It created a template for activists, tort lawyers, members of Congress and so on to take on other industries. And this, in effect, reshaped the way the country thought and dealt with business.
Whyte: …And then you had a whole bunch of public interest advocates and public law firms, following Nader’s example, who descend on Washington in the late sixties and seventies and take up business in regulating corporate conduct. The Nader incident was the spark that lit this conflagration of greater legislation and regulatory protection of Americans from business.
Nocera: …there have also been any number of business scandals that were real. You don’t really talk much in the book about how American society would fix those problems if we didn’t have this culture of tort lawyers and public interest people and so on. How do you stop the bad stuff from happening?
Whyte: …What I’m talking about are repeated incidents where the social harm that’s identified, as with automobile safety — and later with opioids and tobacco — becomes an opportunity for crusaders to attack corporations and blame them for what are essentially social failures. That to my mind is counterproductive and harmful for business and industry in America. In terms of reducing the social harms, these initiatives are useless.
Me: Yes, big pharmaceuticals and complicit doctors pushing opioids had nothing to do with that crisis; it was a “social failure”, a code word for “moral failing”. And yes, the anti-smoking initiatives and higher taxes have been utterly useless, which explains why the majority of Americans are still smoking like it was 1955.
Nocera: … I do think that in the opioid situation companies behaved badly.
Whyte: Companies behave badly in every industry. It’s a fact of life and it’s something that, again, we need to be concerned about. But these attacks on companies, the way we go about trying to solve the problem by suing them and punitively regulating them, does not work. A more nimble and sensible approach could be taken to solve problems without doing harm to the private sector.
Me: Good luck with that! So just what is that magic alternative to solving the problem of badly-behaving corporations other than regulation and holding them legally accountable? Fairy dust?
Whyte: Virtually every other country in the world has a less combative and belligerent process than U.S.-style torts. There are all kinds of administrative options, apart from having the parties go at each other hammer and tong in political and legal venues.
Me: So that’s what this book is really all about: an anti-tort reform screed. And who funded this screed? The American Enterprise Institute?
The American tort system has its pros and cons, but that’s a bit outside of our scope here. There’s a reason tort reform hasn’t happened, as the American public on balance feels it’s a valuable check on unscrupulous, negligent and just plain bad actors. To suggest that tort or safety regulations are what killed GM, or the “American Enterprise” is utterly absurd.
So how can I sue this author for wasting my time reading his inane blather? My time is valuable. Care to join me in a class-action suit?
Blaming governments for stuff is just a very easy and convenient cop-out. It’s just plain childish nonsense. No government has ever kept me from doing anything I wanted. My success, or lack thereof, is mine and mine alone.
This goof is just trying to make money off the “We hate everything and the gubmint’s mean to me,” angry old man set.
I refuse to be, or to become, an angry old man.
You’re very fortunate canucknucklehead.
I’d say American draftees who lost their limbs, minds, or lives in Vietnam might not agree, let alone the many more on the receiving end of all that firepower, which was paid for by the coercion of taxation.
Of course, we do need government, and we do need taxes to pay for it.
The government sets the playing field. Some governments pick who plays. Glad to hear you pay your taxes and yours works for you. May that continue! Be well
First of all, whatever problem I have is mine, not a government’s.
I get a great deal for my taxes:
-I got 13 years of free education for my children.
-My wife and three children have all attended or are attending university. It’s C$5200 a year. None have any student debt.
-I have never had a medical bill in Canada in my life.
-The medication for my chronic illness costs me $6.75 a month for all four prescriptions.
-I have excellent roads on which to drive.
-All the public facilities where I live are first rate
The government does set the playing field, but since everyone has to play by the same rules, it’s a wash.
-We voted for these things, meaning we chose the political party which would reflect what voters in Canada want.
As for wounded soldiers, perhaps voting for a government which doesn’t start wars would be a good thing.
As for wounded soldiers, perhaps voting for a government which doesn’t start wars would be a good thing.
You think the 18 year olds drafted into Vietnam had the right to vote or would have voted for more war? Might want to look into the history of the 26th amendment, it exists because people fighting battles had zero say in going to battle in the first place.
And besides which, isn’t this the crux of it? Politicians and voters in the US who thought communism was a threat supported the Vietnam war and there were warhawks on both sides of the political isle who did(and still are). The people who didn’t vote for politicians who supported war had to conform to the rules because a slim majority supported it(or the candidates that did anyway), and they had to pay taxes for the military hardware and were forced to fight in it.
And yes, Canada is a lovely country, WE HEARD YOU.
A. “-We voted for these things, meaning we chose the political party which would reflect what voters in Canada want.”
I think you mean that a MAJORITY of your countrymen voted for these things and the political party that half the people plus one wanted governing them, I do not believe your current government is in power by unanimous vote. Be careful with and appreciate what you have, it does not take much to turn a majority into a minority or for an alternative regime to rise. If it was truly unanimous there wouldn’t be a vote as there wouldn’t need to be a choice, yet like clockwork you too have elections to give the populace a voice in how to proceed.
B. Canada very sadly has wounded soldiers as well, how does that work when everyone is apparently united and voting against such things? But thanks for the oh-so-smug advice in any case.
C. You forgot to detail your exact income over your working history as well as the percentage of it that went back in taxes every year, i.e. your actual cost for the services you describe, it isn’t exactly “free”. Somehow though I don’t think you’ll be doing so but I’m willing to be surprised. I don’t even need yours, but a verifiable chart or link that details the percentages against income levels would be interesting to peruse. From what I’ve seen in my travels to your country, Canada too has a significant wealth disparity in its populace.
D. Your universities nationwide are not capped at CAD$5200 a year which is the impression your comment fosters (and not for the first time), the prices differ among provinces and institutions. Your taxes perhaps subsidize that as well. In 2019, even your own province’s average tuition was 15% more than that, to get an average there are obviously higher and lower priced institutions. Four provinces have lower costs than yours, perhaps The Man is ripping you off! Where’s the equality?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/733512/tuition-fee-for-full-time-canadian-undergraduates-by-province/
E. Primary Education (K-12) isn’t any more here than there. It’s included unless you choose to do otherwise.
Every country has its good and bad points. Canada seems to be a bit behind the US in administering Covid shots for example, (they are free for anyone that wants one here too) but your healthcare system isn’t apparently magically better in that aspect, which is likely the biggest healthcare worry of any person worldwide right now and I suspect many people would happily pay any amount requested to get one. And I can freely admit that the USA has handled the entire Covid crisis about as poorly as it was humanly possible to do until late January.
In the end, neither the USA nor Canada are outliers in any of the aspects you listed.
I was stating that I think I get a good deal from my taxes, Jim. I wasn’t comparing any two governments.
My son paid $2600 for this semester.
Domestic tuition 5,646.4 CAD, International tuition 38,946.2 CAD.
This is taken off the UBC website.
Canada’s Conservative party is in hopeless disarray and won’t be forming a government any time soon, Jim. Even if a Conservative government is elected, they won’t dare meddle with social programmes. The Harper government is case in point.
My cousin is married to a disabled vet. They are very happy with his treatment.
I left China and went to McGill 30 years ago. As a foreign student, I paid a tuition 10 times more than Canadian students. This has been my bitter lesson of Canadian fairness. Therefore despite my life now in US far from prefect, I still think US is a good place for poor immigrants like me. BTW, in NYS, Cuomo offers free tuition for low income family children to attend New York State Universities — UBC you mentioned is a provincial funded university.
Looks like tuition is going up next year for most programs, your quoted numbers seem to be from 2018-2019. I wonder if they freeze your rates when enrolling so they stay the same throughout?
https://students.ubc.ca/enrolment/finances/tuition-fees/undergraduate-tuition-fees
It’s interesting how the different programs cost different amounts though with next year an Arts degree tuition cost of $5,616 but an Architecture degree costing $9,051. Other programs fall somewhere in between. That’s not all that dissimilar to here when staying in-state at a public university, especially once the scholarships etc are taken into account, at least the higher end of your scale. I was discussing school costs in general with another Canadian recently and that didn’t come up in that conversation either, neither of us thought to ask the other I think.
Here different schools cost different amounts (just like in Canada) but each program within each school is generally the same tuition cost (with some exceptions, but generally Art vs ME vs ARCH vs Comp Sci is all the same tuition at a particular school.)
My wife paid $10,000 per year (or I paid more accurately) for her commerce degree.
Our daughter sailed through her undergrad on a full scholarship at New England Conservatory of Music. She’s studying a Master’s degree in Mainz, Germany.
My eldest son is in International Relations. He’s paying $5200 plus all the fees.
The youngest is at trade school studying to be and HVAC tech. A local firm is paying the bill for him, where he does his work terms.
It’s hard to discuss this without getting political, but Americans in general seem to have a hard time with the truth and must be spoon-fed reality that matches their wants and desires. I’m talking about the type of people who don’t believe the election was fair, won’t get vaccinated for Covid-19 and subscribe to crackpot theories as if they’re reality.
This has not changed since the 60s. You just have outfits like the “American Enterprise Institute” to push anti-government propaganda to goofs that eat it up like a fat kid likes cake.
TL:DR- Americans hate what we don’t understand.
An entertainingly scathing non-book review. Today, however, GM and the government could be considered one and the same since its stockholders were screwed by the government.
The stockholders of Old GM weren’t “screwed by the government”. The stock ended up essentially valueless because the company needed to go through bankruptcy. That’s what inevitably happens to stock in a bankruptcy.
Some GM bondholders claim they were screwed in the bankruptcy proceedings, but the courts ruled otherwise. Most of those bondholders weren’t mom and pops; a lot of hedge funds and such had bought them for pennies on the dollar in a gamble that they would make some money off them. They bet wrong. Let’s shed a tear for them.
I think there’s at least a bit to Robert’s point. Traditional bankruptcy law would have been a choice between a Chapter 7 liquidation where assets are sold off, debts are paid pro rata and shareholders end up with nothing, or a Chapter 11 reorganization where creditors get their debts shaved down while the company sorts out some fixable issues and shareholders can hope to recover their loss after the company successfully exits the process.
The GM bankruptcy did not follow either of these templates. It was an aggressively political bankruptcy where everything was shed as in a 7 but where the buyer of the assets was essentially the insiders from the original company, with a result that looked more like an 11 – except without the shareholders making the transition from sickness to health.
There are arguments pro and con as to whether that result was somehow necessary, but from legal perspective it was a bastardized process that neither you nor I would ever be able to take advantage of if one of us ran a company that filed for relief. As for the court challenges that followed, never underestimate the courts’ reluctance to make hard rulings where the results would be a spectacular mess.
Agreed, but let’s keep in mind that a traditional Ch. 7 or 11 was out of the question, since there was no one willing or able to be a debtor in possession except for the government. GM’s liabilities were mammoth, way beyond its assets at that stage. Which means that the stock had no value. So they were out no matter what. GM was grossly beyond the possibility of a Ch 11 restructuring.
It may have ended up looking like something of a Ch 11, but it would never have happened otherwise. The feds were the only ones capable of taking on that role.
I’m not very interested in debating this very old subject, as it’s been debated to death. But regardless, there’s no doubt in my mind that the old GM stockholders were not “screwed by the government”. They were screwed, no matter what.
Obviously the process was political. GM was seen as too big to fail. So yes, you and I would not be able to get the same treatment.
But the statement of Robert “GM and the government could be considered one and the same since its stockholders were screwed by the government.” is just not factually correct. There has been no connection between GM and the government since the govt. sold its stock in GM very early on.
I have not read all the comments so I apologize if this is a retread, but –
IMHO, what killed the US auto industry was – the US auto industry.
In fact, I’ve long believed that some malignant virus infected the brains of many corporate CEOS in the early 1970’s, because it seems to me that an awful lot of formerly great companies decided to simultaneously commit suicide.
Take three wildly disparate examples – GM, Fender and Harley Davidson. All three decided to decontent their products in order to pump up short term profits (or in the case of the latter two, pursued a merger strategy to pump up paper value), with the predictable results.
I’m sure there are many other examples, but these three popped into my head first.
See comment above about conveniently blaming government for everything.
I have to wonder if the people who lap up this guy’s “Nader destroyed GM” patter are the same ones who wanted the Obama administration to let GM and its suppliers go down the toilet.
I wonder which government do you refer to?
It’s suspecious how GM is that close to the local government in Shanghai, than else
Sounds like you’re just blowing smoke.
You know far more–and argue far better–than me, Paul—but this kind of writing (not sure whether to call it “revisionist”) isn’t doing anyone but the author much good.
And isn’t the Corvair on the cover the second generation with the IRS, anyway?
Oh, well……….thanks for sharing with us this morning!
I think the term “shit” would also work here.
Ken Whyte is a hagiographer of William Randolph Hearst and excreted a a book extolling Herbert Hoover four years ago, and created a nonfiction publishing company with upstanding paragons for truth and probity like Conrad Black.
And Joe Nocera is interviewing him! Joe supports fracking. Why wouldn’t Joe interview Whyte. I guess a year and a quarter under Covid-19 restrictions in New York City has got Joe a little tetchy and at a loss for column inspiration/transpiration/constipation.
I’m sure Paul’s assessment is a lot closer to reality—good for you for using your stage to call out Whyte’s distortions!!
Many “scholarly” books or “news/documentaries” take selected facts, connect them with selective embellishment, and voila, you have a sensational story to tell or sell. Or, you’ve cleverly made a very persuasive argument based on half-truths.
I watched “Cars that Made History” on History Channel last night, and it’s a docudrama, selective on facts, heavy on drama, quite misleading, but very engaging!
Now, take the distortion one recognizes in topics one is conversant in, or better yet, has actual experience, and apply it to news in general, and you see how we are easily misinformed, and…. oops, that’s not a discussion for this space, lol
It’s all about selling soap. This guy is trying to cash in on “The big bad gubmint took away my GTO” schtick.
Invariably, these guy never had a GTO. Heck, he’s probably not old enough to remember how common fatal crashes were in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the crashes I see on YouTube make me wonder how anyone could have survived. They lived mainly due to safety standards.
As an aside, I canceled my cable TV when History Channel went all stupid. That was in 2010 and I don’t miss TV one bit.
“I canceled my cable TV when History Channel went all stupid.”
Cable TV is a horrible ROI for the cost and what you get. It’s 500 channels of what you don’t watch and 50 of what you do. I’m happier streaming Netflix, Paramount+, etc and paying for faster internet while getting local TV off an antenna.
Yeah I cut the cord years ago, I don’t watch any sports, I don’t watch news, and I despise “reality” shows – that doesn’t leave a whole lot. I enjoy a good movie or two now and then but the only way to get those on cable where they aren’t edited for content and packed with commercials is to spend even more on the next tier package! Even then you’re a slave to the programming schedule.
I’ve got a PlayStation 4 that I installed almost almost all of the available streaming apps on for my TV watching, and frankly most of my picks come from the various free ones rather than the Netflix’s and Hulu’s I’m currently lapsed on. My internet isn’t even fast, the only streaming service I had trouble with buffering was Disney +.
A (too) large percentage of the populace will read or buy only that which supports the views they already have. As stated above so much more eloquently than I’d bother to: It’s easy to shovel shit into the mouths of those with an insatiable appetite for it.
I assume the victim narrative is pushed on TV but since I don’t have a TV, I’ll never know.
I am a happy man because I don’t have a TV.
Me too, because me either.
You people do know that PBS exists and is for free with a little flat panel antenna, right? And that you can get a 60″ super high definition LED TV for $500. And you can play stuff from the internet on it also.
But you are morally superior because of depriving yourself, I guess.
No TV is a liberation, not a deprivation.
Michael, some people don’t have a television set because they’ve thought about it and decided they don’t want one. Personally, I think television is to the mind as cigarettes are to the lungs (destructive) and brain (addictive)—so I avoid it. That’s a choice I make, and it’s just as valid as yours. Someone else making a different choice about this than you doesn’t imply anything about either party’s morals. One of the amazing things about CC is the unusually good signal:noise ratio; will you please (and thank you!) adjust your tone to do your part in keeping it that way?
I wouldn’t be so quick to high five each other about abstaining from television when you’re doing so via an interactive portable screen that never leaves your side. TV can be a real vice for people but its days of being the technological boogeyman for the mind has long since been supplanted by newer more pervasive technology we all are gleefully using.
This book is the new thing don’t you know. Conspiracy nuts and all other assorted wackos have taken to distilling woes down to one single cause. For Whyte the cause is very simple and how was it that we all missed it as it was that leftist commie Ralph Nader. Yes sir, he has caused the destruction of Mom, Apple Pie, and the American way of life. For Whyte, Nader has caused the disruption of American Society as he knew and loved it in the past and he is upset. So if you too are upset with American society today, and the direction it has taken, then this book is for you and confirmation of all that is wrong which you already knew.
Nader is a convenient, well known, scapegoat. He makes for good “talking points” on inane propaganda, oops, newscasts.
“America was so effing great when a commie like Nader took it all away!”
America has always been a great nation and is still one, too.
I’ve wondered why the U.S. gov’t didn’t just slap big tariffs on imported cars in the ’70s & ’80s if they wanted to protect the domestic industry. GM had lobbyists to promote this, I’m sure–but it never happened.
The result was the American consumer had a broader choice, and many preferred the better quality and design of Japanese & European cars over the domestic competition. Consumer Reports, with their black & red dot charts of repair incidence cemented the argument that Japanese (and some European cars) were better. And I think this FORCED GM to improve quality, especially in the late ’80s and into the ’90s.
GM failed because it started producing non-competitive products that were often shoddy and subject to extreme “cost engineering” to lower unit costs, to the detriment of quality. Their failure was their own fault, although GM execs would probably blame over-regulation, union excesses, and the oil crisis for diverting resources that could have been used to make better cars.
One unfortunate aspect of all the suing is the stupid warning labels on all kinds of products. From a Ford Focus manual: “Warning! Do not work on a hot engine!” Boy, I’m glad they told me that; I could have burned myself, and not known why!
Am I right on this?
Look at the Chicken Tax, which is still in effect to the enormously profitable benefit of American makers. Moreover, tariffs are not the only kind of protectionist policies. U.S. safety and emissions regulations serve as a non-tariff trade barrier; they are significantly different in structure and protocol, but not in effective outcome versus the international-consensus UN Regulations virtually all the rest of the world uses.
“GM failed because it started producing non-competitive products that were often shoddy and subject to extreme “cost engineering” to lower unit costs, to the detriment of quality. Their failure was their own fault, although GM execs would probably blame over-regulation, union excesses, and the oil crisis for diverting resources that could have been used to make better cars. ” Yes, and the ludicrous thing is that other companies did just fine when confronted by the same conditions in the US market. For some reason instead of going with the flow of regulatory change, the US makers fight it. They fitted very ugly 5 mph bumpers in order to make a point; the Europeans and Japanese makers didn´t need to do this but still complied with the regs. The US makers comply at the last minute whereas Toyota is ahead of the regulations. Which firm consistently makes tonnes of money and sells loads of cars people like?
Richard
Re: “…ugly 5-mph bumpers…” Perhaps where you lived there were no Mercedes or BMW or MGB or Celicas…. all good cars that looked atrocious.
GM and the Americans did much wrong–but GM especially, and Ford, had made tons of money in the 1960s.
The Japanese did much right. They also had a cleverly insular home market to cover much of their fixed costs.
They didn’t have to contend with OSHA or EPA regulations in their plants on their home turf.
Some pretty big tailwinds.
The Europeans, who in the 1970s, were more comparable to the US and had smaller tailwinds than Japan, but also smaller headwinds than the US, their mass-market brands didn’t survive in the US market, did they?
Having been in charge of both OSHA and EPA (well, BAAQMD – Bay Area Air Quality Management District that makes EPA look feeble) compliance in a manufacturing plant for a half decade as one of my tasks, it is not particularly difficult or onerous to meet their rules and regulations, and doing so, while it incurs an expense, generally makes for a far better working environment than not. The companies that have problems with either or both generally have the same type of culture being discussed here where they find reasons that they can’t or won’t comply instead of figuring out what needs to be done.
In any case, in the early 1980s the Japanese were starting to set up shop here in the US and thus having to comply with a completely alien set of laws and regulations including OSHA and EPA. I’d say they seem to have managed quite well from the beginning, generally just buckling down and getting things done. The JDM market is a fraction the size of the US market, so good on them for taking that initiative. I have yet to see a US brand try to make any kind of serious product for Japanese consumption, most attempts have been with garbage cars that don’t get much respect over here either.
VW, Audi, BMW, and Mercedes are all mass market brands in Germany and all survived here. The latter three have decimated the US luxury car market (Lincoln and Cadillac).
Opel and Ford were/are of course Detroit’s European mass-market entries.
The French didn’t make it, true, for various reasons, although one of them managed to buy one of the US makers until it was then further sold to Chrysler.
Fiat (and its sister brands that aren’t really mass market) is really the only other mass market one I can think of and round two seems to not be going that much better than round one, mainly due to the product mix IMO.
The Koreans though are killing it, who would have guessed that in the 1980’s…
Thanks for confirming what I have always suspected. The cost of compliance is usually minimal, and has advantages that far outweigh the costs. We just have companies (and really, the people running those companies) who will try anything to not comply to changed rules at any cost. It would be the equivalent of someone trying to run a NASCAR entry using the 1990 rulebook and then complaining about not being able to run due to not meeting current rules. If you want to play, you have to play by current rules, or you sit out the game. Or, in cases like the ones not wanting to comply, you whine and pout like a 4 year old having a tantrum.
Oddly, most of the costs of compliance are items easily written off on taxes, and for several years, often allowing profits to remain untaxed. GM is a prime example, using the losses and expenses as a way of avoiding paying taxes and often receiving refunds instead.
I was in charge of OSHA, FDA, and ISO compliance in a manufacturing plant for a decade as one of my tasks. Drug & (Medical) Device industry, it was frequently difficult and always expensive to meet those agencies rules and regulations. To reduce regulatory compliance costs, I was tasked with moving manufacturing of several product lines to the Peoples Republic of China, India, and Mexico. And while there were considerable capital costs involved in each move, the payback period in each case was less than five years while quality and on-time delivery performance were perfectly acceptable, every bit as good as the US facilities.
Plus I got to eat awesome food on the company’s dime.
Well, one adjustment, but it does sorta line up with your contention about GM executives:
Tne unfortunate aspect of all the suing…
The insurance industry has been buying image ads telling the public “you’re all suing too much” since my Dad was in knee pants. This idea is spread by lots of clickbait headlines, (dating to before the internet was invented), but not buttressed by actual rates of lawsuit success and payouts.
Auto executives and insurance executives may have their differences, but they’ve found common ground on this subject.
Here in British Columbia we went to a no-fault system two years ago.
Last year my insurance premium was $1900. This year it was $1450.
Eh, anecdotes, data.
Also, auto insurance is one thing. Corporate law is another.
They didn’t do tariffs, but they did have import quotas that limited the number of cars that could be imported into the US, which mostly affected the Japanese automakers.
Of course, the response to that was the Japanese automakers realizing that building cars in the US didn’t count against the quota, so they opened plants and starting to manufacture their most popular models in the US.
I kind of wish Paul had actually been there for the interview, it may have gone in a more interesting than it actually did.
Somehow it doesn’t feel right to blame Nader for my dad’s 1975 Vega, and the 1981 Impala that never ran right, and the 1983 Regal that dropped the back half of the frame in a pile of rust.
These folks never seem to notice that every other car producing nation also has a government that sets standards. Want no government to interfere? Let me know how the auto industry did in Libya or 1990’s Somalia.
If it weren’t for legislation we’d still be driving cars with no seatbelts. Detroit would be claiming customers wouldn’t want to pay for them, like they always did.
Perhaps. Today all new cars in the US come with assisted steering and brakes. Probably AC too. No mandates.
Safety—perhaps Detroit had a point. Yet today, they, Detroit!, often add airbags above what law requires.
The one area where we needed government, preferably intelligent government, was emissions. We all have to breathe the air, yet given a choice between better performance for less money vs cleaner exhaust, I suspect most would pick A. I would—especially in the 1970s.
And oft-maligned GM did more to save the planet than any other carmaker by using its muscle in 1971 to force the oil industry to make unleaded gas available and by developing in leading the way with the catalytic converter, arguably the most significant pollution control ever.
I bet Whyte, like just about every other “subject expert” says nothing about the catalyst.
It’s easy to bash post 1960s GM, I do. But please, let’s give credit where credit is due!
I only read the review above. History rhymes. What killed GM was greed and complacency. Not Nader. Not the oil embargo. Not even the Japanese. Not even the Vega, which was a FLASHING RED ALERT. GM tried to run the same winning plays they had perfected while the game and the world changed. It can never happen to me. Or us. Or here. It did
Regarding the Catalytic converter and the role it played. In the History Channel show referenced above they certainly implied that the Americans and especially GM were dumb in choosing that method to reduce emissions vs Honda’s CVCC. Of course they lean heavily into the drama side when discussing the CVCC Impala Honda built and how Ford and Chrysler bought licenses to the tech but GM called Hondas Toy cars.
Of course there was no mention of the short life of the CVCC while the Cat has endured. Nor any mention of the cost savings of the Cat which was able to fit a wide range of vehicles vs the massive expense of retooling the various engine families at the volumes that US mfgs were selling.
Those CVCC heads Honda built for the Chev 350 in a ’73 Chev Impala merit quite a lot of weight in the discussion. Tables III and V tell just about the whole story.
The short market life of CVCC is not really relevant; I don’t think it’s reasonable or realistic to say the Honda CVCC was somehow less than worthy because the catalytic converter became the all-but-universal centre chunk of emission control systems. Look again at those tables in the linked report. Look what Honda made a ’73 Chev 350 do without a catalyst; the logical progression from there is that Honda’s method would have made for much cleaner exhaust much sooner than we got it, with or without catalysts on new cars through the ’70s and ’80s. Old cars, too; have a think about what adopting Honda’s tech would’ve meant for the effective lifespan of catalytic converters on pre-1981 vehicles without feedback mixture control. As it happened, even when those cars were running properly, their exhaust was very dirty, which made the catalysts run very hot all the time, right on the ragged edge of meltdown, with scanty margin for anything to be out of adjustment. The much cleaner exhaust from the CVCC-head-equipped Chev 350 (and other engines similarly equipped) would’ve helped out quite a lot.
The short market life of the CVCC is relevant. Particularly in context of the program referenced but also in general.
Yes it was cleaner than pre cat cars by a long shot and could meet the standards of the 70’s but there was definite concern as to whether it could meet the standards of the 80’s.
That is why Toyota, Ford, Chrysler and Isuzu never acted upon the licenses they purchased. They saw it as what it turned out to be a short term solution.
Honda didn’t abandon it on a whim and they only briefly tried combining it with a Cat.
Regarding the environmental benefits one of the big selling points of the CVCC was that it ran on less expensive regular gas. That is the little mention fact that they continued to spew lead into the air while properly fueled Cat equipped cars did not.
The CVCC is definitely an important note in the history of the automobile as the first commercially viable stratified charge engine. Ultimately the stratified charge engine did make it to the mass market it just looks more like the TCCS or PROCO systems of the 70’s than the CVCC.
I’m not sure why you put CVCC and catalysts as either/or, nor why you seem to cling to the idea that automakers had one chance, in the early ’70s, to pick a single technology that was going to do the whole job forever.
Properly fueled cat cars didn’t spew lead into the air due to not being able to use leaded gasoline. Can CVCC cars use unleaded gas without consequence? I really don’t know, just curious if the eventual phasing out of leaded gas would have made this a non-factor anyway (CVCC cars spewing lead).
Yes, CVCC engines work just fine on no-lead fuel. Any gasoline engine with exhaust valves and seats of adequate hardness can take unleaded gasoline of adequate octane rating.
It seems like you are the one that was pushing the either/or thing. Fact is all of this has a cost to the mfg which will get passed on to the consumer, so no one was going to make a vehicle way cleaner than needed if it was going to cost more.
So yes the mfgs had to place a bet on one of the other.
If Honda really wanted to they certainly could have fitted Cats to the CVCC from the beginning, but they didn’t, it was a last resort effort to squeeze a little more life out of the technology. They also could have put an unleaded only restrictor in the filler and mad sure the engine was suitably designed. Again they didn’t because that would be an added expense and taken away one of the touted benefits of their product.
For Honda with one vehicle to certify one engine for CVCC was a great choice that meant their near term needs with minimal investment. The fact that it might be obsolete by the early 80’s wasn’t a big concern since if they didn’t make this one car do well in 1975 there may not have been a need to worry about whether or not they could meet the standards of the 80’s
For other mfgs that did expect to live through the 80’s the Cat was a low cost, quick to market solution that looked like it would be viable for a much longer term.
So it is easy to understand why Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Isuzu choose to go with the Cat even though they purchased licenses for Honda’s technology early on.
The point about no-lead gas leads into a goof made by regulators in rolling it out. Leaded gas should’ve been taxed to a level where the end price to the consumer was equal to or higher than unleaded. There’s no way it should’ve been allowed to be the cheaper option, as it was for as long as it lingered at the pumps.
@scoutdude nailed it. Catalytic converters was the most important development in auto emissions.
That GM exec showed poor form by dissing Honda does not in any way change the fact that GM fathered the catalytic converters.
CVCC was innovative for sure. But besides NIH (not invented here), if it was licensed free, why did no one else adopt it?
Your notion of the history of the catalytic converter is faulty; see here.
Also, we know what happens in the absence of safety regulation, and it’s just about the exact opposite of automakers building cars safer than the law requires (Yes, really).
This blog really needs up and down voting. In this case, ↑↑↑↑.
Oddly, Toyota, Honda, and every other manufacturer foreign or domestic that sold cars in the U.S. were subject to the very same regulations.
By and large, Japanese makers put their money and effort into innovating to meet the regulatory requirements. American automakers also spent mountains of money, effort, and time fighting the regulations in congress and in the courts of law and public opinion. Which is a pity, because they had massive engineering talent in their employ. If they had put even a fraction of those resources into meeting the goddamn regs instead of making war on them, it would have been to everyone’s benefit.
Beyond that, there’s a sturdy case to be made that the US auto industry deliberately treated vehicle regulation as a passing fad to be snuffed out by whatever means necessary. One of their oftenest-used tools in that war was to comply with the regulations in the cheapest, nastiest possible ways. Oh, your brand-new car is hard to start, stalls, knocks, hesitates, gets lousy gas mileage, buzzes at you if you don’t fasten the complicated and uncomfortable seat belt, has ugly bumpers? Gee, »tsk« what an awful shame. Not our fault; the government made us do it. Guess you should write to your congressman or something.
That said, the malfeasance and idiocy was not unilateral; the US Government really did do some dumb things. Such as preventing (“anti-trust”) the formation of consortiums to devise good strategies for compliance with the new regs and spread the cost around. I don’t know specifics, but I understand such cooperative efforts were undertaken in Europe and Japan.
You love to promote the narrative that the big three spent their money fighting regulations, rather than investing in technology to comply, as well as that NIH syndrome played a big part in their actions.
Some facts regarding emissions.
GM licensed the Rotary and spent a lot of money developing one with hopes of putting it into production. One of the reasons behind it was its low NOx potential.
GM also bought a license for Bosch electronic fuel injection technology and actually brought it to market in 1975. Of course the goal was more precise fuel metering for better emission control.
Ford spent a lot of money developing their Proco engine with its promise of low emissions and high fuel economy.
Ford bought a CVCC license (and provided the use of their emissions testing facilities to Honda) and developed some of their test engines.
Ford also teamed up with Mazda in part for the low NOx promise of the Rotary.
Chrysler also bought a license for the CVCC.
GM also invested a lot of money developing and tooling up for a lot of the other small pieces that made up the total emissions system package.They sold them world wide to help other mfgs comply and of course reduce their cost by spreading the development and tooling costs across more volume. Carbon canisters, EGR valves and TVS were items they sold a lot of to other mfgs both US based and foreign.
Fact is it was panic time and US mfgs attacked the problem from every angle they could. Fighting the regulations to keep them commercially attainable, their own internal work, licensing and the purchase and sale of complete components.
It wasn’t a level playing field either. Standards were in grams per mile so smaller cars with lower fuel consumption had a much easier time than large cars with higher fuel consumption.
Throw in CAFE and the fact that many of the ways to decrease emissions also decrease fuel economy and companies that only sold smaller vehicles were at a huge advantage.
During the early 70’s, the heavy hand of the EPA mandated emissions standards that the car companies really didn’t have the technology for at that time. The result was the worse performing, poor fuel economy, and unreliable emissions. This was 1973 through 1974. A better approach would have been for the EPA to work with the companies as a partner, instead of a adversary, more of a team effort.
The technology existed plentifully to meet the standards, but American automakers didn’t want to use it. They wanted to keep doing what they were doing without any interference from outside, so they fought and dragged their feet and lied instead.
I would like to see evidence that say for example, GM had in 1972 fully developed catalytic converters, ECM fuel injection, ECM spark control. I’ve no doubt that they were working on these at the time, but I’ve never seen evidence that all this technology was sitting on their shelf and they refused to use it.
As someone who tries to read differing takes on history, it is difficult to read a book written by an author who had broaden the scope of their book beyond the data they have credibly proven. What the author needed to have done is have an editor help him towards a narrower focus that he could credibly prove. However, it is also quite possible that the publisher wanted the author to broaden his theory in order to find a larger market. The author’s original draft didn’t deliver what the publisher believed they could sell.
As a DBA, I am approached by staffer believing that the databases I maintain could provide them with answers for the questions they have. I have to inform then that while I could create queries to provide answers, the databases weren’t designed to answer those questions. Consequently, I have too many staffers believing that any answer is correct, instead of understanding how to reach a correct answer.
The author could have had a possible theory to consider, had he limited the scope of it to the facts he could credibly prove. In my opinion, I see this as a failure of scope.
Kenneth Whyte is, alas, a Canadian journalist; he was the editor of the National Post when it was a vanity project of Conrad Black. Doesn’t surprise me he is trying to peddle some bogus revisionist history.
That word “Journalist” here is carrying more than its rated weight.
He’s a Canadian? I figured since he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about in this book. It would be like me, an AMERICAN writing a book on the history of hockey despite knowing fuck-all about it.
The Corvair was a marketing mistake long before it was seen as a technical mistake. It was three wrong answers to one wrong question (VW). The Falcon was the right answer to the right question (Rambler).
I have my gripes with the way the government has done certain things that affected the car industry (CAFE would be my main target) but this book appears to make a really weak and poorly researched (and I’ll throw in ill-informed) argument. I agree, there appears to be little to nothing worth reading here.
This book appears as a prime example of conformation bias.
A person only considers ideas or statements or even half-truths that support their predetermined views.
As an saying I heard in my twenties goes,
“My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts!”
*confirmation*
Anyhow, GM fully deserves where it is now, perhaps with quite some delay
GM is in fact doing very well now.
In countries where they have chosen to remain in business.
GM declared $11,000,000,000 in profits in Q1 2021.
Good thing they closed down in places where the didn’t make money.
Respectfully, I don’t believe you are correct, would you mind posting the source? My info shows about $3 billion for Q1 per gmauthority.com. Their forward looking guidance for the entire year was/is $10-11B.
hey’ve closed or sold a lot of facilies globally since 2015, and abandoned a lot of markets. This list includes Europe, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Usbekistan, Russia, South Africa…
Some of the things they dropped were dismal failures anyway, while some were successful too. For example the joint venture in Uzbekistan held a 94% market share there (check Statista if you dont believe me)! They sold their share in 2019, although the company that’s now owned by Uzbek government still has the right to use Chevrolet brand on their cars.
They’ve slimmed their operations down considerably and by doing so they’ve managed to address the problem of some of these not-so-successful operations bleeding money. Which has helped them become more profitable, sure. But for me the is issue here is that there’s no indication that they have addressed the core problems that caused these operations to fail. Mismanagement, the failure to understand the local market, the failure to understand what really needs to be done to succeed in that market, etc.
I also think they’ve lost a lot of “potential” by dropping some of these operations.
For example, by dropping Europe they’ve lost a lot of engineering capacity (Opel was designing and building decent, quality cars, and they were better at it than the Americans) as well as credibility as a global player. The signal they’re sending out is that they’re not competent enough to be able to survive in Europe.
Or let’s take India – a population of 1.4 billion and a growing market, but they weren’t able to crack it and bailed out. Imagine how much potential there would have been in that market, had they only managed to find a right way how to approach it. But they couldn’t and that’s really the main point I’m trying to make here!
They could have made use of their presence in these different locations around the globe by learning how to manage these properly. Dropping them is an easy way out, its a surrender, a defeat. I don’t think it’s a sign of them doing well.
They’ve launched the Ultium technology now – with great fanfare and a lot of big words, claiming that this will be the radical new world-leading thing, a key to their future success. Now, how many times in the past have they launched something with similar ablomp, and how many times has it proved to be a massive failure?
Honestly, I’m not really buying their words
Lots of good thoughts on it, but I will respectfully disagree on what they “lost” in closing those markets.
Opel had some good engineering. So did Holden. But they engineered cars that fell out of favor, ones that were losing market. The markets of most EU countries did not favor the GM products, and one of the smartest business moves is no longer doing business where your business is not wanted. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but you have to know when to fold ’em, as Kenny Rogers noted.
The fact that the Indian market is not viable is one that affects damned near every non-indigenous company trying to do business there. Unlike China, the government is not fawning over foreign run companies coming in, as they are a democracy and can’t pull off some of the shenanigans that the all powerful Peoples Party can do in China regarding businesses, IP, subsidies, grants, and providing infrastructure. I really look forward to see how the Indian market progresses. The sheer number of consumers, coupled with a more democratic government, will mean a lot of chaos, but a lot of reward, to the companies that figure it out. The Chinese government provided stability, and that provided the companies with what they wanted to set up shop there. Whether they keep doing business there will come down to how friendly or not the government remains with them.
If GM does things right, it should be like VAG and Toyota combined. And it turned out to be a fraction of VAG right now, coming to the capacity of engineering, production….
well, everything
It´s pretty plain to anyone with a grasp of facts and critical faculties that US industry hasn´t been destroyed since, as recently as today, most of the biggest and richest companies in existence are American. That almost none of them are car firms is to do with where technical progress and the market are at now and also because, with due respect to the good people working at the Big Two and formerly Chrysler, the product planning and management has been rubbish for fifty years. There is Tesla who have risen from nothing to challenge Ford and GM while Ford and GM have just fought another rearguard action or dragged their feet.
Perhaps Whyte can turn his attention to the real, obvious truth that cigarettes are harmless and that cancer´s the user´s fault? He seems to be well able to make the necessary elisions, conlfations and category mistakes in the case of car safety so it ought to be easy to argue that we ought to be back to 20 a day right away.
Wow, this got way more heated, way more quickly, than I would have expected. 🙂
I’ll add a positive comment about the legacy North American car industry, probably one of the few I’ve ever made, and that is about Ford. With the introduction of the Mach E – by all accounts a very credible effort – and now the F-150 Lightning, it seems that Ford is on the ball about the challenges facing their industry and is also being smart about their specific marketing strong points.
Once they focus on the critical issues, American enterprise (and R&D) has always been capable of competing with the best in the world, and that is still the case.
The new F-150 EV is brilliant and at that base price, contractors will be snapping them up because they cost less to run. The drivers will see just how cool electric power is and go out and buy one him/herself. It’s a win-win.
GM is also going big into EVs and it will be interesting how their products fare.
Tesla doesn’t have the game all to themselves anymore.
What they’ll find out is how useless electric power is for trucks that are actually used for work rather than virtue signalling. I refuse to buy an electric vehicle, ever, no matter how much enviro-weenies and government may want it. Government is nothing more than a criminal gang, and every act of government is an act of violence. I personally resist and disobey government whenever possible.
Right on!
Meet the full EV big rig, rated at a GVM of 110,000 lbs. Actually used for work.
Electric vehicles are perfect for city use, short trips. Over the road or long distances they fall down in practicality.
For the past 5 years there’s been a lot of VC sloshing around several startups wanting to be the “Tesla of trucks”. Ford’s announcement means that Rivian, Lordstown and even the Tesla Cybertruck group have until next spring (Ford’s ship date) to put production trucks in customers’ hands before Dearborn does, and Canoo, Bollinger and others that are farther back and were looking at a mid-2020s launch date now risk entering a segment fully occupied by legacy automakers – if Ford has launched, GM and Mopar can’t be far behind – if indeed the VC gravy train carries them that far.
So how can I sue this author for wasting my time reading his inane blather? My time is valuable. Care to join me in a class-action suit?
No, but thank you for taking one for the team and making this article. Most entertaining all-text CC post I’ve read in a long time, and with CComments to match.
But if you do feel you’re wasting your time, Paul, cut out the middle man and just skip anything put out by Bloomberg. Putrid journalism, sometimes even worse (and just as predictable) as the WSJ. Maybe that’s the “more nimble and sensible approach” advocated by that Whyte guy to address private sector misdeeds.
Unfortunately, by linking to the Bloomberg article at the end of the post (which I completely understand is unavoidable), we have only added traffic, eyeballs and revenue for that parasitic media. Even bad publicity is good, in this system, though your takedown of this agenda-driven book and that stunningly incompetent interview is Internet gold.
I’m a Bloomberg subscriber. I like to follow business and finance, and they’re pretty good at that. And some of their opinion pieces are good to decent. This was an egregious failure.
Worse than the WSJ? Certainly not in terms of their political orientation in the editorial section.
I don’t take everything I read as gospel truth, but they cover certain areas better than just about any other media. Their Hyperdrive section covers the EV industry quite well.
I love how Ralph Nader continues to get blamed for something that he had nothing to do with. Get over it, guys. It seems like car nuts hold the longest grudges.
Especially when most of the people doing the blaming weren’t even alive when Nader wrote his book. They have no idea how unsafe 1950s and 1960s cars were, with 4500 lbs on 14″ bias ply tires and 9″ drum brakes all around. Seat belts? Only wussies need seat belts! Don’t you trust my driving? I’m the best driver I know!
It doesn’t matter that it’s car related.
The “politics of grievance” has been proven to be a money spinner whether you’re flogging T shirts or soliciting political donations.
In my simple opinion, GM like most of US manufacturing sectors has gotteninto the prefect storm and come out much damaged and barely survive. Nader and the tort lawyer is one factor, increasing government regulation is a factor. But I am afraid there are many more. One of often talk about are union, energy crisis and Japanese import. I go further, obsolete engineering and manufacturing, high labor cost, high taxes, high US dollar value, short term thinking, cost cutting, poor reliability, poor product design and line-u, society transforming into service sector, globalization, outsourcing…..
You can go on YouTube and watch a lot of the propaganda that came out of the auto and insurance industries before Nader where “blame the driver” was king. A lot of it is laughable to watch. Maybe the driver did cause the accident but he had no chance when you look at how his car behaved – steering column through the chest, collapsed seats, part of the hood through the windshield, no crumple zones, etc.
And Canucknucklehead is right that people who did not live through the 50s and 60s are largely unaware of how bad cars were or the impact of auto accidents on every day life at the time. Kids I went to school with, neighbors, friends, relatives were killed or severely injured on a regular basis. One friend lost his eye when he went through the windshield of a 59 Oldsmobile (no seatbelts, of course). I could go on but I’d sound like one of those driver’s training films of the era.
The author lost me when he suggests that automobile interiors were safe by the early 60’s. No, afraid not. Ford was on to a good thing in 1956 but we know how that turned out. Nader was something of a national hero not a villain.
It is amazing what “used to be reputable” publishing houses (Knopf in this case) are turning out these days. In terms of fact checking, you have to be just as vigilant with new books as you are with the internet, cable news, or other print media. It’s great that Paul’s analysis of this one pops up toward the top in searches using the title.
Excellent point about the 1950s propaganda urging everyone to drive safely but completely ignoring the poor safety engineering of the vehicles themselves. People like Ralph Nader, Bill Haddon (first adminstrator of NHTSA’s predecessor agency and later IIHS president), and Daniel Moynihan (former US senator from NY) changed everything and put auto and highway safety on a scientific path.
Pennsylvania somehow missed the memo and as recently as in the 2010s was plastering its roadsides with signs urging drivers to “slow down, save a life,” “don’t tailgate,” and “don’t drink and drive.” These have mostly come down now.
This Whyte guy sounds like a real character; guess he’d be yucking it up with David E. Davis and Brock Yates if these two were still alive.
Driving doesn’t hurt if you don’t crash into anything.
Driving standards are appalling. Should anything be done about that, or should we all just zorb to work?
Yep. Take a look at these 1968 crash tests—note how well Chrysler’s stronger, improved-for-1964 door latches (don’t) work to prevent the door flying open in a crash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siT-SIfOnQw&t=0m9s
Now look at these 1966 letters to the editor of Life magazine in response to an article about auto (un)safety; the public thought “Just drive carefully” was somehow going to magically work.
A friend of mine mentioned George Akerlof’s famous 1970 universe of lemons paper in other contexts – specifically, what signals do consumers have access to to make decisions about selecting product in markets in which there is heavy informational asymmetry. The answer is, they can’t, and lemons dominate the market because there is no reliable signal of quality. Thus Dad’s 1977 Cutlass Supreme.
I was thinking of this in terms of media conglomerates and the above Bloomberg interview about the Conrad Black shill’s extruded word product.
Here is a gentle reminder of the good old days.
Good old now
Stock plot, cardboard characters, turgid claptrap, Whyte must have needed another meal ticket and quick buck. He should turn to writing romance novels, seems to have a forte for those….
I agree more with Mr. Whyte than Mr. Niedermeyer. GM was only good at producing V8 powered body on frame rear wheel drive full and mid-size cars, pickups, and SUV’s. Government erred in forcing GM to produce vehicles with which it had no expertise. All the money spent on the 1980 X body, 1982 A and J bodies, the 1985 C and N bodies, the 1986 E, H, and K bodies, the 1987 L body, the 1988 W body, the 1991 Saturn, the 1995 G body, etc. was in vain. All those cars were mediocre, and now GM basically back to producing primarily V8 powered body on frame pickups and SUV’s. GM should have been allowed to produce what it was good at and imported small cars as necessary from Opel and Asian affiliates.
You seem to be suggesting the government forced GM to spend fortunes developing crap cars and ignore models available to them from their overseas divisions.
They did that by themselves. The government didn’t mandate that GM should copy the Japanese. The public demanded a car they knew would start in the morning. GM gave them a new plastic toy with the same inferior engineering as before. Pretty much the opposite of what they needed to do.
Is the government’s role to protect GM from competition, and executives from their own incompetence?
GM led the way producing FWD, even ahead of Japanese and European makes, they did this not from any government pressure, but from figuring out that the design would enhance fuel economy, traction, and packaging. There was mismanagement at times in GM, but we’ve seen this in every car company across the globe.
Even if you are referencing the Toronado and El Dorado of the 60’s with their 7+liter engines, that’s not the case.
Look up Auto Union, Citroen Traction Avant for a couple of volume pre WWII examples.. DKW, Saab, Mini were well ahead of the above as well in the 1950s as just a few examples. Plenty more after them.
If you mean the GM X-cars of 1980 and more economy minded cars, then look up Audi, Citroen, Renault, Lancia, Fiat, VW with their Golf/Rabbit, Passat/Dasher, Polo, lots of popular FWD cars there, some brands selling exclusively FWD. Even the US market Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon predate the GM X-cars by a couple of years.
Japan offered the Toyota Tercel in the latter 1970’s. Honda’s Civic debuted for 1973, the Accord for 1976, all FWD. Subaru too. Ford with the Fiesta in 1976.
There are plenty more. GM was by no means a pioneer in the mass-market FWD arena which traded on the fuel economy, traction, and packaging advantages mentioned.
GM endeavored to switch their entire fleet to FWD, which they did other than a few B bodys, where much of the other car companies were behind. Exceptions were of course VW, a mix of Japanese as you point out. Some of the big sellers stayed with RWD for a long time like Volvo. The point was that GM made an attempt to advance technologically on their own without government pressure.
I agree, though Jim is right GM didn’t pioneer FWD, the switch over en masse was purely GMs uncoerced decision. Nobody at GM had a passing thought that “we can only build big V8 powered body on frame rear wheel drive cars well, we’ll fail at FWD!” That sentiment is an attribute we as drivers and enthusiasts figured out that they were probably indeed more consistent at putting together better, but old GM itself was a corporation that lived and died by hubris. They thought they were going to create a new standard of the world with the X-bodies and their other FWD cars of the 80s, this was the same GM that brought out the UPP, the rear engine Corvair, the Tempest rope drive, turbochargers, the unlined aluminum Vega block and numerous other outside the box hits and misses.
The dodgy qualities of the X bodies and many GM front drivers to come may have been coerced by resources being stretched to thin with regulatory compliance to some degree, which is subject to debate, but the move to FWD for GM was purely voluntary, they easily could have gone the Ford route with the Fox chassis and underpin a substantial portion of their early 80s catalog with badge downsizing using either the RWD H or X bodies and small displacement V8s to meet regulatory targets, but GM brass had greater confidence that it could pull off a switch of every car line to FWD between 1980 and 1986.
GM never wanted to be perceived as a dinosaur. Unfortunately for them, unlike the Vega that was effectively treated as junior car in the Sloan hierarchy where their engineering foibles could be brushed off as “Ah that’s too bad, oh well we have a shiny new Malibu or Impala you can trade it in for!”, the Citation was slated to be a very mainstream high volume model for traditional GM buyers, and a promise of things to come in future segments, and its well publicized shortcomings doomed them. It didn’t help that cost cutting and management choices chipped away brand identity and hired a corporate yes man Irv Rybicki to play it safe with styling resulting in a bunch of lookalikes wearing minor variations of the already deeply mined sheer look styling brought about by his predecessor.
The thing with a lot of those classic rear drive V8 GMs we cherish is they were riding on a fairly average chassis underneath, about as average as FWD A and H bodies really. The difference was 60s GM could style cars with the best of the world’s designers and could get away with selling the sizzle with hot engines and annual styling changes. That whole Emperor wearing no clothes saying never had a better usage than with GM, once their styling leadership waned the cars were really exposed for what they were.
“I’m Kenneth Whyte and I approve of this billboard!” — spotted in southeastern Ohio in 2007.
The people who started the process of “bringing down” the “old GM” were George Romney, Robert McNamara and Lee Iacocca, in my view.
GM’s success was based, in a very large part, on the Sloan Brand Ladder. Astute component sharing, and clever styling differentiation courtesy of Harley Earl, made it very successful. But, as has been previously noted on this site, it really only worked if each division offered one basic car, and the options a customer could buy were limited.
While GM helped undermine its own brand structure with the divisions invading each other’s turf, it was the model proliferation started by the success of the 1958 Rambler and the 1958 Thunderbird that really got the ball rolling. Ford kept up the pressure with the 1962 Fairlane, 1965 Mustang and 1965 LTD.
Naturally, each division’s dealer body wanted to sell the widest range of cars possible (except for Cadillac in the 1960s and 1970s), so we soon had Buick Specials that were cheaper and smaller than Chevrolet Impalas. The Sloan Brand Ladder relied heavily on size and price as the markers of prestige…but if Buick is selling intermediates that are cheaper and smaller than “standard” Chevrolets, which brand is more prestigious?
Ford – and, later, Toyota – proved that multiple divisions are not necessary to appeal to customers ready to “trade up” to more expensive vehicles. Even when we were kids, my friends and I knew that Thunderbirds were considerably more expensive – and prestigious – than Mavericks. It didn’t matter that they were both Fords sold by the local Ford dealer. Today people happily buy Land Cruisers and Corollas at Toyota dealerships, even though they appeal to very different market segments. (For that matter, they buy Mustangs, Platinum-edition F-150s and Escapes at the Ford dealership.)
By the early 1980s, having multiple brands hurt, rather than helped, GM’s competitive position. It made it more difficult for GM to respond to everything from government regulations to the rise of imports. GM’s management never adjusted to this new reality.
Exactly right! That’s why people who claim Pontiac or Oldsmobile should be resurrected are barking up the wrong tree. With model proliferation at all sizes, price points, and body styles/vehicle types, having multiple brands no longer makes sense. Instead, the mainstream/luxury branding model has long been the most viable for large automakers (Toyota/Lexus, Ford/Lincoln, etc.).
It will be interesting to see how Stellantis sorts out its numerous brands in various markets. Clearly, not all of them are going to survive.
I agree with your assessment, although there were other issues too. Actually the compression of the Sloan Ladder started in the late ’30s, and by the mid ’50s, was seriously compromised by cars such as the early ’50s Buick Special and the Chevrolet Bel Air. A Chevy Nomad listed for more than a Buick Century Riviera.
And then the fragmentation you noted exacerbated that much further.
The other issue is a cultural one: the import boom of the 50’s was a preview of things to come. An increasing number of Americans wanted something other than a big American car. The imports gave it to them.
The domestic compacts and sporty cars like the Monza and Mustang satisfied that for a few years. But as the baby boomers became serious car buyers right at the time there was a major social upheaval of values, attitudes, music, hair, etc. during the later 60s, which caused them to embrace imports again as Detroit was suddenly out of fashion. This explains a sharp uptick in import sales in around 1968-1970, that then continued to grow strongly.
The embrace of the VW and the new Japanese imports by this new and very influential cohort was in my opinion the single biggest threat to GM. Car companies have always needed to sell to young people, as older buyers were generally loyal anyway. The loss of younger buyers only exacerbated the growing negative image problem of Detroit, along with their often cynical attempts to market to them.
GM and the Big Three were put on the defensive, and the demands of emission and safety regulations only made that worse. Companies that are on the defensive and see their market share declining typically have a very hard time turning that around. Their attitude starts to become defensive “We’ll kick the Japanese out with our new J-Cars” (I’m paraphrasing) which does not resonate well with better educated and more sophisticated younger buyers.
It became all too obvious to this cohort that GM and Detroit were losing their mojo, and not offering anything compelling, let alone anything that would enhance the buyer’s social status. Imports did, on the other hand.
And so the downward decline accelerated, a self-perpetuating downward spiral that would have been essentially impossible for anyone to stop. And it’s pretty apparent that GM management was not really top notch.
I feel strongly that GM was toast a lot earlier than when their terminal market share decline set in. May factors contributed to that, and their excess number of brands was certainly one of them, although GM never consistently differentiated the brands well in later years, unlike say VAG in Europe, whose four main brands (Audi, VW, SEAT and Skoda) are quite well differentiated and that structure continues to work for them. But then they have a much higher market share in Europe than GM did here in the 80s and 90s.
Sometimes circumstances are too great for a company, especially one that was so successful and had become complacent, to pull out of a terminal decline. GM was hardly the first.
It takes a long time for a wounded elephant to bleed out—or maybe a woolly mammoth is a better example.
What happened to GM isn’t any different than what happened to RCA, Hoover, Schwinn, Volvo, Wolverine, etc., etc., etc., all first world manufacturers who either moved operations to lower cost, lower regulatory burden countries or just sold out to overseas competitors. In the US regulatory capture was their first strategy for staying in country, but for most it was just easier and cheaper to move operations to lower cost business climates. My guess is that we’ll see white collar industries doing the same over the next several decades.
Going back to Nader, even though he was wrong about the Corvair, and much else, he did help create the movement to consider automobile safety, and the industry and Federal Highway Safety Administration worked towards safer automobiles. But lets get real. Most of the accidents are caused by alcohol use, poor driving, inattentive driving, and I’ve seen drivers that never should be allowed to drive ever because they’re just plain incapable.
Drivers cause most crashes, yes. And so…therefore…what? What does “getting real” about that mean to you? A driver who gets in a crash deserves to be disfigured, maimed, or killed because they shouldn’t have made a mistake? A passenger in the car deserves what they get for not predicting the driver would make a mistake? We tried that approach, before 1968. It was a bloody, gory failure.
When I say get real Daniel, I mean that the “nut behind the wheel” should be the focus of auto crash safety, since, like you said, driver error causes most wrecks. There was a time that drunk drivers weren’t taken seriously. Then, thanks to “Mothers Against Drunk Driver’s” and other advocacy groups, penalties, various laws changed to really throw the book against drunks, and this did have a major impact at reducing accidents. The effort to take drunk drivers off the road had a greater impact than building cars to be safer, even though both efforts are of course a good idea.
Are you quite sure? I don’t think that’s correct, so I’d be interested to see the stats you’re looking at.
Found one interesting chart, showed 41% of accident fatalities in 1985 due to drunk driving, then over some years it went to 28% drunk driving fatalities in 2019. So the efforts of MADD and another group, Rid of Drunk Drivers, plus major revisions in drunk driving laws all had a major effect. I would argue that this had a greater impact than building safer cars. Both efforts are of course the way to go.
Oh, dear. That’s a severe oversimplification; much too narrow a view of too few things over too short a time to conclude that cracking down on impaired driving has had a bigger effect than safer cars.
That said, yes, both efforts are of course the way to go.
Oh dear, that’s a ridiculous rejection of the statistics you requested showing 13% reduction in traffic fatalities over a 34 year period due to removing drunk drivers.
Oh heavens, I would say the crackdown has been a terrific benefit. Don’t need statistics to recognize it.
My goodness, I remember the bad old days when “everybody” was drunk.
The cops pulling ’em over were drunker yet, and the judge was even more drunk still. LoL
Seriously though nothing funny about driving impaired.
Another point, “drunk” keeps getting referenced but that’s just the tip of the iceberg today. Impaired (for a multitude of reasons) is more accurate.
But dear me, I would say that the driver of an all-hard-steel mechanical-brake Model-A who has a strong self-preservation instinct and a suspicious distrust of ALL other drivers is still better off than an idiot auto-piloting an Aetna Safety Car.
Thank you!!!
Both the driver and the vehicle are part of the safety equation.
Vehicles need to be made safe for the “unexpected.” But there is nothing wrong with expecting drivers to actually know what they are doing. It’s more pleasant sharing the road with knowledgeable drivers who aren’t texting/putting on makeup/reading while trying to drive the car.
I’m glad that today’s cars are safer, but I’d rather not be involved in an accident in the first place.
Daniel is right though. While cars, drivers, and the environment (roads, signs, glare, etc.) are all factors (the Haddon Matrix), it’s a lot easier to engineer safety into the vehicles than to try to re-educate some 220+ million drivers in the US. Plus a lot of “education” really comes down to attitude.
Even a kindergartner knows that red means stop, but how many drivers CHOOSE to run red lights? How many do you think KNOW texting while driving is dangerous but do it anyway?
Moreover, education doesn’t really work. Even very rigourous driver training doesn’t really help very much, because the problem is less “Oh, I didn’t know” and more “Oops, I didn’t do”. It would be lovely if people would just behave as they best should, but that’s not what people do, even highly trained ones. Even in places with extremely stringent driver training and licence regimens, like Germany, human error is still overwhelmingly the most common cause of car crashes.
This presentation on the subject is worth your 24 minutes (less if you watch it at 1.25× speed):
Brian O’Neill — now that’s a familiar name, Daniel! He was my longtime boss at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Is that right! Did you/do you know David Zuby or Matthew Brumbelow?
The success of the grassroots campaign against drunk driving suggests otherwise. I remember the late 1970s – driving under the influence was largely winked at the by general public. Many people had a story about barely making it home after a party.
But then MADD launched its effort in the early 1980s, and traffic fatalities due to impaired driving dropped dramatically. The public began to take it seriously, and government responded to that change in attitude (as did law enforcement). Phrases such as “designated driver” entered our lexicon.
As for Germany – one, “human error” is not necessarily the same as grossly reckless behavior (driving while impaired, for example) or heedlessly violating laws (running red lights).
Two, drive in Germany – there IS a higher skill level and overall level of driver competence. Not just compared to the U.S., but other European nations, such as Italy and Great Britain. And it makes it much more pleasant to drive in Germany as compared to other nations.
Automobile accidents, similar to plane crashes, rarely are limited to one cause. Princess Diana’s 1997 death in Paris provides an example. The driver was impaired, paparazzi were driving recklessly following the Princess’s Mercedes-Benz, the passengers failed to use seatbelts, and the car hit the stone wall of the Pont de l’Alma tunnel because there was no guard rail between the pillars to prevent this, a highway design defect. To focus on one or two issues connected to automobile transportation safety rather than the big picture is not good strategy.
The only party advocating for a focus on one element of the system—the driver, to the exclusion of all else—was the auto industry in the pre-regulation era. Now we focus on all parts of the system: the vehicles, the roads and roadway environment, and the drivers.
+1 to both of you!
There is a great Driver’s Ed film titled “The Final Factor”. It carefully looks at all of the factors in play at any one moment while driving. Road, traffic, weather, time, vehicle and the driver. They select any driver and break him down by alertness, health, driving habits good and bad, possible impairment and any concurrent distractions like other passengers. The determination is that drivers deal with most of these factors routinely. Some drivers are better at it than others. They put a number on the number of factors in a dynamic situation that the average driver can handle easily. As the number of considerations increase the margin of error decreases, obviously. A driver reaching his threshold of competence and is suddenly confronted with one more fucking thing is in danger of having an accident. That final factor can be in the form of sudden blinding glare, a reckless driver, an emergency stop, sudden appearance of a person, animal or road trash, a sharp bend in the road, a blowout or any combination of other random bullshit you can imagine.
There is a word for this when you stack thing upon thing until the small faults in each combine into a single larger fault that throws the entire assembly out of wack. Not so bad in a manufacturing process but potentially deadly when driving.
Out of all the myriad reasons for automobile accidents the most common reason is the impaired driver.