Don't Tell Us How to Build Cars!

Today, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson indicated he was not in favor of bailing out General Motors with the $750 Congress gave him to play with. GM says it has enough cash to last into the new year and very little beyond. Are we playing “Chicken” here?
Whatever the game is, it is hard not to feel that General Motors has it coming. Even in the face of the reality that if GM goes down, it will take with it tens of thousands of high paying, tax paying jobs through out the nation. It would be a monumental economic disaster.
But it is so hard not to think that GM has brought this on itself—that all of the “Big Three’ have brought it on themselves. Each of the companies, especially General Motors, is a monument to corporate arrogance. You want to think of that sneering corporate face finally brought down—but then you realize they are likely to swamp the whole boat as they fall out.
My dad served in the tank corps during World War II. (He was lucky enough to go in at the end of the war and not to see combat.) I remember one story, especially, that he told me.
Most people who know anything about WWII know that our main battle tank, the Sherman, was a tinker toy up against a German Tiger or Panther. Only because we made so many of them and had total air domination did our tankers survive.
The archives are full of stories of German and American tanks meeting face to face, the Americans getting off the first shot, and watching it bounce off. Then the Germans took aim and blew the Sherman right out of its treads.
Or of the GIs who drove their Sherman over a hill, saw a Tiger, and bailed out for their lives before it could sight in on them . Or of the GIs who came upon a French cement factory and slathered wet cement and pieces of metal on the front of their Shermans to protect themselves.
The army was well aware of this situation. My dad told me that when they would go to Detroit to complain about it, the auto executives would retort: WE build vehicles; don’t tell us how to do it.” Shut up and go away. With Detroit the customer is always wrong. Even if he’s getting killed.
I remember a great little story about Charlie Wilson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense and former CEO of General Motors. During World War II, Wilson headed the GM division that made tracer bullets. After he joined the cabinet, he took a trip to Korea to see the war.
They started out driving in a Chevy truck. They got to a hill and the driver told him they would take a jeep from here on. Offended, the GM partisan demanded to know why. Why not the Chevy? The driver, who didn’t know Wilson from Adam, replied, “This damn Chevy wouldn’t make it up these hills.” Wilson had no clue.
As they drove up the mountains near the front lines, the night sky was lit up with flying lights. “What are those?” asked the man who had headed the division that made them. “Tracers” replied the driver. Wilson had made millions of them; he had never bothered to see one.
That’s our General Motors. My family drove Buicks from the 1950s on. Ten years ago I finally bought one. Cute, red, lots of gadgets. I like driving it. But from day one it had so many nagging little glitches, it drives me nuts. The manager of the Buick dealership that sold it to me retired soon after. ( Believe it or not, my wife’s Dodge minivan is holding up better.)
I bumped into the former manager one day and told him about the little things that were constantly going wrong. He nodded and told me about the time he went to Detroit for a dealers’ meeting with the Vice President of the Buick division. He said, “I brought up the same kinds of problems. I asked him, `What do I tell my customers?’”
The Vice President all but sneered back, “You don’t tell them anything.”
At long last, General Motors is getting snake bit by the arrogance that sustained it for so long. Once again, it looks like the people who had nothing to do with making GM what it is—us—will get hurt the worst. After all, they make cars. What do we know?
Is that why so many of us buy Toyota’s now?