Greg G. wrote:
Lew Hodgett said:

Greg G." wrote:

And the bean counters don't help much in that regard either.

Bean counters AKA: Product Planning

A major part of the American automotive industries' problem.

They've a lot of problems at this point. It seems as of late that they
spend more time modifying and moving minor parts around than building
durability and ease of maintenance into their products. Stylists on
steroids, 1000 different plastic lamp assemblies, late getting on
board with efficiency and mileage improvements, fit and finish issues.

We used to have both GM and Ford assembly plants here, and I've been
in both. I remember when GM first retrofitted the Doraville plant
with robotics to construct a new Oldsmobile model. Yet the Camry ate
it for lunch in performance, mileage, comfort, and durability. The
cost of living in this country, and thus the cost of labor, are
killing us in the world markets we now have to compete in - which
includes the US. The plant closed in early 2009, after GM spent $150
million upgrading it in 2003, and most of the workers fled to other
plants around the country, one commenting that they felt like gypsies.
Many were foreclosed on when the plants shut down and they were unable
to replace the $28/hour pay. The plant now sits idle with weeds
reclaiming the pavement and GM refuses to sell at less than prime
rates in a depressed market. Where's Ed Cole when you need him?
http://bulletin.aarp.org/states/ga/2...e_gypsies.html

Similarly, the Ford Hapeville Assembly Plant ceased production in
October 2006. The city was attempting to revitalize the area but the
housing and economy bust shelved any concrete plans.

I simply don't see how anyone realistically expects us to compete with
50 cent an hour workers and countries who have no safety concerns,
pollution standards, or labor laws. CEO's in this country are now
complaining about publicity over the child labor they exploit in the
third world to produce products they import.

Who is going to buy anything when they have no jobs or income?
WalMart doesn't cut it, everyone can't be an attorney or doctor, and
much of the manual labor "services industry" stuff has been taken over
by immigrant labor - with the tacit assistance of business. Phone
support, computer programming outsourced. IBM has an entire line of
CAD products produced in India.

India? I thought IBM's CAD product was Catia, which is a product of Avions
Marcel Dassault.

Man, things sure were a lot simpler 30 years ago...

The thing is, we can't compete on the world market for stuff that doesn't
require special expertise to make. There isn't any good short term
solution--if we close the borders the rest of the world will do the same and
the market for US goods and services will disappear. Long term we have to
encourage innovation instead of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
In many ways the US is one of the _least_ innovative countries in the
world--look at aerospace--the Russians brought five designes to completion
to our one--yes, our best were and are better than their best, but they were
trying stuff that we weren't. We've been talking about Wing In Ground
Effect for decades, they've been flying them for decades. How about
shipbuilding--why is the fastest ship in the world made in Australia?
Consumer electronics--how is is that the Japanese grasped the concept that
"good enough" consumer video would sell and then brought VHS and Beta to
market, while Ampex, which was technologically capable of doing that as far
back as the '60s, never _tried_ it? And a little Japanese vacuum bottle
that is absolutely brilliant--the inside is exactly sized so that you can
drop a can of soda or beer into it and keep the can cold for hours. Thermos
could have made that at any time during their history so why didn't anybody
think to _try_ it? The thing that put Japanese consumer electronics on the
map wasn't cheap stuff, it was an expensive little 12-inch TV that could run
off the lighter plug in a car--everybody who saw those first little Sonys
was fascinated by them and the US electronics industry had _nothing_ like
that. Even stupid little bric-a-brac--I've got a set of little LED lights
that stick to your fingertips with rubber bands that are good for
light-painting and make a fun stocking stuffer (unfortunately the rubber
bands that come with them suck but rubber bands aren't hard to find) that
some US company could have been making ages ago.

I don't know why this is the case--just that it is. We don't encourage
companies to bring high-risk products to market, we don't encourage basic
research, we don't encourage applied research, and we keep moaning and
groaning about how other countries do a better job of "science education"
while most people who graduate with technical degrees end up either teaching
school or doing something unrelated to their degree.

And then there's general incompetence--I remember the materials people at
Enormous Aerospace telling us that we couldn't use this or that or the other
because it made seals swell--one day somebody asked the materials guy why we
cared if it made seals swell, and he replied "because it indicates that
there is something going on that could potentially degrade the seal".
Wasn't until I had left that industry that I found out that the tests the
idiots were using came from the automotive industry and the purpose of the
test wasn't to find out _if_ the seals swell but to make sure that they
swelled by the _right_ _amount_ and that all the stuff that the idiots had
been telling us that we couldn't use made the seals swell because it was
_supposed_ to make the seals swell. But it's not just big business--I used
to work for a woman who had visions of becoming a software vendor--the
trouble is that she didn't know squat about the computer industry or about
software and she thought that she could play for cheap with something that
had started out as a simple little program to do one stupid thing, and grown
into an unmaintainable monster by adding this feature and that feature and
the other feature until it was a few hundred thousand lines of code.

Sorry for the rant.