Detroit Strike

GM is on strike.

Yes, I know the conservatives love to blame the unions for the downfall of Detroit, claiming that the union benefits make the American automakers uncompetitive. Problem with that is it's mostly bullshit.

Last time I checked, the UAW doesn't design or engineer the cars. I don't see how it is the UAW's fault that Honda and Toyota and Mitusbishi and and and can all run rings around the American automakers when it comes to value and quality. Just about all of the Japanese makers build cars in the US now because it's cheaper, even with American wages. The Japanese managers know full well that if you want good, skilled, loyal workers, you have to pay them top wages. And they do, as do the Germans.

So you might want to look at the engineering and the design of the pieces of shit that Detroit pumps out. It wasn't the UAW that failed to keep up the design of the Ford Taurus, a car that used to compete with the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry and now is defunct. I rented a midsize Chevy sedan in the early `90s and it was the first car I ever drove that had 9,000 miles on it that should have been driven to the junkyard. It had a brilliant personal security feature that unlocked all the doors once you put the transmission in park. The headlight switch on the dashboard was located in a position so that if you swiped at the turn signal for a left-hand turn, you'd shut the headlights off. That wasn't the UAW's fault.

One time, I looked at buying a small Chevy. The fit and finish on the demonstrator model was atrocious. It was the first car I ever drove that accelerated so poorly that you'd have to time 0-60mph with a calendar. I felt sorry for the salesman, in a way, for when he asked if I was ready to deal, I just laughed. That time, I bought a Mazda GLC, which wasn't a terrific car, but compared to the Chevy, it was a luxury car and was the same price.

My mother used to have a Ford Galaxy in the late 1960s that had the annoying habit of stalling in the rain. She said she'd never buy another piece of shit from Detroit and kept to that point of view for 30 years, when she bought a Jeep Cherokee in the mid `90s. After she got tired of repeatedly fighting with the idiots at the Chrysler dealership over different problems with it, she bought a VW Beetle, drove that for awhile and then bought a Subaru (the unofficial car of northern New England) when she felt that a AWD might be a better choice for winter driving.

My sister-in-law had a Jeep Cherokee of similar vintage; my brother is very vocal that it was the biggest piece of shit he ever had the misfortune of owning. They bought a Volvo.

The UAW has its share of blame, for they were slow to react to the need to make high-quality cars and they fought almost every attempt by the automakers to adopt a higher quality method of production. It didn't help matters that the automakers were not shy about admitting that one of the collateral objectives was to break the union.

I love it how they refer to the JD Power survey of car owners' satisfaction after 90 days. Who the Christ keeps a car for only 90 days? A few cars ago, I took a Honda to a gas station for an oil change, it had 30,000 miles on it. The manager of the gas station asked me if I had any problems with it, and I said no. He then pointed at a Buick LeSabre of the same vintage and he said it was there for the fourth time, each time for a different repair.

About the only way you could do worse than buy a POS from Detroit is to buy a Land Rover.

One of these days, the executives that run those automobile companies will step up to the plate and really try to design and build an affordable car of high quality, the same kind of car that the Japanese makers have been churning out for decades.

I'm probably not going to live that long.

And neither will you.