In Cars

Following up on the overwhelmingly popular success of the driftglass plan to save the country from being Eated by Toxic Mortgages comes the sequel: How to save the U.S. Auto Industry.

In our last exciting episode we learned that trying to fix anything before you figure out exactly how and why it’s broken is, well, stupid.

So, what’s broken about Big Auto?

Well, from inertia to cost-bloat to short-sightedness, there are so many open, visible and suppurating sores available to the Monday morning industrial planner that anyone could pick their favorite poisons, mix them up like ingredients at a do-it-yourself Bloody Mary bar, and probably write a pretty vivid description of what the corpse looks like.

But for all of that, the fundamental cause of the failure of U.S. auto industry is simple: Most of the people who run the Big Three gave up making cars years ago.

Or, as an acquaintance of mine in the business once put it: “There isn’t one cocksucker left at GM who can read a motherfucking blueprint anymore.”

Think about it.

Other companies have shown over and over again that whatever the problems with Big Auto may be, they have nothing to do with the price of steel or plastic, or the position of the moon or stars. There is no absence of innovative ideas for how to build safe, efficient cars people actually want to drive. And awesome, spark-throwing robots

are widely available.

Not that many years ago, the Big Three still had had two incredible advantages going for them: they controlled powerful brand names and they were sitting on oceans of cash and talent. But instead of using those tools to build better/faster/cleaner/cheaper, the dirty open secret that every supplier knows is that the Big Three chose instead to slouch down that long, low road to WalMartylvania.

They became, in effect, the mutant kissing-cousins of hedge funds, run not by car guys, but by the same species of people who crashed the financial markets.

Like WalMart, they used their dominant market positions to force their first and second tier suppliers to take on more and more of the hard stuff – research, development, design, etc. – while the people in the home office got more and more obsessed with abusing the tools and techniques of industrial efficiency to wring every cent out of the manufacturing process without ever bothering to notice that the product coming off the assembly linen at the end of that process kinda sucked.

And then, like WalMart, they squeezed those same suppliers for every fucking nickel, threatening them with financial extinction unless they met the corporation’s increasingly rapacious terms, until the whole idea of “profit” became more a function of manipulating those asymmetrical extorter/extortee relationships, and less about building better cars.

There is still a lot of talent locked up inside those behemoths, but if you want to fix Big Auto, first you have to get rid of upper management, and the bigger axe you use the better.

Start with the Chief Executives. Then a few thousand Vice Presidents. Machete the goo all the way down to GM Apologist and spokesdouche, Sean Fucking Hannity.

Second, to step in and straighten the industry out in a hurry you’re going to need a whole lot of competent professionals who love – not like, but love – building cars, and who are capable of getting the nearly-impossible done hurry-up-quick. Which would be kind of a worrisomely tall order were it not for the serendipitous fact that 20 brutal years of Big Three corporate Darwinism have already weeded the weak and slow out from the ranks of their first and second tier suppliers, leaving behind an army of incredibly hardy, agile survivors who are already used to working miracles and pulling the auto industry’s collective ass out of the fire on time and under budget.