After a frantic summer of discounts and sharply rising gasoline prices,
Ford and General Motors were ripped in the last quarter with sales plummeting 26%. Monster SUV sales were down 50%. Most satisfying of all (in a way): Hummer sales,
the car of Arnie and a long list of appalling American attributes, cascaded 33% in the last quarter (compared to a year ago).
Ford and GM lost market share again, losing ground to 52%. Even though the entire sector is off 10%, Honda and Toyota are doing just fine.
Ford, an "automobile" company that actually is a light truck company, only had one decent seller, the Fusion, a sturdy, efficient, inexpensive heir to the Escort. Does GM have any truly hot seller? No.
Plain fact of the matter is Ford and GM only know how to produce decent light trucks, and the era when cheap gas prices could cover their gross mismanagement is over.
It means a huge amount of pain for our people--hundreds of thousands of lost jobs in all the related production industries, lost pensions and healthcare to retirees, and a bleak outlook of poverty to anyone who depended on Ford and GM management. We desperately need the production capability to ease our trade deficit (we could export a lot of cars to a growing world market, what a concept), but it always fails.
The idiots at General Morons, as Billmon calls them, effect us all a great deal. I guess when you run a company into the ground but still pay yourself well it really doesn't matter, hell, life is still good. I don't have any other explanation as to how a management team over the course of the last three decades could be so monumentally stupid and incompetent. The same is precisely true for Ford.
Don't agree? Look at the Hummer--a useless, dangerous, monumentally offensive pos that threatens our planet and national security. It's so wrong I'm surprised I write about it, it so degrading to the human soul.
I'm just a joe schmoe, you know? I'm no brainiac, sputtering in some egocentric puffery makes me uncomfortable. But I can and must say that gross management incompetence at Ford and GM is responsible for the incredible rout that's about to take place in the next year. It wasn't the unions, it wasn't the competition, it wasn't unforeseen events.
It was and is utter fools in denial, cheating short term circumstances to cover their incompetence. Now with just one factor in market--fuel efficiency--they are routed, and it's time to pay. It makes me angry that so many of our little people, who truly make up the backbone of this country, will have to pay for it with untold pain and misery while management walks away with paychecks. Again.