What’s Bad With General Motors Is Bad With the USA. I’ve read that GM is going down the tubes. Sales are declining. Bankruptcy looms. An American dinosaur is dying.
Actually, GM was warned quite a while ago. GM was always good at knocking out big cars by the millions. Since the mid-1960s, GM stopped innovating — they would leave that to Ford, then Volkswagen and Volvo, then the Japanese. Their cars were still stylish — GM knew and still knows how to make a car look good — but the quality was declining. But as to compensate, GM gave you what seemed like more value by expanding the dimensions.
People seemed to like big cars, even if they didn’t run right, and GM was there to sell them. Then came the gasoline lines of the mid-70s, when GM tried to make small cars. They weren’t very good, but instead of committing to research and development so as to perfect the small car, GM decided to go back to big cars. They got back into the spotlight in the roaring 1990s when everyone wanted an SUV or pickup truck. Instead of investing in research and development in things like hybrid power, GM kept on bashing out monsters and would loan you the money to buy them (they made a big portion of their profits from financing). Now, whether because of increased gas prices (which have actually come down quite a bit lately; I saw regular for $1.99 tonight) or changing public tastes and values (wouldn’t that be something if small and smart becomes fashionable again in the auto world), SUV and truck sales are down. GM’s regular cars are OK, but they’re not Toyotas or Hondas. GM ignored all of its warnings, and now the vultures are circling overhead.
GM is a reflection of everything that is wrong with America today — a once-great empire that still appears powerful and technically advanced, but got lazy and disinspired over the years and is now living off the left-overs from the glory days. Sooner or later the reckoning will come. GM forgot about the balance of virtue that made it great (the balance of quality and style, the balance of standardization and customer choice, the balance of production efficiency and personalized marketing), and replaced them with extremes (extremely large vehicles, extremely little innovation, extremely good credit financing, extremely poor quality). America seems to be moving from balances to extremes, too (extremely rich or extremely poor, extremely caring but extremely capitalist, extremely nice but extremely greedy, extremely low taxes but extremely indebted, extremely religious but extremely militarized).
At GM, it was style over substance, bigness over quality, power over finesse. GM defined the American Dream for our parents (if you are a Baby Boomer) or grandparents (if you are Gen X, Y, Z or whatever). If GM hits the skids, how much longer can that dream hold up? We shall see.