From the new issue of Newsweek, an interview with Honda’s chief US engineer, Charles Baker:
Newsweek: How difficult was it to engineer the MDX to meet Honda’s stringent mileage standards?Baker: I’ll never forget it. I was a rookie leading this MDX team. We’d done the research and we had an efficient package. But when we pitched our business plan to the board of directors, Mr. [Koichi] Amemiya, who was in charge of North America, his No. 1 comment was: “It should be more green.” I made the mistake of saying, “But sir, nobody cares about the green issues.” And he just smiled and said “I know.”
From the WaPo, on GM’s development of the GM Aztek:
The Aztek represented all that is wrong with GM’s design process, that official said. The concept car actually did something few GM designs do: arrive before a trend — this time, the crossover SUV that combines the attributes of a truck and a passenger car. And GM had high hopes to sell 50,000 to 70,000 Azteks a year, establishing Pontiac on the cutting edge.Then came production, the executive said. The penny-pinchers demanded that costs be kept low by putting the concept car on an existing minivan platform. That destroyed the original proportions and produced the vehicle’s bizarre, pushed-up back end. But the designers kept telling themselves it was good enough.
“By the time it was done, it came out as this horrible, least-common-denominator vehicle where everyone said, ‘How could you put that on the road?’ ” the official said.
Sales never reached the 30,000 level needed to make money on the Aztek, so it abruptly went out of production last year. The tongue-in-cheek hosts of National Public Radio’s “Car Talk” named it the ugliest car of 2005. “It looks the way Montezuma’s revenge feels,” one listener quipped.
It’s called L-E-A-D-E-R-S-H-I-P.
Of the top 10 most fuel efficient cars on the road today, Honda has 7 of them. As the chart above shows, over the course of the past five years, Honda’s share price has increased 50%, while GM’s has decreased 50%.
Of course fuel efficiency isn’t the only factor that comes into play in determining the relative success and failure of the two companies, but of all the US manufacturers GM most slavisly reflects Bushian economic philosophy: spend your money lobbying Congress not to legislate fuel efficiency rather than voluntarily adopting it yourself, reward yourself and other top level employees lavishly, pin the blame for your poor decision making on the unions and expect the working class to pick up the tab while you wrestle Oprah for $6,000 handbags at Hermes.
A friend just pre-ordered a Lexus RX 400h and I’m dying to drive it. As someone who makes a solid effort to buy American-made products whenever possible, I’m probably a couple of cars away from being interested in anything that US automakers have to offer, and that is just a plain tragedy.
Update: John Pearley Huffman has a review of the new Lexus in The Car Connection.com. He also says Roger L. Simon has been sniffing around the new Lexus. John attributes it to geography-related curiosity.
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It’s a stupid mistake, and I probably wouldn’t have checked until I heard the rubbing noise either, Froggy. Although, in the shop’s defense, I doubt the guy who mounted the tire even looked at the other three on the car. The boss probably ordered the tire (his fuckup) and told the spooge to put it on after it arrived. If it’s a dedicated tire shop, there is no excuse.
If GM ends up going “belly up” as far as car sales go, they can always go into the business of belt sales. I have a seat-belt belt that is GM and I get compliments on it all of the time.
Hey, Fixuh, whaddya think of this? Mrs Frogsdong had a little disagreement with a curb and wracked up the suspension real nice on her Volvo S70. They had it in the shop for a week and tonight I drove it. I pull into a parking space and hear a loud rubbing noise, so when I get out I take a look at the tire they replaced (front passenger side). The shop stuck a 225/55/R16 on it. The car takes 205/55/R16. I checked the bill and sure enough they claim to have put the michelin MV4 205/55/R16 on there, which it isn’t. Now Mrs F is mad at herself for not checking that. Who in the hell would have thought they’d put the wrong tire on? She also doesn’t want me to call the shop tomorrow. She says she’ll do it. She’s afraid I might say something intemperate. Intemperate? Hell, I want to rip them a new one.
I’d like to recommend Brock Yates’ “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry”, which was written twenty-two years ago, but remains a very sobering read.
An excellent book. I reread it every few years and depressingly realize that GM’s arrogant, insular management lurches from crisis to crisis every few years, always blaming someone or something else, promoting corporate-politician ass-kissing incompetents, never taking responsibility and consequently never learning a damn thing.
Imagine where they’d be today if they truly woke up, shook themselves up and started hoovering up knowledge, principles and practices from Honda and Toyota in the 80s instead of lapsing back into their smug reliance on short-term financial gimmicks and over-reliance on giant guzzlers with fat margins.
There’s a book called “Whatever Happened To The British Motorcycle Industry” that almost exactly parallels this deal. Reliance on “proven” (read: the tooling and engineering are paid for and we’re making lotsa money selling the bozos the same old shit so why change?) models and their heads firmly in the sand vis a vis the Japanese onslaught.
And speaking of the Chrysler 300C, here’s my road test of the thing.
The management is too entrenched to leave, or they would have seen the writing on the wall 5 years ago. Fortunately, when they go down, most of the blue collar workers will be snapped up by Honda, Toyota, and Nissan if they’re willing to relocate to one of their ‘corporate cities’ (Smyrna, GA, Marysville, OH and the like). As I’ve said forever, GM’s been trading on the rep they earned 40 years ago and it’s wearing thin. If Delphi Electronics are the future, I’m gonna put a gun to my head.
I’m with you John in that I think GM can do it — but not until management abandons the notion that what they need is the government to come and bail them out, which seems to be a deeply held Republican business notion these days.
Question: Honda had a 55 mpg car in the late 80s – CRX-HF. Where is it now and why can’t the hybrids make more than that?
The best GM news floating is that its fight with the unions over health insurance might, just might, lead to them pushing the US governement into a proper national healthcare system not tied to jobs. Healthcare tied to jobs has led to two tragedies on opposite ends of the spectrum – the large companies like GM who are increasingly unable to compete in the world market because of the weight of maintaining the same level of healthcare coverage for their employees, and the WalMarts who forge ahead by limiting their hourly people to 37.5 hours a week so they do not qualify for health coverage. The main issue is to get rid of involvement by insurance companies who leach away close to 40 cents of every healthcare dollar and who have a huge lobby and undue influence on the current government.
And I’d like to recommend the episode of The Simpsons where Homer’s long-lost brother allows him to design a car for the “common man.” The design yields something like the Atzec. One of Homer’s sample suggestions: “I want a horn, here, here, and here. You can never find a horn when you’re angry! And they should all play La Cucaracha!” I’d like to think that the leaders of the US auto industry are smarter than Homer Simpson, but…
I’d like to recommend Brock Yates’ “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry”, which was written twenty-two years ago, but remains a very sobering read. Many of the executives of the big three are very, very isolated from the actual purchasing public, particularly the customers on the coasts. Witness GM’s love of giant SUVs–try parking one of those in Boston. In the midwest, an enormous, ill-handling metal box isn’t a disadvantage. It’s not like there were any corners to drive around anyway.
The only big question facing GM (and the Ford and Chrysler, to a smaller extent) is whether they will be able to retool and build efficent cars before gas hits $4/gallon. It will be a smaller company; but how much smaller?
Plus Jane, I drove the Lexus RX400h months ago. It’s very good… but not beyond criticism. My review is up at:
http://www.thecarconnection.co…..ticle=8104
Honda has always been an outstanding engineering company. But let’s not over-praise them.
The EPA Top Ten Fuel Economy list is skewed by the fact that it rates manual and automatic transmission models separately. So Honda’s extremely low sales volume, two-seat Insight gets two spots on the list for both the manual and automatic. Meanwhile the Civic Hybrid gets four listings for it’s manual and automatic versions plus manual and automatics equipped with the lean burn option. That’s two cars for Honda really — not six — taking up six spots on the list.
Meanwhile, the list screws over Volkswagen by couding the New Beetle, Golf and Jetta diesels all as a single vehicle (they share a common drivetrain and weight classification — the Jetta wagon is listed separately because it’s in a different weight class). That doesn’t seem fair — if there’s a competition to see who fills the most spots on this list.
Also Honda has made some blunders on its own. For instance when they redesigned the Civic for the 2001 model year they pretty much drained it of its character and it practically disenfranchised the youth market that was so critical to the brand’s success. And I’ll never understand some of their other marketing decisions like failing to import the “real” Civic Type-R and bringing in a highly compromised Civic Si instead.
Also, while Honda makes headlines for its small cars’ fuel economy, it makes its money on larger vehicles like the Accord, Odyssey minivan, the Pilot SUV and, yes, the Acura MDX. They get good fuel economy for their size, weight and vehicle types, but they’re not necessarily ahead of their direct competitors in that category either.
The Pontiac Aztek is a legendary screw-up. But there’s a lot of talent at GM and with their backs against the wall, they’re capable of great things. There’s been a big culture change there in the last few years that hasn’t had time yet to show up in product developments. The engineers and designers who I know who work there all think things have gotten significantly better over there since the bad-old Aztek days.
And it doesn’t take much to turn around a car company — just products people will crave (look at Chrysler which has been printing cash with its Chrysler 300 and Dodge Magnum).
The U.S. majors had the same attitude that Chimpy Inc had toward Iraq. Arrogance. GM will be out of business within a decade because of it. Wait for Buick and Pontiac to go the way of Oldsmobile within the next couple years, with the Chevy Truck division soon after. The only nameplates actually making money for them are the Cadillac offerings and GMC trucks. Now that the Camaro is gone (they should have done what Ford did to the Mustang) and they don’t put out a V-8 police car, Chevy will lose the die hards soon enough.
I think you’re right, Frogsdong. The arrogance seems to be deeply entrenched and longstanding.
My father is a retired automobile mechanic and a very smart man. Back in the seventies, when the Japanese cars began to end US auto’s hegemony and capture market share ont he strength of fuel efficiency and engneering, all he kept sayign was how the US manufacturers saw this coming and paid no attention.
There’s a little teensy company called Toyota that is climbing their rear bumper too, poised to be a member of the Big 3.
That I would love to see, Fixer.
MAybe one day, I’ll have my wife do a post on the efficiency and work ethic at the Honda plants. (American Honda is one of her clients.) It’s amazing how they out produce and out engineer us.