Pointing out the Obvious

Aside from the fact that they let the unions strong arm them for decades- especially the 1970's and 1980's, or even the fact that they mothballed production capacities in favor of spinning off internal supply chains into spun off barely independent companies, or using gimmick financing to enable them to charge inflated prices to their consumers < 72 month auto loans? give me a break>- the real problem is they build crap.

Seriously- they build crap. Their engines have barely developed in 30 years. Ford, aside from its Volvo and Jaguar acquired engines- date from the early 1980's. Aside from cosmetic changes to the front ends and roof lines none of the trucks or cars have substantially improved in terms of form & function. In a very real sense the Detroit of today is little different from the Detroit of the 1950's when it was taking pre-war chassis and engines and slapping fins and chrome on every possible surface.

Have there been some high spots? Sure cars like the Riviera, Thunderbird, and 300M were great. They also were essentially custom built, used as test beds for other simpler cars- and the abandoned. GM's Quad 4 engine and the Oldsmobile Aurora were a world class combination of form and function. Yet you can't buy an Olds anymore because GM wanted to streamline for marketing purposes. And the union agreed because in exchange for shutting down assembly plants like Fisher, the union got huge severance packages and garuntees for the now idled workers. Ford shut down its assembly plant in Atlanta and GM shut down its plant in Doraville. Never mind the former was home to the Taurus chassis lines and the later was home to the Uplander - a car that created the crossover class.

Even when they got things right as is the case with projects like the Prowler or GT40, the idiotic moves they made in terms of hamstringing their production, logistics, and supply always reflected an impact on the workers and marketing. Chrysler's launching of the cab forward Sebring line created pretty impressive numbers in terms of sales- to a point that Daimler Benz even bought them. Yet the reality is that even Daimler couldn't manage to run Chrysler at a profit. Whether or not the institutional legacy contributed to Chrysler's eventual decline is debatable.

The real point is that in terms of technology, innovation, and actual product availability to the consumer the Detroit companies out right fail in comparison to other makes. In short the offerings from Detroit fail in terms of chassis design one of the least modified or improved components in their inventory. Their engines are overweight, made in a manner little improved in the last 30 years, and are modern only insofar as the top end mechanical systems have included multiple cams and electronic engine management systems. While fit and finish have improved markedly, the durability of appearance items is pathetic. The paint is barely resistant to scratching of its clear coat. Plastic bumpers and front facia still tend to shed paint and spider. Interior grades of cloths and fabrics are almost universally inferior to those on even the cheapest imported cars. The tactile surfaces show wear in a matter of months, and often are made of inferior plastics that quickly shed their painted on finishes.

The cars are lacking in design based on reality. The cars look like they were cobbled together from parts bins. The era of great designers that ended with the 1970's gas crisis has only gotten worse. American cars are either small econo-boxes or leviathans on the order slab sided Hummers. The sense of style is very limited in terms of addressing the needs of consumers in terms of utility and mechanical efficiency. It is as if Detroit simply cant suffer any eye pleasing form factor or even be bothered with designing a car based on optimizing performance effiencies and user utility.

GM, Ford, and Chrysler may be selling gangbusters in Asia right now. The thing is, their cars sell there only because their vehicles are cheaper than the preferred cars in the market. In China, the number one car is Volkswagen. And it increases its share every year. GM and Ford may crow about how successful they are over there, but the reality is that their cars are bottom feeders. VW sells multiple brands that most of you wouldn't recognize, but the thing is VW will wind up selling a million cars this year. That is around 18-20% of the entire market. GM has around 15%, Ford somewhere similar. Chrysler even less. The Chinese buy VW or Toyota products when they can afford it. They still buy their state owned automobiles most. And what is further telling that in terms of GM's presence in China, it is a subsidiary of SAIC one of China's largest automotive groups. GM may have "sold" 1 million cars in China this year- but they weren't really GM cars for the most part. The reality is that Detroit is basically the bottom feeder in the Chinese market. They plan on selling most of their cars outside of the United States in the next decade. It seems their business model is to try and sell their cars in places where consumers don't realize the cars are crap.

Even in motorsport, Detroit can't compete. Give Toyota a few more years and NASCAR fans won't be watching Detroit plated cars. Aside from the Corvettes competing at LeMans every year and usually taking their class, Detroit is not a factor in racing. To those of you saying "So What?" I point you to Porsche AG. Porsche races in dozens of classes, wins in dozens of the harshest racing venues of the world and as a result is the most profitable automaker in the world because it takes racing technology, perfects it on the tracks of the world, and places them into its consumer cars.

What about the other major car manufacturers? Honda is all over motorsport. The same can be said for Volkswagen, FIAT, Renault, Nissan, and Toyota. One of the best indicators of healthy consumer car sales is whether or not a manufacturer competes in Formula One racing. Toyota, FIAT, BMW, and Renault do- and all of them are doing far better than their Detroit rivals. When it comes to technology development the only place Detroit can be competitive is NASCAR- and lets face it NASCAR is about as low tech as racing can get.

For whatever reason, Detroit offers inferior products. And what is worse is that the cars start out overpriced and lose their value rapidly once you buy it. Design sense and esthetics are not world class. They may be better built compared to Detroit's offering in the last decade, but the reality is that they are often very inferior compared to other automakers. People can blame the unions, or legacy costs, or incompetent management. The real problem is the cars simply suck.

After the fire, I had a brand new Pontiac G6 Coupe. The fit and finish was so bad that there were three separate controls that broke off in my hand. I pushed on a button in one case and it went through the dashboard. Granted it was a rental car but the ergonomics were straight out of the 1980's. Gas milage was hideous. The thing averaged 12 MPG. 12 MPG on a car that was less than 1 month old. The engine bay emitted so much heat that one person who was standing next to the driver side window talking to me actually complained about how much heat was flowing away from the engine compartment. The AC was so feeble that according to the interior cockpit temperature gauge the air temperature in the car only managed to drop 6 degrees after a 30 minute drive.

And that was a new redesigned forward to the future GM offerings that is supposed to take consumers along for the ride.

Now ask yourself if you would buy the following. It is a decades old chassis with minimal modifications. The front end is a plastic cowling with a grill that actually isn't functional and is purely cosmetic. The fit and finish of the interior is so poor that parts break off with little effort. Ergonomics of seating and layout of controls isn't. The AC is so poor it cannot cool a car off in the Summer time- and by cool off I mean get the temperature less than 85 degrees. It gets 12 MPG city and 14 MPG highway. The engine design is so inefficient that the entire engine bay radiates excessive heat.

I don't think you would either.

A very telling thing is that I have a used Porsche. It isn't a very common model. Only 2,200 or so made it into the country the year it was new. As it has sat at the construction site it has often been oogled by the workers. A game has developed between myself and my general contractor. When we see people gawking at it we ask them what year they think the car was made- and this is after one of us tell them that it is a used car. The average guess is 2002 model year. When I tell them it is a 1992 model car you can pretty much knock them over with a feather.

And that is the embodiment of the failings of Detroit.

My car is a decade old and more, yet it is pleasing to the eye, has modern features like anti lock breaks, 16 way power seats, power windows, multiple airbags, gets 20 something MPG, multiple airbags, and enough other stuff to convince the average person that it is a new car.

You put a 1992 model car from Detroit on my construction site and there isn't any question at all that it is a 1992 model car. Detroit hasn't changed that much so I suspect that in a decade people will be able to tell a 202 Model Detroit car is a piece of junk.

My Porsche? I suspect they will be thinking its a 2011 model year car.

Detroit's collapse is inevitable. It isn't the fault of the unions, but it also isn't a wise move to bail them out. Bankruptcy may be the only thing that might save them because it would require the removal of all the unsound business models that Detroit can't seem to overcome.

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Ignorance in voting

There will always be a sizable minority of people who will judge a person by their skin color. Nothing is likely to ever change that. Living in the South, the idea of voting for a person based on skin color is simply not an issue to me. Personally I voted for four people this election who happen to be black and three of them were Democrats. What mattered to me was what their qualifications and experience was. Followed closely by what they wanted to do as an office holder and how they planned to use that office to accomplish those goals.

Frankly, I seriously doubt any person I voted for got elected. I am so disinterested in this election's outcome, that I haven't even bothered to look at any of the returns or even if any of the amendments passed. That said, one thing I did notice during this cycle was the wholesale ignorance exampled in the "man on the street" interviews on the national cable networks as well as the broadcast network affiliates in Atlanta. I concur on the examples of voters for Obama- except that it was not just black people who were seemingly clueless as to who they intended to vote for. The generalized gross indifference towards voters educating themselves was pretty apparent. Whether the interviewee was white or black, about the only thing they could spout as to why they intended to vote for Obama was because he was going to "change" things.

What a nebulous basis to vote upon.

As to the lockstep vote by blacks for Obama, partly it is ingrained political separatism that involves people growing up in families where being a Democrat is simple rote outcome. Partly it is because the public officials who are predominately focused to serving communities in urban areas tend to be black and tend to be ingrained in terms of social, economic, and political power. It is too simple to say blacks vote for blacks. Instead blacks vote for those leaders who probably are already leaders in their local communities. Political powerbases thus become established and black officials get progressively pushed up the ladder of elective offices to the ultimate level of the Presidency.

And that is no different from what happens in any other voting community- with one exception. Almost all other political polities are no so demographically exceptional. By that I mean, in almost any other demographic if you take a basic data point, say sex, ethnic background, education, employment status, sexual orientation, or even the trivial such as freckles or hair color, and then took a sample of that one data point and mapped out independents, republicans, democrats you see a fractured data set.

All the people you sampled may have freckles, but it is incredibly unlikely that 90%of them self describe themselves as democrats or leaning to democrat candidates. In the data point represented by blacks, you will see somewhere around 90% of all the sample being democrats.

Line up almost any other group of people with the same skin color and you won't duplicate that.

This is again not racist or even based upon racism. To a very real degree however, it represents one aspect of political unity as a social institution within the black community. Unlike many communities that are based upon skin color or ethnic origins, the black community has a political solidarity that is national in impact. Irish Catholics in Savannah Georgia will vote very differently from their counterparts in Boston and New York City. But the black community in Athens, Georgia will vote in lockstep with the black community in Atlanta, Georgia, and also as the same community did in Chicago, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, -- or just about any other community that happens to be black across the entire country.

I noted this as much before the election. The black community voting at 95% in favor of Obama to me almost makes it certain that blacks did not vote for Obama because he happened to be black. I assumed that this race would be a swing of 2-3%. As a voting block if the 10% of black who are not self identified as democrats had all voted for Obama out of simple skin color preference, then the percentage of blacks who voted for Obama would have been at around 98% and translated into the spread of the margin of victory. Instead its 95%, meaning you cannot attribute McCain's loss to black racism. His support would have been much higher among blacks if it was due to racism.

However I do think Obama won because the entire voter population is now systemically over run with voters who received zero civics education and simply take the process of voting about as seriously as they do when picking their NCAA basketball tournament office pool ladder.

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Rubbernecking

I had to go out today a little after 4:00 PM. It was raining, but not bad enough to require anything other than intermittent wipers. I also happened to forget it was homecoming weekend at UGA. So it is a pretty fair bet to say that the population in town for the weekend is somewhere over 200,000 people. Normally we are around 80,000 with an additional 35,000 illegal aliens.

Having spent the last six or so years driving a minivan and a couple of SUV's, I guess I have become far more used to and comfortable with being in a large vehicle with very large crush zones. It was rather unnerving to be driving in traffic in a small Porsche again.

Normally at 4:00 in the afternoon, I can get from one side of the county to the other in about 20 minutes if I travel straight through town. If I take the interstate grade highway loop that goes around Athens, I could do it in maybe 10. Unfortunately, I had to go to a bank on the other side of town to drop off some additional paperwork regarding our construction on the burned house < aside, the credit market seems to be changing hourly>

At any rate, there isn't really anyway to go to that bank from my house other than the main road through town.

Let me offer my views on rubbernecking.

If you are a visitor from Tennessee and you have no idea where your hotel is and cannot seem to read all the multitudes of signs directing you to the campus- stop slowing down to ask traffic officers on the side of the road how to get to the RV parking lots. Further even with his advice, you seem to go out of your way to ignore his directions, upon which you then guide your 80 foot RV directly into downtown. A place even sub-compact cars have a problem navigating.

If you happen to be yet another Vanderbilt booster in yet another RV, and you SLOW DOWN to see if the RV in front of you got any info from the traffic cop with the blue lights flashing on his cruiser- DON"T slow down to 5 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. And if you happen to be a local yokel from Athens- REALIZE that the people driving the RV's are almost universally clueless as to where they are or where they need to go to begin 24 hours of tailgating. Get out of the way of these leviathans BEFORE they slam on their brakes to ask the cop where they are supposed to be.

If you are too stupid to be aware of the fact that every Fall, we get clueless drivers every couple of weeks, then for the love of God don't slow down just to observe the spectacle of yet another lost RV driver traveling in the opposite direction. This isn't even an event. You should know that they are lost. There are multiple WalMart parking lots available for them to wind up in. If they get hopelessly lost don't worry they will eventually have a safe place to stop, turn the 80 foot beast around, and look at a map.

If you are lucky enough to get past the endless line of RV stalls, and the people slowing down to look at them, then for God's sake please don't become mesmerized by the spectacle of two garbage trucks on main street stopping to pick up garbage. Pay attention to the street lights and keep moving. What should have been a 3 minute drive through downtown took me over 30 minutes because for some reason two garbage trucks picking up garbage in the rain is somehow a novel thing that must be looked at.

Then once that rubbernecking incident was over, I spent the next five miles nearly getting run over by Cadillac Escalades. All the while I was also having to avoid a never ending display of Vandy fans gawking at co-eds and slowing down to honk at each gaggle they passed on the side of the road. ACT like you have seen rain drenched females wearing white t-shirts before. Yes they have nipples under those shirts- and since this is one of the most liberal cities in the nation- most of them are not wearing bras.

What should have taken me maybe 30 minutes took me an hour and 20 minutes.

And almost all of it was due to rubbernecking.

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