How do you beat Mexico at carmaking business?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=01bf1dca-d21f-468d-8308-1458b6881307

Nicolas Van Praet , Financial Post
Published: Saturday, June 07, 2008

They blocked a road in defiant displeasure, confronted a woman driving a foreign-made Mercedes and vowed to escalate their fight to save their livelihoods.

But assembly-line workers at General Motors Corp.'s truck plant in Oshawa, Ont., face a grim reality as GM reconfirmed yesterday its decision to shut the factory down. They're building extended-cab trucks that have few American buyers at a time of US$4-a-gallon gasoline. And their jobs are going elsewhere.

Some 2,600 workers will lose their jobs next year when the Oshawa truck plant closes. And that's nothing compared to what could be in store for Canada's auto industry overall.

Another 18,000 workers will likely join the unemployment rolls by 2014, according to a forecast by consulting firm Automotive Compass LLC in West Chester, PA. Eight years ago, Canada employed close to 172,000 people in auto, truck and related parts manufacturing. Today, a once-mighty industry is shrinking fast.

"Historically, we had some really major competitive advantages related to wages, health-care costs and exchange rates. We've lost all three advantages," said William Pochiluk, a Canadian who is Automotive Compass president.

"No matter how good your products are, no matter how good your productivity is or how good your efficiencies are, what it boils down to is it's just too expensive to build light vehicles in Canada right now."

FULL 2 page story at link.

[lapfog_1]

1. GM (or Ford) should wake up

and buy these guys for $xx million, re-tool a plant somewhere in the US to produce them and hire back some of their union employees to make em.

http://www.aptera.com

They could, right now, sell 200,000 of these... if they could drop the price to something like $19,000 or so (current price is like $29,000, so it's within striking range).

The gas savings for me alone would be more than the monthly payment (and that's at the current $3.87/gallon).

[Warpy]

2. First, you fire all the top level execs

to get rid of the fools who decided to concentrate on gas hogs instead of advertising the good, sturdy, efficient cars they do make. That includes the lobbyists that kept "trucks" exempt from CAFE standards.

Second, you promote all the people from the small car divisions into positions of greater responsablity.

Third, you develop a strategy to take the efficient car market away from the overseas companies. You work with the UAW to develop this strategy. Companies that operate strictly from the top down are asking for failure.

Fourth, you develop an R&D department that focuses on drive train rather than body styling so that you can keep whatever edge you develop.