4 ms·
When Sloan took over, GM was 3x smaller than Ford. When Sloan retired, GM was 2.3x bigger than Ford.
by cs702 9y ago
When Sloan took over, GM was 3x smaller than Ford.
When Sloan retired, GM was 2.3x bigger than Ford.
- dogma1138 9y agoI’m not saying that Sloan didn’t do wonders he clearly did what I’m saying is that it’s hard to estimate if without WW2 would he had the opportunity to achieve the same outcome. “During World War II, GM led the largest commercial-to-military war production effort in American history. In 1942, the company converted all of factories to produce $12 billion worth of airplanes, trucks, tanks, guns, and shells for the US military.” Before the US got into the war GM supplied a 3rd of the trucks used by the Wehrmacht. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Blitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Blitz
- iabacu 9y agoWell, the same macro economics / historical factors that helped GM, could’ve helped Ford and others. In particular, other 2/3 of trucks must have come from somewhere.
- dogma1138 9y agoFord didn’t own 2 major subsidiaries in Europe. While GM was buying every company they could get their hands on Forde was too busy with building Fordlândia in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest the best they managed to get is to enter into a partnership with a Russian car company after the Bolsheviks have already gotten into power. I think GM was much better positioned and it much more decisively went all out on war production Ford made cars and engines during the war GM made everything from bullets to machines guns to tanks and bombers.
- sfifs 9y agoMars, Solar city, Boring company, Hyperloop...
- anonu 9y agoThe articles premise is that Durant was prescient enough to turn his horse carriage company into a car company because he knew it was the future.... Then the author tries to make a parallel with cars propelled by gas vs electricity. It's not really a perfect parallel. Don't get me wrong, I'm massively rooting for Elon and Tesla. But it seems to be that the original success of GM was because they were in an industry building things that were 1000x better than the old way of doing things. Tesla doesn't seem to be 1000x... Maybe 10x... Until they have fully self driving cars. So my conclusion is that the electrical car aspect of Tesla is not really the game changer... It's the AI which we have yet to prove out...