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> Of course, a big part of the reason for that was presumably lack of external competition in the 70s. If you say to Manufacturing Company X "don't worry about
by OldHand2018 5y ago
> Of course, a big part of the reason for that was presumably lack of external competition in the 70s. If you say to Manufacturing Company X "don't worry about the European and Japanese manufacturers, they're not allowed bid on this" you are unlikely to get the same sort of quality than you'd get if they were.
Yes! (And no). In the US, by 1970, foreign auto manufacturers had achieved a 10% market share, and it had been growing steadily since the mid 1960s. The Detroit manufacturers were fully aware of this, they just weren’t making changes. That was a time of great societal unrest and huge labor strife. It’s not hard to imagine the elites not wanting to save American manufacturing jobs or at least making them competitive.
- rsynnott 5y agoI'd argue that the gap between American and European/Japanese automakers was probably smaller than the gap between American and European/Japanese train manufacturers at the time, though. Also, it's probably far easier to justify inaction on cars because some of the things they're judged on are pretty subjective. A GM exec could plausibly have said something like "we don't need to increase reliability to match Japanese cars, because people don't want that sort of car here; they're too small/whatever". They'd have been wrong, as it turns out, but it wouldn't have been obvious nonsense. Whereas a train manufacturer exec wouldn't have had the same sort of arguments; they'd have _had_ to compete on the things railways care about, which are mostly just reliability.