Tag Archives: General Motors

“Late to the Party”, by Eric Peters

Posted on February 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

The last thing some car executives want to do is build a vehicle people actually want to buy. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

A measure of just how divorced from reality the car industry is can be gleaned from a news story making the rounds about General Motors electing not to build a rival to the massively successful Ford Bronco and Jeep Wrangler 4x4s.

At least, not one with an engine.

GM’s president, Mark Reuss, stated the other day that “I’m not gonna do a Bronco” because he doesn’t want to be “late to the party.” This is logic akin to GM deciding not to build the Camaro back in 1967 because Ford had already built the Mustang – which was selling in the hundreds of thousands annually. GM, of course, ended up selling millions of Camaros (and sister car, Pontiac Firebird) over the next couple of decades – because there was a market for cars like the Mustang.

Just as, today, there is clearly a market for 4x4s with engines like the Bronco – which is the most successful vehicle Ford has launched in a decade, at least. Sales of this model were up 234 percent in 2022.

That’s not a typo.

117,057 were sold. That is a huge number in absolute terms but when put in context, it is even huger. The Bronco is not a mass-market vehicle. Unlike, say, the F-150 pickup – which is Ford’s best-selling vehicle.

Except for the electric version of it.

Ford sells about half-a-million non-electric F-150s every year, to people who need a practical vehicle. Ford has only sold about 15,000 electric F-150s, because they are not practical. 

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The MSRP of Wokeness, by Eric Peters

Posted on July 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

GM has cast its lot with the go woke, go broke crowd. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

It is hard to make money selling virtue – especially when your buyers cannot afford it.

General Motors’ net income is down by . . . 40 percent. Its business model is almost as successful as the Biden Thing’s presidency – and for dovetailed reasons. The Biden Thing crippled the supply chains upon which all companies depend in order to make the things they sell. GM has had fewer cars to sell on account of this.

But it goes much deeper than that.

GM’s other problem is the same problem every company selling cars is dealing with, also caused by the Biden Thing. Or at least, by the things behind the Biden Thing. That thing being the devaluation of the buying power of the currency people use to buy everything. The admitted-to devaluation is close to 9 percent; it is probably closer to 12. Either way, it amounts to an equivalent tax on every American’s buying power.

Put another way, it means the price of every new car has increased by whatever the percent actually is – on top of increases caused by scarcity (those supply chain disruptions) and (more subtly but much more fundamentally) the actual increase in the cost of cars, due to the cost of complying with the decrees of the  Biden Thing’s regulatory apparat.

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Remember When it was Just Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie & Chevrolet? by Eric Peters

Posted on September 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

If employers can compel employees to vaccinate, is there anything they can’t force them to do? From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

If you oppose forcing people to submit to medical procedures that may injure or even kill them – or simply oppose forcing anyone to submit to any medical procedure, period – then you might want to consider not buying any vehicle made by General Motors.

This once-upon-a-time car company seems to believe it is become a hospital ward – and we are all patients. That it has the right to make employment conditional upon acceptance of company policies requiring all employees to submit to any medical procedure the corporation’s muckety-mucks decree they must submit to.

Mark the italics.

If it is accepted that GM – if any company – can make employment conditional upon submitting to a “vaccination” it will have set the precedent for requiring employees to submit to medical procedures, generally.

If the justification is accepted for mandatory submission to “vaccinations” then the justification has already been accepted for mandatory submission to health checkups, psychiatric evaluations, the mandatory answering of probing questions into one’s personal affairs – as any such thing can be asserted by control freaks to present a potential risk to the “health” of employees and thus, GM – any employer – is entitled to know and to impose whatever it decides to be necessary as regards such things.

As the condition of being allowed to work.

It will no longer be – ask your doctor. It will be – go see the doctor. And – do as the doctor says.  Period.

Take whatever meds he says you must take. Submit to any procedure he says is “necessary.” Answer all of his questions. These to inevitably include questions regarding whether you own any firearms – which the same Leftists pushing the Jab also have already defined as a matter of  . . . “public health.”

Else find another job.

People are fools if they do not grasp this.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Law

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GM Says: Ihre Papieren, Bitte! by Eric Peters

Posted on August 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Major corporations have become arms of the state. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

It used to be governments that demanded to see your “papers.” Today, it’s corporations. Which function as governments, without the bother of elections – without the hassle of having to pass laws that might be reviewed (and rejected) by courts.

Instead, policies – which have the force and effect of laws – and which you cannot appeal. There is only the choice: Comply – or be fired.

Which wouldn’t be so terrible were it not for the terrible fact that corporations – a relative handful, effectively – now own the country, in the sense that is becoming very difficult for anyone to find employment that isn’t corporate. The tentacles of the octopus reach into every nook and cranny. Even businesses that aren’t corporations often have to deal with them – as suppliers, as their major customers.

And thereby, the corporations set policies which become very difficult to avoid.

The genius of this deserves grudging respect. It is the realization of Mussolini’s dictum about “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” – via corporations, which exploit their disingenuous status as “private” enterprises to audaciously impose that which the state dare not even propose.

GM has just imposed a requirement that every salaried employee must produce papers to prove they have rolled up their sleeve and been injected with the Jab that the corporation decrees they must submit to as a condition of their employment. That is to say, do this – or be fired.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Law, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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Tesla – and GM – Finally Admit It, by Eric Peters

Posted on May 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

Electric cars, including Tesla’s, in the US have yet to meet the market test: can they be sold without subsidies at a price that will their makers to make a decent profit? From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

 
 
 

GM – and Tesla – just publicly admitted that they can’t sell electric cars. Or rather, they need your help – via Uncle.

To pay people $7,500 each to “buy” their electric cars.

To be paid by those who pay the taxes which will make up for the taxes not collected from the people who “buy” electric cars. This is the wealth transfer scheme styled “electric car tax credits.”

They have been around for years – and may be coming back – because electric cars have pull rather than range.

Great sums of money were expended to extract great sums of money – via the tax code, which was adjusted to give preferential treatment to the purchasers of electric cars by making electric cars seem more affordable than they are, in fact.

 

In order to create the fiction of a “market” for electric cars, where none – or very little – actually existed.

If that were not the case, then why the need to pay people to “buy” them? In every other case of such massive discounting – an industry term –  the need to apply such discounts is taken as evidence of the car being discounted being a flop.

Get rid of them by whatever means necessary – as by giving them away –  and then build no more.

The Aztek being a for-instance. Imagine being paid to buy one. Of course, the difference with EVs is that instead of GM paying you to buy an Aztek, the government is making someone else pay for your electric Aztek.

Or rather, your neighbor’s electric Aztek.

No one would abide such a thing, much less laud such a thing. How come almost no one is questioning this thing?

That question is hardly ever raised – much less answered. Probably because of the answer. Electric cars are the Azteks of our time, but worse. And unlike the Aztek, which was merely ugly – electric cars are evil. A kind of cancer that is not only metastasizing but being encouraged to metastasize.

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Why Americans Are Broke, by Eric Peters

Posted on March 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

One reason Americans are broke is because they don’t have any low cost options, readily available in other country, on a big ticket item: trucks. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

 

Remember when trucks were simple – and inexpensive?

They still are both – just not here. And ironically, they are built by the same company that will only sell you an expensive and complicated one, here.

General Motors.

Here, it will sell you a Chevy Colorado for $25,200 to start. This is the least expensive new truck GM sells in the United States. In China, GM sells a truck called the Zhengtu that starts at just over $9,000 through its Wuling subsidiary.

This truck would probably be of interest to many Americans – and not just because it costs less than half as much as the least expensive truck GM will sell you here. It has features you cannot get in any truck sold here – such as hinged, outward folding-flat bed walls that turn a compact-sized bed into a bed that can carry a full-sized truck load.

 

To get something equivalently spacious here, you’d have to buy a full-sized truck like the Chevy Silverado 1500 – and that one stickers for $28,600 to start. Even then, its bed isn’t as wide – or not, as you prefer, like the Zhengtu’s modular bed.

It’s just very expensive.   

Because, of course, it has to be. Uncle will not allow such things as bed walls that fold outward – it’s not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe! In fact, all it is is non-compliant with current federal folderol, such as bumper/side-impact/rollover standards and so on – per my recent article on the subject.

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Affirmative Motors, by Eric Peters

Posted on December 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

What if building a better car has nothing to do with the race, ethnic group, gender, or any of the other tickers now used in hiring? What if it has more to do with engineering and technical competence? From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

GM used to hire engineers – and build cars. Now it counts beans – and signals virtue.

Word arrives that GM will henceforth explicitly judge applicants for employment based on how they look  – i.e., the color of their skin – openly repudiating the quaint idea that academic and other earned qualifications ought to be the sole criteria for employment.

Your hue will count as much as your degree – a surefire recipe for competence in critical work such as engineering.

But then, GM is doing less of that these days while doing a great deal more in the way of signaling and perhaps different CV are relevant for work of that nature.

It’s not just GM, either.

The pharmaceutical combine Merck – one of the developers of the Holy Jab – is on board, which will surely engender confidence in the due diligence of the people who mixed and tested whatever’s in the Holy Jab – along with WalMart, Verizon, American Express, Caterpillar and IBM and others who have joined a new racial combine styled the OneTen initiative, whose purpose is to put race first while insisting not to approve is – can you guess? – racist.

Mass hiring of black people – because they are black people – is the goal.

The initiative will “focus on hiring and training black workers without four-year degrees” in order to provide them with “family sustaining” jobs that pay on average $50,000 annually.

But this is not racist.

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Thinning the Cadillac Herd, by Eric Peters

Posted on November 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

For anyone who enjoys the mobility, autonomy, and freedom offered by automobiles, the future looks grim. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Since GM is having trouble selling EVs, it’s not surprising to learn it is buying out the dealerships that can’t sell them.

The trade publication Automotive News reports that GM is offering to pay any of its 880 Cadillac dealers as much as $500,000 to close their doors – in order to leave fewer Cadillac stores, so that when Cadillac “transitions” to selling nothing but EVs by 2030 (there’s that date again) it’ll look like Cadillac is selling more EVs.

Kruschev used the same trick to make Western observers think he had a huge fleet of intercontinental bombers  by flying the same six airplanes in a wide loop over Moscow for their viewing edification.

Meanwhile, the same GM that is paying dealers to close will be increasing what it spends on EV development by 35 percent to $27 billion over the next two years, probably because of the apparent selection of the new El Presidente, who has promised to “mandate” a market for EVs (assuming he doesn’t forget what he promised).

GM CEO Mary Barra is chomping at the bit – or rather, urging American drivers be “mandated” to chomp on the bit: “We are confident that  . . . we can collaboratively find the pathway that will deliver an all-electric future,” she warbled the other day.

This is as remarkable as it is political – as well as contra everything economical.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Economy, Energy, Environment, Government

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