I worked (and retired) from a TOYOTA plant for over 25 years. In the early days at the plant, the presidents for the first decade or more were Japanese, and there were many Japanese 'trainers' always on the shop floor, very willing to listen to your concerns about quality, and how to improve the efficiency of production. I have never in my life seen people with such an amazing work ethic. It was outstanding. Back when l was a kid, Panasonic advertisements had a tag line, 'Made in Japan by fanatics.' Never fully understood that until l worked with the Japanese at the plant. I have nothing but the upmost respect for the Japanese people. The American auto industry never stood a chance.
Japanese work super hard. I was a pilot for a FedEx feeder company, I had a set route that had two planes going to the destination. The other guy who flew that route was a super lean and fit Japanese guy, about 50-something years old. We had about 20 planes that had start times between 5-530AM. Every pilot, except Masa the Japanese guy, would sit inside their plane while it was getting loaded, including me. Masa would be doing walking exercises, forward and backward! Lunges, and round and round he would go. He is the only one who did not use the autopilot, even during the cruise portion of the flight. I asked him if that was true, and yes it was. He said, "I am the flight director." Respect to that. And the selfish best part for me was he loved to work! He would work every Friday evening, and Saturday, which allowed me to finish my work week Friday morning at 9AM giving me 3 day weekends forever. He said, "I love my job, this is my vacation!"
Even the janitor who takes care of the public toilets take pride in their work, and nobody looks down on them as everyone has a role in a highly functioning society. Our country is doomed with the ethics and subjects being pushed by our highly Marxist public education system.
The CAW was continually frustrated by the workers at the Toyota and Honda plants refusing to let them organise those plants. They new what the Workers vs Management animosity did to the domestic auto industry.
Chevy Vega's started rusting the day they left the factory, due to a body sealer used on body seams, (not undercoating) that reacted badly with the primer and paint as the car aged. Rare to see a rust free example these days.....
"And we're fighting back with great, well designed cars like the Vega, full-size cars with 120 hp engines, our upcoming world-beating diesels, and the X cars including the future of luxury, the Cimarron."
Wow, this really shows how Chevy went downhill. They recognized they were getting crushed by the competition and their solution was to tell everyone to just work harder.
That was the solution. GM couldn't come close to matching the costs of overseas factories where the employees were more motivated to work harder, better quality control, at 1/10th the wages. The UAW was extremely lazy unionized with low quality, smoking weed and drinking on lunch breaks, and with no one else allowed to compete for those jobs in the plants. Worse, they were so expensive that GM couldn't afford to put the money into R&D thanks to the massive overhead costs the UAW incurred.
It's not *that* unreasonable if you consider how bad GM assembly lines were back then. People genuinely only coming in 3 or 4 days a week, smoking pot on the lines and overall just doing a crap job. Only places you saw worse was Britain, where workers were deliberately sabotaging cars, and the USSR, where workers were hung over so often and badly that people knew to avoid buying stuff manufactured on Mondays.
That bailout money is long gone....pissed away by both GM management and union leaders... (UAW strike on GM September thru October, 2019)...never again will I by a GM..
@@scottizzo9058 To add to this is all the great car guys that worked at GM at one time. The Billy Durant s the Alfred Sloan's the Harley Earl's the Ed Coles The Zora Arkus Duntovs the Bill Mitchell's the Semon Bunkie Knewsons the Pete Estes Irv Rebikis Chuck Jordan's and yes, Even John Deloreans that helped make GM what it once was they would be mad as hell to see what happened to GM today. The fact is that those guys were car guys instead of financial guys like Roger Smith of the 80s was.I could almost say the same thing for Chrysler. If old Walter P Chrysler could see what happened to the company of his name today he d be mad as hell too!
Only 170 out of 1,000 cars were foreign? Chevy didn't know how good they had it--the number is closer to 50/50 now. But I digress---what GM was basically saying is "We make crap cars, but they're AMERICAN crap cars, and that's what people should be buying". It blows my mind that they actually believed their quality problems were in assembly instead of design
So true. I believe more design and engineering blunders than assembly issues. If something is not designed or engineered properly, great assembly is not going to help it. Corrosion prevention was also not on their radar either.
Don't you just love it when a car company blames its workers and not the engineers, the management staff the people that are making decisions .........the people that actually made the car and not assembled it. What a joke...... it's just the people in power wanting to make all the money and put out an inferior product and then blame the little guy. What a shame
Please the shareholders with nice dividends. CEO pay is set up to get the company stock as high as possible so they do share buybacks instead of put quality materials into the cars because it takes time for car buyers perception of quality to become great.
Well in the end the domestic brands regained market share worldwide and produce quality products. A large part of the problem was the failure of marketing and product trends. Foreign cars became fashionable. Finally I never in this film heard them blaming the worker. The only thing I heard was reminding workers to focus on quality. What’s wrong with that?
Joshua Fuller I don’t go with that mindset anymore. I go with whatever gives me reliability and longevity. Been a diehard Toyota guy since 2011. Tried all American makes for 25 years. Not worth the headache.
Been a mechanic my whole life ,i drive toyotas ,in all fairness detroits quality really went down hill in the early 80s some i blame on cost cutting some on union
They can't acknowledge why Japanese cars succeeded (Mainly by building the compact, practical, well built and fuel efficient cars that customers wanted to buy) because it would force them to make that kind of cars. Keep sucking and blaming the customer for looking for better option (and Lobbying against imported cars) is far less expensive on the short run and far more in touch with GM mentality in the 70's
After producing cars like the 57 T-Bird, 61 Continental, 58 Impala, 63 New Yorker, 63 Vette, 57 Chrysler 300, 68 Chevelle, 67 Nova, 65 Falcon & 62 Skylark we decided to make crap built with backwards engineering with hardly any fully independent suspensions, practically no fuel injection, no overhead cam engines, and unreliable-as-hell electronics. All this after US industry DEVELOPED these technologies in the 50's and 60's.
@@phoneone1371 How could that be? They added more vinyl top options, hung those big hulking 5mph bumpers way out there, put stand-up hood ornaments on almost every model, gave us avocado green & faded yellow bodies right off the assembly line, put more insignias on the exterior, tried to make old straight-edge designs look kind of aerodynamic, tried to make them look more modern by slapping rectangular headlamps everywhere and stayed with those white wall tires, which everybody still loves!
This video makes it clear that even way back in the seventies GM , Ford, & Chrysler was unwilling to own up to their own greed and cost cutting. Foisting poorly designed crap on the public over and over again and they have the Gaul to insinuate it’s the fault of production workers.
You’re exactly right. While the foreign car companies were bringing wonderful little cars, that got good gas mileage. Lasted as long as the GM cars were cheaper to maintain, insure and buy. The American automotive manufacturers we’re making even bigger cars, with bigger engines. Costing More to buy, and maintain. Giant cars, have that much more sheet metal . That much more sheet-metal cost more to paint, and warehouse. The machines to work it cost more. On and on . Not to mention the gas mileage, used to push that huge body around. It’s not the workers fault, they’re just assembling the parts. Design and management is where the real problem lies.
@Bill Coulter It's funny how well all that "poorly designed crap" has stood the test of time isn't it. When's the last time you saw a 40-50 year old antique, all original, unrestored Honda??? That's right, never. Only American cars last long enough to pass on to your grandchildren.
@@OkFixer You couldn't be more wrong there dude, if the foreign cars all lasted as long as the American ones then where are all the antique foreign cars at? I go to car shows all the time and I have literally never seen an all original unrestored/unrebuilt foreign car before. I've seen a couple that were nicely restored from a state of decay but never seen any that have stayed mobile and clean nonstop for 40 plus years. I myself have four different American made 70's vehicles that are all still drivable and all still have their original engines and transmissions. 75 Plymouth Valiant, 76 Jeep CJ5, 73 Ford Mustang and 79 Olds Cutlass. That's one vehicle from each of the big three including AMC thrown in there for good measure that outlasted all their foreign competition. The Valiant and the Jeep get unbelievably good mileage too since they have tiny single barrel carburetors. Another thing you are wrong about is the maintenance costs, the big three were the best at parts interchangeability, often keeping the same external engine components and accessories unchanged across multiple makes and models for decades of production to drastically cut cost. As an example all Chrysler small block V8's made from 1966 to 1992 use the exact same fuel, oil and water pumps. Because of that excellent level of foresight and ingenuity I am still to this very day able to get any replacement mechanical part I need for my daily driver 68 Plymouth Roadrunner and it is always dirt cheap. Fuel pumps cost about 15 bucks, water pumps cost about 40 bucks, alternators cost about 60 bucks etc. Back when foreign cars were the new thing on the block nobody carried parts for them here in the U.S. so obviously it cost a lot MORE to own and maintain a foreign car in the 70's not less like you said earlier.
I met a 19 year old girl employee at a Buenos Aires hospital-- she wore a mid-seventies Casio watch and understood how ironic it is to do that. She's 70's futuristic.
I love when they say we need five out of five workers in a Chevy every single day yet if you look in the background there's a beetle parked in the same GM parking lot
Yup. Too bad the big three car makers didn't watch the video, or they would have realized that the foreign cars were going to come in and "eat their lunch" if they didn't build better cheaper cars.
Watching this reminded me of a similar film that British Leyland made at the same time called "The Quality Connection" which can be seen elsewhere on RUclips. It has a wraparound sketch of an officer investigating a car crash and flashes back to a car being built and every defect in it's construction. Ultimately the driver of the car that crashed, hits a bus stop and hits a person who had taken his car in for service because it was defective. It ends with the warning that if you do your job like this, you will lose your job to foreign automakers.
Phil Shifley hey, Chevy was really trying with the Vega and the aluminum engine. We can say a lot of things about the quality they put out then, but putting out a POS isn’t good for anyone’s business. Look at American cars now very much are indistinguishable from the foreign cars.
@@ryanpaaz You can still find drivable Vega's on craigslist to this day, where are all the foreign cars from that era at though? Funny how everyone wants to trash the U.S. auto industry but we seem to be the only country that can make cars reliable enough to make it to antique status on their original engine and transmission.
I was gonna make the same comment. The Vega was rushed into production . NOTHING was good on that car! Junk motor, no quality and the biggest rust bucket ever. I had several friends with one. A true throw away car. Blame everyone, the big shots, engineers, bean counters, and the unions. They all had an attitude.
Technology and engineering definitely isn’t where we are. And they also probably had some planned obsolescence there too. But for a non special car appliance it did it’s job.
@@buddyclem7328 I was actually going to say that GM started going downhill during the Roger Smith era of the 1980s. That's comming from someone who spent the first 38 years of his life with at least one GM car in his family. And still what's pissin me off about GM is having to take a loan from the governmemt and dropping Pontiac !.
An interesting perspective. The ungrateful American workers really let down poor old General Motors. Who can forget reliable Chevrolet Chevette & Vega, the proven Oldsmobile Diesel, or the the fabulous Cadillac Cimarron? Great cars all, but GM workers just did a crappy job of assembly....that is when bothered to show up for work. Good to know.
The Cadillac Cimarron was developed quick & dirty to be a worthy contender for the BMW 320. Ha-ha! The way GM managers told it, Caddy dealers pressed the company to introduce a small car, any small car asap, and that's what they got.
Employees were shit. GM and other US makers have serious quality issues partly because employees were terrible at their jobs. Their production lines tended not to be stopped, so employees would screw something up and then the car would be sent on its way and dumped into a mistake lot where it would later be fixed. It was a joke. Japan beat the US on all fronts, from design to quality of labor.
My first car was a 1981 base model Chevette Scooter. The inside door panels were cardboard dyed black at the factory. GM didn't build a poor car. The assembly was good. It was designed to be rock bottom low end.
@@MsJamiewoods I had a 1980 scooter, with a 5 speed, and those black cardboard door panels. I loved that car, I drove the shit out of it, but it never really let me down.
Don't you dare put the Chevette In that category! My 1983 Chevette is my solid Reliable daily In 2020. Zero mechanical issues 38 years later. She zips Along just fine. Makes me more money than I spend on her.
Camaro69 Green these American companies already died out, most cars they make are made in Mexico and Canada. In their place Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, and Mercedes have built factories.
In 2002 I bought my wife a brand new Chevrolet Cavalier. Some months later our daughter was driving it and it quit. Apparently it had run out of gas, despite the gauge saying it had 1/4 tank. The service adviser told us that was a common problem. The company had purchased thousands of defective fuel gauges and decided it was cheaper to replace them under warranty than to recall them. Small wonder people started to recognise when you bought a Japanese car it damned well worked. Properly, for years and years.
One thing that realy killed American Cars was the poor performance of the mid seventy's cars. My dad bought a new Ford LTD II that was so disappointing in the performance and economy, that it ran worse than the 1969 LTD he traded in on the new car. When the new Car runs worse than the old car it is time to look for something better! All American Cars in mid 1970 run Shitty.
@@mylanmiller9656 I have plenty of old cars from the 70's that still run fine on their original engines and transmissions. 75 Valiant, 76 jeep CJ5, 73 Mustang, 79 Cutlass all still going strong. The 70's cars may have been slow compared to the 60's cars but they were still very high quality cars. Pretty much anything made in America from the dawn of the auto industry to the phasing out of non computerized vehicles is the top of the heap as far as quality and reliability go. Like I said I have four American cars from the 70's with original running gear that are still drivable and have never been restored. Show me one Honda that has made it 40 years without a rebuild . . .
@@Impactjunky any body that tells me that they have a mid seventies Car that runs fine, has a low standard of what they call fine. I have owned Ford Chevy and dodge vehicles from that era, not any of them were what I would call fine. they all had poor HP and no economy. The fords also ran so poor that it they were a descries for a new car.
GM sells cars in Asia, it is expected they would open plants there, this is not new... Hell, in the 1940s FORD had plants in Germany that were used by the Nazis in WW2 to build cars and trucks with forced slave workers...
@@TEverettReynolds Yes, Henry Ford supported the National Socialist - that's not new either. To sell an auto in China it has to be made there; but GM is planning to export the autos they make in China's new modern plants to the US. They have invested heavily in China, while letting the dated plants and products they made in the US languish.
The American worker that was more interested in getting a lap dance down at the local strip club than putting in a days work. I had a friend of mine who knew about that wonderful place where Vegas were built called lordstown workers did such a great job there and loved their jobs so much that they used to leave pop cans in the doors. Want more at another plant which I won't name it was a known fact that any time the line broke down the workers got sent home try visualizing that happening at one of those import car plants the frequent attitude was back then was is not my job. If a worker sees a problem he or she has every right to stop that line until the problem is fixed sometimes that doesn't happen. What I'm sick of are these assholes who always have it locked in their head that it's always a fault of management or engineering it's never the fault of the lowly worker on the line oh no looking back on it there was plenty of blame to go around so long as everyone was making money who cared that is until the imports came along and started eating marketshare a nd then the icing on the cake was the feds with their regs, I know because I've been a car junkie my whole life!
The worker, or more specifically the unions, were a huge part of the problem. GM had to make nickel and dimed turds to pay for obscene legacy costs from an unsustainable pension plan.
We built garbage compared to japanese and Europeans. Zero pride to implement and build competitive cars/pickups from line workers to management; then OPEC came and we Americans and Canadians gave the Big3 and AMC the middle finger.
It's really a case of "It's everyone else's fault if I'm failing", just like today's business blaming millenials for their downfall. If you can't understand and adapt to what the customer want, and your business is going bankrupt, you're the one to blame, not the customer who is looking to spend its hard earned cash on goods and services that matches its tastes.
Of course blame the blue collar worker as the designers and engineers were management and would never allow an advert to point the blame to themselves as they were the real problem. In the end they lobbied the government to scrap pension benefits, health benefits, union power to organise or strike and make redundancy procedure easier. Their whole argument was that it is the workers who were lazy and they shall work harder and better if they know that they could get fired in a moments notice. They lobbied against health and safety rules as been too expensive making them noncompetitive. They lobbied against minimum wage for the very same reason. When all that didn't work they lobbied for NAFTA and went down to Mexico where there were no worker protections, no minimum wage e.t.c. All they had to do was make a better car.
I think this was a motivational film for GM employees. If I had seen it, I would have been motivated------to go find a job at Toyota. I got a kick out of seeing the Chevy Vega being built, and being displayed as GM's great hope to compete with foreign makers in the compact car market. It had a lot of new engineering features and manufacturing engineering technology, but there were too many bugs to work out, and not enough time to do it. My dad bought a '73 Vega new, and it was a good car. The Vega was a better car than the Pinto, but the Pinto had a better engine. I still have a Cosworth-Vega. My brother and I built a V8 Vega in 1979, he still has it and makes the occasional improvement in it. I think the biggest contribution that the Vega made to American culture was popularizing the V8 engine swap. And Bill "Grumpy" Jenkins in his pro stock Vega won the NHRA championship in 1972, which was big news. He built the car for about $5000, and earned $250,000 with it. I bought a '75 Vega in 1980 as my college car for $800, and it served me for 5 years. My friend Weird Bill had a '73 VW Beetle, which my Vega would beat in a drag race or autocross, but the Beetle had a lot fewer squeaks, rattles, and leaks than my Vega did.
I recommend watching the 1986 movie, Gungho starring Michael Keaton. They use to show that movie to Japanese business people who intended to work with American auto manufacturers as how not to act. It’s a good representation of why the Japanese were beating American companies.
@@ronaldschwigel2286 not just Chevrolet, I haven't seen anyone buy a NEW sedan in a long while, but wannabe SUVs galore, #1 reason seems to be that new sedans tend to bottom out too much on speed bumps, parking lot entereances, and potholes on the highway.
@@1940limited it's a choice between being in an explosion or your brake pedal sinking to the floor at 65 mph because your rusted brake lines finally gave way...
Competition is generally a GOOD thing. It makes everyone step their game up. Instead, Chevrolet referred to the industry as "their industry" and it was this blind entitlement that left the door open for simple, functional, and efficient vehicles to win the heart of many consumers.
@@robertkoscinski8023 Ofcourse they would not all the Imports were that great, when you say Imports you have to take into consideration not just Japan and Germany. But England France Italy Sweden and now South Korea To say that Import cars are always better is too much of a general statement, as a car junkie I know that it was the British that brought the sportscar to America, I remember all the different makes and models of the 40s 50s a nd 60s but for the most part the British never made a dent in the USA when it came to mass market sedans. Why. Because they just dumped cars on the American market without either the sales support or a parts and service network furthermore Most British sedans weren't very well suited for the American market the same thing was also true with almost anything French. Personally I think many Citroens are pretty intresting but I know that alot of the Renault s that have been dumped on this country were exactly that dumped on this country as if the French were insulting our own intelligence. And almost everything Italian needs to be babied, frankly I hope Fiats new venture into the USA works alot better than Fiats in the past were, But then we get to the Germans Frankly the most important import of all is indeed the beetle, Demographics played a huge role in its success , But Volkswagen learned that in order to succeed no matter how good the bug was there had to be a parts and d service as well as sales network. There is even more to the story of the Volkswagen than I'm saying here but it's sufficient to say that Volkswagen realized that America was critical to their success. Not everything that Germany imported to the US was always great .Some were overpriced. Now getting to the Japanese, they too had to rebuild after ww2 and they too realized that they had to export stuff, What this hole video didn't show you is that we were the ones who taught them the game we were the ones who helped them to rebuild but they also began to follow the example of Volkswagen and not only that they began to take over Volkswagens marketshare in the USA. Some may think that this video is out of date,Its made the conclusion that the world has changed. Even though it was made in 1972 and the world has changed alot more since then. You see it isn't so much my country vs your country anymore,its my company vs your company on a worldwide level sometimes I don't like that but that's a bitch slap of reality right there!
Here's how the conversation SHOULD go: GM guy: "We're losing to the competition..." Me: Ok, what are you going to do about it? GM guy: "We're losing market share and our profits are down. So we are going to build our cars even cheaper, to get those profits back UP where they should be!" Hello?
Flies2FLL yes, because people tend to buy the cheaper version of something whenever they can, which makes that idea nothing more than an attempt at "adapt and overcome". Unfortunately, that approach doesn't work in a globalized market, because the cost of labor, materials, and other necessities in manufacturing are just a fraction of the cost elsewhere. Unfortunately, even if we only allowed products that were designed, tested, approved, and made in our own country, it would cause an economic collapse, because EVERYTHING is made in Asia now, which would leave us with pretty much nothing, and what little we would have would cost twice as much just because it wasn't made in a slave labor sweatshop somewhere. It might not be considered slave wages to the other countries, but if Americans were made to work for so little, they would riot in the streets while the media lambasts the company responsible until they go out of business from the controversy.
I think I just heard that in a meeting just recently. Not about cars - but same thing. Make it more cheaply so profits go up and forget about customer service that cost money. All about profits for the share holders. If customers happen to be satisfied along the way - that's just a coincidence. That will work fine for the current management who only plan on being in one place for a short time. The company as a whole suffers in the long term - but it was good for the last quarter profits. That's all that counts.
Fast food , drugs, crooked power hungry politicians and one parent house holds made Amrica weak. We should have Nuked Veitnam and won that war by killing every single commie piece of shit that lived there.
I own a '72 Datsun 240z, and a '74 Ford Maverick. One is quick, light, responsive, and fun. The other doesn't turn when the wheel does, doesn't accelerate when you hit the accelerator, and doesn't stop when you lean on the brakes. Frankly I'm amazed any US car manufacturers were still in business by the 80s.
American Auto Makers were getting eaten Alive during the late 70s into the 80s and continues today The Pickups and Suvs are what's Keeping them In buinsess today.
They are also two completely different types of cars for two different markets. One is a sports car, the other is a low-cost family sedan. Our family had a 1974 Maverick; 302 V8, C4 automatic, A/C, and front disc brakes. It steered OK for an American compact car, accelerated better than most other cars, and the non-power disc brakes were quite good! It was a good car for the times and we didn't have that much trouble with it. If you look at sales figures for the '70-'77 Ford Maverick, you'll see it was quite a good car for Ford; they sold a LOT of them then. It was replaced by the 1978 Ford Fairmont, which sold very well its first few years.
I drove a Datsun truck ("utility") in Australia back then, tough little worker and used it to cart rocks and pull down trees. Only 4 cylinders with easy to service mechanical design.
Opel and chevy are different, Opel is no longer owned by GM and Chevy existed in europe for a few years separately until recently. Also Opel doesn't exist in the UK, it's called vauxhall in the UK.
In 1974 I was 21 years old and looking to buy my my first brand new car. I wanted a Chevrolet Z 28 Camaro. I went to my local Chevrolet dealer and was ignored by all the sales people, finally I went to a salesman and told him I wanted to order a new car. He looked at me and said, "Kid you can't afford one of these ". I was furious and walked out. Two days later I went to another dealer and ordered my car. I was treated with respect. When my new car came in I drove over to the original dealer and found that rude salesman. I showed him my new car and said this could have been your sale, and other not so polite things. I could have very well gone to a foreign car dealership but I wanted that Camaro. I was also loyal to Chevrolet because my father was a loyal Chevrolet man also and he fought in WW 2 so that this country would remain strong.
tpcoachfix this is similar to my experience with another model! I was personally told they didn't care. Well, I purchased a different model from a different dealer and also drove by to laugh at the idiots. They looked stunned, but probably.didn't learn a thing.
This is exactly why the big 3 got in the bind they were in. They were ignorant and arrogant. Their pride wouldn’t let them see the forest for the trees
My dad wanted to help me get my first Mustang when I was 19 and trying to get one with my own money. We went to a local dealership and the salesman acted like he had a stick up his butt when I test drove one. The next day was a Saturday and the only day my dad had time off work to go with me to buy one and we were ready to buy. The salesman knew this, scheduled an appt with us and before we left, called my dad and said they were taking Saturday off. We went to the next dealership and I bought a brand new loaded black 90 Mustang GT. It was hilarious when he called back multiple times wondering why we blew him off!
As a kid we owned a Vega, then a Cavalier, and then a Chevette. I knew well what it felt like to be stranded on the roadside due to breakdowns. Chevrolet did this to themselves. 50 years later I have a 56 year old Volkswagen and it just goes and goes. PS I have a half dozen US made vehicles too, but they haven’t minted enough money for me to buy another Chevy.
As an American, I would like to thank Nissan for the multiple reliable vehicles that I owned and relied on for years. Also, thank Smyrna, Tennessee for building most of those Nissans.
I would like to thank nissan too for 29 years of service. Nissans are made in Tennessee by Americans for Americans . The parts are made here . I like cars that don't break down and leave you stranded. That's why I drive nissan products.
I just finished restoring my 62 vw bug. My wife loves it, she said it's the perfect around-the-town car. It's crazy to me that I can hop in a 60-year-old car, start it up which runs perfectly, and drive away as simply as a modern car. It does require more maintenance than a modern car, but I do all that myself so it's very cheap to run.
@jthomas3773 I so agree. The stock heater cooks me to death within minutes. All the tech I need personally is google maps, which my phone provides so I'm good! It's still 6 volt, so I carry a portable phone charger with me. I love my bug.
Bought me a new 1972 VW Beetle for $1,900 about a year after my new bought 1971 Mustang Mach-I literally fell apart. Cost me twice what the Beetle did and lasted 15,000 miles. Do the math.
Hypothetically speaking, Just imagine if you held on to both vehicles like someone holds on to a Roth IRA or mutual funds. The Mustang would be worth 10 times more than the VW, if you did the same thing just a year or two earlier the Mustang would then be roughly 20 times more valuable today than the VW, perhaps even more. 🤔😭
@@irocitZ yes and did you know that back then? The beetle rose in value too. It was figurative speech. Quality of a car that costs double was way worse than the cheap one.
@@traubengott9783 I did not know that back then, just like a majority of people did I bought and sold a few cars I really have regrets about. But then, there's some who held onto cars for whatever reason are now realizing they made a outstanding decision holding onto them. I do know there are loyal VW fans, I actually know a few. I just happen to be more of a muscle car person but I can appreciate most classics.
@Real Dudes Party Nude So even with all those issues and styling woes you mentioned, the imports still outsell American cars worldwide by huge margins I guess they're having the last laugh because no one except Americans buy their cars and at the end of the day the reason to build cars in the first place is to make money
my father bought a 1972 Caprice 4dr Sedan off the showroom floor. I learned to park that car on the streets of Manhattan. It was a great car and always look for one for sale .
I was 11 when my mother bought a new, off the lot, 1969 VW Beetle. I was with her then and right before, when she'd test driven a new, three on the tree, six cylinder, Ford Maverick, whose dealer was right across the street from the VW dealer. Both were the same price. I remember riding in the Maverick & could find nothing wrong with it from my 11 year old point of view. But instead, my mother went with a dark blue with white interior, 4 speed, Beetle.
My father had a 1971 Ford Maverick. Ran great and had lots of interior room for a 2 door sedan. He then traded that in for a 1st gen 1981 Ford Escort. The Escort? Meh.
A good choice she made. My dad traded his 67 vw on a new maverick and regretted it almost immediately. The vw has 93,000 miles on it , with a replaced clutch being the only service needed in all that time. The maverick didn’t make it half that. And yes the VWs resale value was and is much higher. The guy who said Mavericks are 25k and VWs 2k...come on man that is just simply false. Unless the maverick comes with a trunk full of crack.
First car in 1976 was a Chevy Vega. It made it to 49K miles. My next new cars were 3 Datsun, 6 camrys, 2 landcruisers, 2 toyota trucks, 1 forerunner , 2 corollas, 4 lexus.
kendollgt At least the Vega was generally better regarded than Ford’s Pinto. Neither as reliable and well built as Japanese and European cars though...
@Real Dudes Party Nude The "foreign toilets" damn near killed GM and won in the long run. American cars only regained their reputation as little as 5 years ago. Malaise era american cars were crap and got punished accordingly. Europe had the BMW 2002, Japan had the Datsun 510, America had the Vega. There is no comparison.
@Real Dudes Party Nude Your ignorance is amusing. The ''Bowel movement wagon'' was built long before BMW started cutting back on quality. It was quick (the weakest version had a 101hp 2 liter four, not bad for the early 70s), lightweight, well balanced and innovative (both fuel injection and turbocharging were options). This is without even mentioning the excellent build quality. Calling this car a useless status symbol both tells me you don't know what BMW is in europe, but given that you called the C8 Corvette a useless, overrated status symbol tells me I shouldn't have expected much. As for why the 510 sold less well? Simple answer really, the japanese manufacturers didn't yet have a reputation for quality and reliability, they were known as making shitty little kei cars like the Subaru 360. People trusted the established makes more. A reputation must be built, and the japanese giants built theirs with the 510s and early Corollas. Now onto the Yugo. I'll just say one thing. I'm from Slovenia, formerly a part of Yugoslavia, but now a developed nation favorably comparable with the USA. It's primary competitor in America was the Chevette. We both know which car cost twice as much, was slower, less practical, built worse and is less numerous today. Hint: it wasnt the jugić In addition. Nothing avoids the criticism of history. Look on the forums, recent reviews, hell, even yt comments. None of the cars I described had warping engine blocks and rotted by 30000 miles like the Vega, not a single one had build quality worse than British Leyland like the Chevette, or was a fire hazard in a rear collision, or had ancient body on frame FR platforms. Detroit started improving in the 80s with cars like the Buick GNX, mustang SVO, Omni GLHS etc. But the 70s were unquestionably crap. Low quality, low performance, sold on ignorance and patriotism. No one is stopping you from loving malaise era cars, but please pull your head from your ass and stop claiming they were actually good.
Japanese car's underbodies rusted out in the late 70's. Foreign cars were bought for good gas mileage. Patriotism goes right out the door if it costs more.
@@jtbmetaldesigns Nah man I've got a literal handful of old American cars and trucks from the 60's and 70's that were beat on and left out in the weather and are still in one piece and drivable. The foreign stuff doesn't last nearly as long as ours does.
"3 days out of 5 won't do, it has to be 5 days out of 5 to build quality cars..." 🤣🤣🤣 Yeah, let's be more efficient at building crap! As if punchcards are secret sauce to quality. If you engineer crap, you'll end up assembling crap.
Stop blaming assembly line workers for the auto industry's problems. The corporations who employed them did not care about quality. Cars are not hand-crafted items that reflect the experience and competence of individual craftsmen. They are engineered manufactured goods built in assembly lines that are specifically set up to take out all complexity from every position so that one worker can be easily replaced with another. Bad quality is directly attributable to management.
Milesblue right. A few years later Jimmy Carter was blaming the American consumer for the energy crisis. Seems like the 1970s were a time to blame shift and bitch and moan.
Funny how GM was soliciting GM employees to work harder to build better cars. They can only do so much with the substandard materials that were given to build such cars. GM is designed as a profit center who only cares about profits per unit. This means that corners are cut and quality suffers. You can only fool the public for so long. U.S. buyers went in droves to Japanese cars because Japanese cars were built with quality and dependability engineered into to each car. The film goes on to say that jobs are lost because of people buying foreign cars. I agree, but if GM was so concerned about the employment situation in the U.S. then why now do they build a great number of their cars in other countries today. Again they are profit centers who only care about the people at the top of GM and the shareholders. They look at the U.S. marketplace as no longer viable, so they are looking at other countries for growth. I bet if you start building your products here again and focus on your homeland GM, you will see your precious market increase here in the U.S. You know why. Because people who work become consumers who buy your cars thus increasing your sales and profits. But also build what people want at decent prices, and don't leave out quality this time. I recently read an article about a 2018 Cadillac Escalade. The person reviewing the Escalade was put off by the, as he put it. Cheap looking interior for a $90,000 vehicle. If you are going to put the name Cadillac on the car then try to be as you put it, The Standard of the World.
When Chevrolet finally came out with a sub-compact car to compete with the little foreign cars, what did they come up with? The Vega, which was just about the worst American car ever built. The foreign makes took over because the big-3 automakers were asleep at the wheel. Of course the imported cars weren't perfect, but their dealerships had better service departments to take care of problems quickly and painlessly.
"We never even worried about it" was their stated attitude concerning imports. They described one of the primary problems of the beginning of the end of the dominance of U.S. auto manufacturing right there.
Here was the problem. When their marketing people said Americans wanted smaller cars, management thought "Cheap". When they said better gas mileage, management thought "Underpowered". When they were told Americans still wanted a small car to be well built, they thought "Cheap". GM management could never get out of the "Small = Cheap" mindset. That's how we got the Vega.
The way the video lauds the USA and what it stands for, while simultaneously chastising the American people for exercising their freedom to choose the products they buy, is fascinating.
The vega was a total waste, because if you look at it, you see how with competent engineering it could have been the great compact sports car its design suggest it to be. I think no car have ever been so bad while looking so good
It must not have been too fun because you remember some of it. I do not recall one moment from the 1970's. Last thing i remember was july 1968, then the next thing is june 1982.
Yes, the Americans working on the assembly line do great work. It blows my mind that Chevy would blame assembly line workers for what was clearly an engineering issue.
Damn those reliable, efficient, low priced, well engineered, long lasting, well styled, high quality Japanese imports. We still haven't learned. Blaming the workers? It begins in engineering.
@@leonotarianni7733 I find it intresting that this video was made olny a short time after one of, if not the worst UAW strikes ever against GM the strike of 1970.
@jibarito Barranquitas That's funny because my 79 Cutlass, 75 Valiant, 76 Jeep CJ5 and 73 Mustang are all still going on their original engines and transmissions while I've literally never seen a Japanese car from the 70's that wasn't restored or rebuilt. The only foreign cars I've seen come close to the level of reliability American cars have are the old VW Beetles.
Forgot to say,Why didn't the manufacturers ask themselves, does everybody still want a hulking great v8 and body to match ,no they did not ,they wanted reliability ,economy ,quality and a price to match.Nothing more nothing less!.And the foreign competition provided that.
Ye they are awesomely rugged & reliable & yet most of them in the 70s thru to the 90s were " badge engineerd" by the ' big 3' ; Ford Courier ( Mazda B1800) Isuzu ( Chevy LUV), Mitsubishi L series( Dodge) as Captive Imports.
Ford stopped making cars except the Mustang. They're making mid and large SUV's and pick up trucks. They brought back the Ford Ranger and it's much larger than its previous design before they quit making them.
@@truthwinseverytime8805 they still do successfully in europe though :D They are Ford Focus, Transit and Fiesta are very popular here. Ironic... They have the designs and know how to build small cars at a competitive price in europe but cant figure out how to do so in america :D
its amazing that until those foreign cars started showing up by tens of 1000s that the US auto builders had no idea that those foreign automobiles were what the US consumer wanted..,good quality at low prices what a concept.
I never purchased a foreign automobile. I am Ford and Chevy person. I like big cars. Back when thus film was made American cars did well until than dam gasoline shortage hit in the 70's.
its easy to say when you have only owned 2 vehicles.ive owned 30-40 and have owned maybe 5 imports.they do some things right and others not so much.variety breeds innovation whoever and forces people to be competitive and not a shitty monopoly
@@jdsmith556 I've seen and heard of plenty of dumb kids killing Hondas, I'm selling parts right now off of a prelude that my friend blew up and left at my shop, and I've also seen a Hispanic kid lock his motor up shifting at like 7 or 8 grand trying outrun my 68 Roadrunner.
Last summer, my neighbors had two "Hondas" in the driveway, a Civic hatchback and an Acura Integra (still technically a Honda in my opinion). The Civic died more than once because of rainwater in the engine, and the Integra straight up lost a front wheel! That, plus the reputation for reckless kids driving them (especially stolen junker Civics driven by Immigrants in my hometown, who would literally try to run me down to the point of leaving the road to do so), means I would rather push an American car than drive a Japanese one. And yes, part of that IS my own personal experience leading to a slight bias, but I also don't like the size, the styling, the sound of the engine (with OR without a fart can), or the fact that even the American cars I once loved were forced to imitate imported econoboxes to stay in business. You can say all you want that it was because they had better mileage, or better quality, but the fact is, the only reason they sold so well is because they were CHEAPER. It's the same reason Americans are known for McDonald's instead of steak, wooden houses instead of brick, and two Walmarts in every town. We have at least one economic recession every decade, so most of us end up always going with the cheapest option, whether it's because we are frugal or because we are too poor to get the better option. Even the super rich didn't get to where they are by spending more than they need to. Less materials, cheaper labor, and the evil of government mandates and insurance costs raped the American automotive industry, and then the Japanese came in to get sloppy seconds.
I am shocked seeing a Vega go through the dip tank! What was in that tank- water? Vegas had rust by the time they hit the dealer lot and it was all downhill from there. What junk. No wonder there were so many VWs in the later clips.
"Competing means we have to make better cars than the competition." And so now, Chevrolet would like to introduce its newest design for the 1970s, the Vega! Thiis exciting new design will give us a competitive edge over cars like the Ford Pinto.
Foreign companies have a COOPERATIVE culture between management and the people who do the work. American companies have built an ADVERSARIAL culture, especially in automobile manufacturing but in many other segments as well. The pay gap between CEOs in the U.S. vs. workers demonstrates the difference. Akio Toyoda, Toyota's CEO, was paid $6.7 million in 2022 on revenue of $267 billion; Mary Barra of GM, was paid $29 million the same year on revenue of $157 billion. In Germany, Oliver Zipse, the CEO of BMW, earned $5.6 million in 2022 on revenue of $150 billion. And Americas auto WORKERS don't take martini lunches.
It always comes back to quality. At some point the vehicles were not designed and built with quality as the bottom line. It was not the workers. Decades of cheaper materials and outdated designs led to the outcome. To this day, GM cannot compete with the top brands in terms of ride, fit and finish at the high price point, and they cannot complete with the quality of the budget models. Tough place to be.
I am gobsmacked. That was absolutely breathtaking. Such brutal honesty from a large corporation like that does not come along every day. They went to great effort to point out the threat and backed it up with statistics. Their solution? Tell their workforce to work harder building the cars that led to the problem in the first place.
Loads of interesting comments here and some very sage ideas as well. From an Aussie viewpoint this film is a precursor to what happened to our GM and Ford plants here. Holden (local GM product) was known as "Australia's own car" and most models were designed and manufactured here with some input from Detroit. Ford built Aussie Falcons well after the model disappeared in North America. The cars were locally designed and engineered just like the Holdens. Australia's car market is more fragmented than the market in the US. We have more brands here competing for limited business. Holden built great cars ...especially the final models (exported to the US as Chevy SS) BUT they weren't the cars the public wanted. Over here the market sways in favour of small hatchbacks and light SUV pickups. Holden and Ford did not adapt to the public's taste and that served to destroy their market base. Then in the period between 2013 and 2015 first Ford and then Holden decided to stop making cars here... 90 years of Holden local manufacturing and a similar number of years for Ford went right out the window. It was terrible to watch...the pride of Australian manufacturing sinking into the mud. So my comments to our American cousins here are plain... do whatever you can to keep your factories going because once they shut down that's it...all the skills and all the know how goes out the window. Australia...a country which used to manufacture everything from the socks on your feet to the tv you watched to the car you drove now manufactures very little. We are net importers and we are living off the commodities we produce in mines and on farms.
The only thing keeping Australia going is the comparatively small population to resource rich land mass.. Same for New Zealand. It's likely both Nations become Asian dominated lands once it becomes too dangerous for Western Naval forces to challange China's growing Military might in the region.
The REAL problem was/is GM management, who didn't want to truly acknowledge that they needed to build GOOD and profitable small cars for the American market! If they had actually built a high quality well-engineered small car, people would have bought them. The Toyota Corolla has gone through many generations, has remained relevant, and is the best-selling car in the world. Why? People around the world recognize that it's a good car at a good price, and it will last a long time. Meanwhile GM still continues to slide downhill.
@snowrocket . . . when it came to a potentially GOOD small car, the Chevy Vega, 1974 GT, had the potential; but the shoddy paint and poorly made engine, and components, killed it. I had a '74 Vega GT, where the ride and handling was very good. The interior layout was acceptable; with a comfortable bucket seat. But, in six years the deterioration of the engine, drivetrain, and body rust made it a pile of junk at 66K miles. Compare that to a '91 Honda Civic I owned, which lasted me 21 years until something in the drivetrain broke at 235K miles. If Chevy could have put in the quality of the Civic into the Vega, it could have reduced the tide of Japanese imports into the US.
@@bloqk16 Yeah, the Vega and Pinto could have been great small cars, but GM and Ford didn't put the effort into them like they generally did on the full-size cars. In 1974, a Toyota, Datsun, or VW was a good small car that was durable. I had two Mazda RX-3s in the 1980s, a '74 wagon and a '73 coupe. They were OK apart from the 14-16 MPG rotary engine that liked to fall apart back then. Every era has its good cars and bad cars.
Foreign made, but American bought. If the u.s car industry did a better job at retaining their domestic market, foreign cars would have never had a chance. A good car that is designed well, and evenly priced will sell itself.
I guess GM should have not adopted built in obsolescence (purposely engineering poor vehicle quality) as it's primary business model. If GM and the other US manufacturuers had innovated and built better products then they would have survived.
The original idea of planned obsolescence wasn't to make a car that wouldn't last very long, but to make a new model that looked more contemporary than the old one.
@@traubengott9783 You're right, that's what it evolved into at GM. At first it was styling "Who wants to be seen in a stoggie old 55 Belair when you can have the ALL NEW 58 IMPALA!!" As electronics & luxury became more important it was "Who wants a an old 58 Impala when you can have a 66 Caprice with a vinyl roof, AC, stereo 8-track, quiet as a Cadillac, 454 cubes, smooth as an Olds." I bought a new 83 Camaro that just fell to pieces in 3 years.
You're absolutely right! Intentionally engineering components to fail prematurely is one of their biggest downfalls. They completely ignore the "law of the harvest".
When G.M. announced they were closing the plants in Oshawa, (Ontario,) home of the GM Canada headquarters, the union president was quoted in the papers complaining about the unfair imports. Unfair how? building an attractive, safe, reliable, well equipped product that was great value for your money? That kind of unfair?
I worked (and retired) from a TOYOTA plant for over 25 years. In the early days at the plant, the presidents for the first decade or more were Japanese, and there were many Japanese 'trainers' always on the shop floor, very willing to listen to your concerns about quality, and how to improve the efficiency of production. I have never in my life seen people with such an amazing work ethic. It was outstanding. Back when l was a kid, Panasonic advertisements had a tag line, 'Made in Japan by fanatics.' Never fully understood that until l worked with the Japanese at the plant. I have nothing but the upmost respect for the Japanese people. The American auto industry never stood a chance.
Japanese work super hard. I was a pilot for a FedEx feeder company, I had a set route that had two planes going to the destination. The other guy who flew that route was a super lean and fit Japanese guy, about 50-something years old. We had about 20 planes that had start times between 5-530AM. Every pilot, except Masa the Japanese guy, would sit inside their plane while it was getting loaded, including me. Masa would be doing walking exercises, forward and backward! Lunges, and round and round he would go. He is the only one who did not use the autopilot, even during the cruise portion of the flight. I asked him if that was true, and yes it was. He said, "I am the flight director." Respect to that. And the selfish best part for me was he loved to work! He would work every Friday evening, and Saturday, which allowed me to finish my work week Friday morning at 9AM giving me 3 day weekends forever. He said, "I love my job, this is my vacation!"
Even the janitor who takes care of the public toilets take pride in their work, and nobody looks down on them as everyone has a role in a highly functioning society. Our country is doomed with the ethics and subjects being pushed by our highly Marxist public education system.
The CAW was continually frustrated by the workers at the Toyota and Honda plants refusing to let them organise those plants. They new what the Workers vs Management animosity did to the domestic auto industry.
The big 3 moved overseas because of greed, not to improve quality.
This is the greatest VW ad...ever! America's response...the Vega!
Lawrence Ross I thought the same! They show all these beautiful foreign cars compared to the big Chevrolets!
😎😂True that!
Don't forget the pinto
Chevy Vega's started rusting the day they left the factory, due to a body sealer used on body seams, (not undercoating) that reacted badly with the primer and paint as the car aged. Rare to see a rust free example these days.....
Making the engine block out of aluminium with a teflon coated cylinder didn't help either.
Maybe they should have built the cars people wanted.....
Lee Iacocca was right
"And we're fighting back with great, well designed cars like the Vega, full-size cars with 120 hp engines, our upcoming world-beating diesels, and the X cars including the future of luxury, the Cimarron."
The european cars had even less HP. We bought a brand new Mercedes 300 D in 1975 and it had 59 HP. I had a 1979 Fiat X1/9 with 85 HP.
Funny i had a X1/9 also what a POS
@@marks6663 At least it was not 59 hp advertised as 120 hp.
120HP? Think again! My 1984 Cavalier with fuel injection got only 95HP. Didn't the Chevette have only 40HP?
@@marks6663 D is Diesel. So less power then a gas engine.
Wow, this really shows how Chevy went downhill. They recognized they were getting crushed by the competition and their solution was to tell everyone to just work harder.
I used to work at a place like that. I quit and they went under. Best decision ever.
They say work harder but they slap their badges *ON IMPORTS.*
That was the solution. GM couldn't come close to matching the costs of overseas factories where the employees were more motivated to work harder, better quality control, at 1/10th the wages. The UAW was extremely lazy unionized with low quality, smoking weed and drinking on lunch breaks, and with no one else allowed to compete for those jobs in the plants. Worse, they were so expensive that GM couldn't afford to put the money into R&D thanks to the massive overhead costs the UAW incurred.
It's not *that* unreasonable if you consider how bad GM assembly lines were back then. People genuinely only coming in 3 or 4 days a week, smoking pot on the lines and overall just doing a crap job. Only places you saw worse was Britain, where workers were deliberately sabotaging cars, and the USSR, where workers were hung over so often and badly that people knew to avoid buying stuff manufactured on Mondays.
@@LAG09 Remember WIN? Whip Inflation Now (shop harder). Quality or perceived quality sunk US cars. So the narrator is right, as you say.
"We can't wait for the government to save us"
2008 would like to have a word ...
When you say government you mean the poor taxpayer
That bailout money is long gone....pissed away by both GM management and union leaders...
(UAW strike on GM September thru October, 2019)...never again will I by a GM..
"Save us, Caesar! Save us!"
@@scottizzo9058 To add to this is all the great car guys that worked at GM at one time. The Billy Durant s the Alfred Sloan's the Harley Earl's the Ed Coles The Zora Arkus Duntovs the Bill Mitchell's the Semon Bunkie Knewsons the Pete Estes Irv Rebikis Chuck Jordan's and yes, Even John Deloreans that helped make GM what it once was they would be mad as hell to see what happened to GM today. The fact is that those guys were car guys instead of financial guys like Roger Smith of the 80s was.I could almost say the same thing for Chrysler. If old Walter P Chrysler could see what happened to the company of his name today he d be mad as hell too!
@@michaelweizer7794 They brought it on themselves. It called a paradigm shift. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 put the stake in the heart.
Only 170 out of 1,000 cars were foreign? Chevy didn't know how good they had it--the number is closer to 50/50 now. But I digress---what GM was basically saying is "We make crap cars, but they're AMERICAN crap cars, and that's what people should be buying". It blows my mind that they actually believed their quality problems were in assembly instead of design
The Brisith thought the same.
So true. I believe more design and engineering blunders than assembly issues. If something is not designed or engineered properly, great assembly is not going to help it. Corrosion prevention was also not on their radar either.
Don't you just love it when a car company blames its workers and not the engineers, the management staff the people that are making decisions .........the people that actually made the car and not assembled it. What a joke...... it's just the people in power wanting to make all the money and put out an inferior product and then blame the little guy. What a shame
Exactly, corporate propaganda film to pass the blame for inferior quality products the big 3 were churning left & right. They did it to themselves.
The bean counters order cheaper materials to be put on the car instead of materials that last. Gotta please the shareholders in the short term.
@@dannydaw59 . Please them how? People don't want to buy crap.
Please the shareholders with nice dividends. CEO pay is set up to get the company stock as high as possible so they do share buybacks instead of put quality materials into the cars because it takes time for car buyers perception of quality to become great.
Well in the end the domestic brands regained market share worldwide and produce quality products. A large part of the problem was the failure of marketing and product trends. Foreign cars became fashionable. Finally I never in this film heard them blaming the worker. The only thing I heard was reminding workers to focus on quality. What’s wrong with that?
We recognize the competition... and give you the Vega, and a stern lecture
I am a staunch advocate for buying American cars, but the Vega was shit.
@@joshuafuller9898 Maybe it was terrible. But you could get one with the 305 V8. Thats a sleeper today when modded.
Joshua Fuller I don’t go with that mindset anymore. I go with whatever gives me reliability and longevity. Been a diehard Toyota guy since 2011. Tried all American makes for 25 years. Not worth the headache.
LMFAO
Been a mechanic my whole life ,i drive toyotas ,in all fairness detroits quality really went down hill in the early 80s some i blame on cost cutting some on union
I notice, no mention of why Toyota succeeded - because of smart logistics and quality control. No, you guys on the floor just have to work harder.
They can't acknowledge why Japanese cars succeeded (Mainly by building the compact, practical, well built and fuel efficient cars that customers wanted to buy) because it would force them to make that kind of cars. Keep sucking and blaming the customer for looking for better option (and Lobbying against imported cars) is far less expensive on the short run and far more in touch with GM mentality in the 70's
They obviously realized it in 1984 when they went in on NUMMI in California with Toyota. It's a shame it took them so long.
This was before Toyota took over
GM was smart to adopt the "Just in time" manufacturing method that Toyota pioneered.
true but the quality control was possible because every Japanese employee worked damn hard and was committed to excellence.
Well, at least we had the greatest bongos and hi-hat cymbals!
Commie beatnik bongo music!
lol
😂😂😂. Yeah, the music is ominous and very 70s funky!
Sounded like the opening to "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus.
I think the track really expressed the mood and content in each segment. Well done. I’m still waiting for the bass solo.
"so our strategy as we go into the 70s is to make the crappiest cars we've ever made"
And continued that to this day.... except now they just rebadge European junk....
After producing cars like the 57 T-Bird, 61 Continental, 58 Impala, 63 New Yorker, 63 Vette, 57 Chrysler 300, 68 Chevelle, 67 Nova, 65 Falcon & 62 Skylark we decided to make crap built with backwards engineering with hardly any fully independent suspensions, practically no fuel injection, no overhead cam engines, and unreliable-as-hell electronics. All this after US industry DEVELOPED these technologies in the 50's and 60's.
After 1972 they were also the ugliest
@@phoneone1371 How could that be? They added more vinyl top options, hung those big hulking 5mph bumpers way out there, put stand-up hood ornaments on almost every model, gave us avocado green & faded yellow bodies right off the assembly line, put more insignias on the exterior, tried to make old straight-edge designs look kind of aerodynamic, tried to make them look more modern by slapping rectangular headlamps everywhere and stayed with those white wall tires, which everybody still loves!
And we will beat them with the Vega.......Fail.
This video makes it clear that even way back in the seventies GM , Ford, & Chrysler was unwilling to own up to their own greed and cost cutting. Foisting poorly designed crap on the public over and over again and they have the Gaul to insinuate it’s the fault of production workers.
Ouch , I’ve been hit by the spelling police!
@Real Dudes Party Nude
The guy don't even have guts enough to use his own name but quick to spout off about grammar.
You’re exactly right. While the foreign car companies were bringing wonderful little cars, that got good gas mileage. Lasted as long as the GM cars were cheaper to maintain, insure and buy. The American automotive manufacturers we’re making even bigger cars, with bigger engines. Costing More to buy, and maintain. Giant cars, have that much more sheet metal . That much more sheet-metal cost more to paint, and warehouse. The machines to work it cost more. On and on . Not to mention the gas mileage, used to push that huge body around.
It’s not the workers fault, they’re just assembling the parts. Design and management is where the real problem lies.
@Bill Coulter It's funny how well all that "poorly designed crap" has stood the test of time isn't it. When's the last time you saw a 40-50 year old antique, all original, unrestored Honda??? That's right, never. Only American cars last long enough to pass on to your grandchildren.
@@OkFixer You couldn't be more wrong there dude, if the foreign cars all lasted as long as the American ones then where are all the antique foreign cars at? I go to car shows all the time and I have literally never seen an all original unrestored/unrebuilt foreign car before. I've seen a couple that were nicely restored from a state of decay but never seen any that have stayed mobile and clean nonstop for 40 plus years.
I myself have four different American made 70's vehicles that are all still drivable and all still have their original engines and transmissions. 75 Plymouth Valiant, 76 Jeep CJ5, 73 Ford Mustang and 79 Olds Cutlass. That's one vehicle from each of the big three including AMC thrown in there for good measure that outlasted all their foreign competition. The Valiant and the Jeep get unbelievably good mileage too since they have tiny single barrel carburetors.
Another thing you are wrong about is the maintenance costs, the big three were the best at parts interchangeability, often keeping the same external engine components and accessories unchanged across multiple makes and models for decades of production to drastically cut cost. As an example all Chrysler small block V8's made from 1966 to 1992 use the exact same fuel, oil and water pumps. Because of that excellent level of foresight and ingenuity I am still to this very day able to get any replacement mechanical part I need for my daily driver 68 Plymouth Roadrunner and it is always dirt cheap. Fuel pumps cost about 15 bucks, water pumps cost about 40 bucks, alternators cost about 60 bucks etc. Back when foreign cars were the new thing on the block nobody carried parts for them here in the U.S. so obviously it cost a lot MORE to own and maintain a foreign car in the 70's not less like you said earlier.
Hey, I have that exact Panasonic clock radio at 7:57! It still works great after nearly 50 years. Thanks Japan!
"What do you mean doc, all the best stuff is made in japan"
I just blew off a dodge hellcat with my Honda Civic , thanks Japan.🤣
I met a 19 year old girl employee at a Buenos Aires hospital-- she wore a mid-seventies Casio watch and understood how ironic it is to do that. She's 70's futuristic.
LOL I have that exact same one as well still going strong.
I have a Panasonic clock radio! I got mine for Christmas in 1984. It still works perfectly!
I love when they say we need five out of five workers in a Chevy every single day yet if you look in the background there's a beetle parked in the same GM parking lot
I'm surprised. American auto workers would destroy foreign cars parked in a lot with UAW members cars.
@@rondj1965 that used to happen at the Ford plant my grandpa worked at. They would beat up the car then beat up the guy.
Sounded more like a scare film for new employees than a promo film.
Yup. Too bad the big three car makers didn't watch the video, or they would have realized that the foreign cars were going to come in and "eat their lunch" if they didn't build better cheaper cars.
@@TEverettReynolds Yup, more like breakfast ,lunch and dinner! lol
I thought this would be on making smaller and more fuel efficient cars. Then it turned to a propaganda film.
@@rileyfreeman2875 yep. it's all the workers fault - not management or engineering!
Watching this reminded me of a similar film that British Leyland made at the same time called "The Quality Connection" which can be seen elsewhere on RUclips. It has a wraparound sketch of an officer investigating a car crash and flashes back to a car being built and every defect in it's construction. Ultimately the driver of the car that crashed, hits a bus stop and hits a person who had taken his car in for service because it was defective. It ends with the warning that if you do your job like this, you will lose your job to foreign automakers.
I think its funny when he said "Design and build a better Chevrolet" while showing an assembly of a Chevy Vega. That says it all right there.
Phil Shifley hey, Chevy was really trying with the Vega and the aluminum engine. We can say a lot of things about the quality they put out then, but putting out a POS isn’t good for anyone’s business. Look at American cars now very much are indistinguishable from the foreign cars.
@@ryanpaaz You can still find drivable Vega's on craigslist to this day, where are all the foreign cars from that era at though? Funny how everyone wants to trash the U.S. auto industry but we seem to be the only country that can make cars reliable enough to make it to antique status on their original engine and transmission.
I was gonna make the same comment. The Vega was rushed into production . NOTHING was good on that car! Junk motor, no quality and the biggest rust bucket ever. I had several friends with one. A true throw away car. Blame everyone, the big shots, engineers, bean counters, and the unions. They all had an attitude.
Technology and engineering definitely isn’t where we are. And they also probably had some planned obsolescence there too. But for a non special car appliance it did it’s job.
GM had the money to engineer and price vehicles in a better way, but corporate greed and corporate deadlines took presidence.
"Headed for OUR customers"
GM's 1970s mentality in a nutshell.
Yeah. If you lost customers, then they aren't your customers anymore! I grew up driving GM, and I watched them go downhill in build quality.
@@buddyclem7328 I was actually going to say that GM started going downhill during the Roger Smith era of the 1980s. That's comming from someone who spent the first 38 years of his life with at least one GM car in his family. And still what's pissin me off about GM is having to take a loan from the governmemt and dropping Pontiac !.
michael weizer And Oldsmobile !
@@vinnydaq13 that too!.
@@michaelweizer7794 nah pretty sure GM fell off around the time this was filmed. Also, pontiacs are lame
This is the MOST DEMOTIVATIONAL "motivational" film I've ever seen. 😮🤪
No shit! From a Honda Lover. 🤠
Yeah, talk about arrogant and negative. All the sales are ours and they are taking our sales. No, you have a new competitor, time to improve.
An interesting perspective. The ungrateful American workers really let down poor old General Motors. Who can forget reliable Chevrolet Chevette & Vega, the proven Oldsmobile Diesel, or the the fabulous Cadillac Cimarron? Great cars all, but GM workers just did a crappy job of assembly....that is when bothered to show up for work. Good to know.
The Cadillac Cimarron was developed quick & dirty to be a worthy contender for the BMW 320. Ha-ha! The way GM managers told it, Caddy dealers pressed the company to introduce a small car, any small car asap, and that's what they got.
Employees were shit. GM and other US makers have serious quality issues partly because employees were terrible at their jobs. Their production lines tended not to be stopped, so employees would screw something up and then the car would be sent on its way and dumped into a mistake lot where it would later be fixed. It was a joke. Japan beat the US on all fronts, from design to quality of labor.
My first car was a 1981 base model Chevette Scooter. The inside door panels were cardboard dyed black at the factory. GM didn't build a poor car. The assembly was good. It was designed to be rock bottom low end.
@@MsJamiewoods I had a 1980 scooter, with a 5 speed, and those black cardboard door panels. I loved that car, I drove the shit out of it, but it never really let me down.
Don't you dare put the Chevette In that category! My 1983 Chevette is my solid Reliable daily In 2020. Zero mechanical issues 38 years later.
She zips Along just fine. Makes me more money than I spend on her.
always found it odd how American companies think the people owe them a living
Thats why they got their asses kicked by Japenese and European automakers.
damn commies
If the big companies go away... so do you. Think about it.
Camaro69 Green not true. If these dinosaurs finally die out, someone else will come and do it better
Camaro69 Green these American companies already died out, most cars they make are made in Mexico and Canada. In their place Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, and Mercedes have built factories.
In 2002 I bought my wife a brand new Chevrolet Cavalier. Some months later our daughter was driving it and it quit. Apparently it had run out of gas, despite the gauge saying it had 1/4 tank. The service adviser told us that was a common problem. The company had purchased thousands of defective fuel gauges and decided it was cheaper to replace them under warranty than to recall them. Small wonder people started to recognise when you bought a Japanese car it damned well worked. Properly, for years and years.
Your chevy damned well worked too, if you kept gas in it
I can't watch this.
American cars lost ground to foreign automobiles because of economy and quality.
One thing that realy killed American Cars was the poor performance of the mid seventy's cars.
My dad bought a new Ford LTD II that was so disappointing in the performance and economy, that it ran worse than the 1969 LTD he traded in on the new car. When the new Car runs worse than the old car it is time to look for something better! All American Cars in mid 1970 run Shitty.
Blame the EPA.
@@mylanmiller9656 thanks to epa imports did not have to abide by epa then like now
@@mylanmiller9656 I have plenty of old cars from the 70's that still run fine on their original engines and transmissions. 75 Valiant, 76 jeep CJ5, 73 Mustang, 79 Cutlass all still going strong. The 70's cars may have been slow compared to the 60's cars but they were still very high quality cars. Pretty much anything made in America from the dawn of the auto industry to the phasing out of non computerized vehicles is the top of the heap as far as quality and reliability go. Like I said I have four American cars from the 70's with original running gear that are still drivable and have never been restored. Show me one Honda that has made it 40 years without a rebuild . . .
@@Impactjunky
any body that tells me that they have a mid seventies Car that runs fine, has a low standard of what they call fine. I have owned Ford Chevy and dodge vehicles from that era, not any of them were what I would call fine. they all had poor HP and no economy. The fords also ran so poor that it they were a descries for a new car.
"And a short time our jobs may disappear" - yes //;-( GM is closing plants in the USA and opening plants in CHINA. Greed is GM's only value
GM sells cars in Asia, it is expected they would open plants there, this is not new... Hell, in the 1940s FORD had plants in Germany that were used by the Nazis in WW2 to build cars and trucks with forced slave workers...
@@TEverettReynolds Yes, Henry Ford supported the National Socialist - that's not new either. To sell an auto in China it has to be made there; but GM is planning to export the autos they make in China's new modern plants to the US. They have invested heavily in China, while letting the dated plants and products they made in the US languish.
@@TEverettReynolds Ford still has plants in Germany
@@onefastcyclist Does that mean that we will see some of those Buicks that the Chinese love so much ?,get that a Chinese Buick sold in the US
@@michaelweizer7794 unfortunately yes, so expect the quality to be go down too
I sense a strong tone of authoritarianism in this video. Like its required company propaganda one must watch during their introduction and training.
Yeah, when you are motivating employees through fear you've got a problem.
I think the narrator used to stand in for Genl Burkhalter on Hogan's Heroes
Man the background music is the only reason i keep rewatching this video
It's has a beatnik vibe.
It sounds like they are encouraging their employees to get stoned!
I love how the narrator says we can't wait for the government to save us. Wow that thinking went out the window quick.
To be fair not for another 38 years. Chrysler was bailed out in 1979 but they did pay it back with interest.
@@frankgarrett242 And paid it back like 5 years early, IIRC
This was a desperate film to dump the failing American auto industry on the worker and protect the lack of vision coming from the top.
The American worker that was more interested in getting a lap dance down at the local strip club than putting in a days work. I had a friend of mine who knew about that wonderful place where Vegas were built called lordstown workers did such a great job there and loved their jobs so much that they used to leave pop cans in the doors. Want more at another plant which I won't name it was a known fact that any time the line broke down the workers got sent home try visualizing that happening at one of those import car plants the frequent attitude was back then was is not my job. If a worker sees a problem he or she has every right to stop that line until the problem is fixed sometimes that doesn't happen. What I'm sick of are these assholes who always have it locked in their head that it's always a fault of management or engineering it's never the fault of the lowly worker on the line oh no looking back on it there was plenty of blame to go around so long as everyone was making money who cared that is until the imports came along and started eating marketshare a nd then the icing on the cake was the feds with their regs, I know because I've been a car junkie my whole life!
The worker, or more specifically the unions, were a huge part of the problem. GM had to make nickel and dimed turds to pay for obscene legacy costs from an unsustainable pension plan.
We built garbage compared to japanese and Europeans. Zero pride to implement and build competitive cars/pickups from line workers to management; then OPEC came and we Americans and Canadians gave the Big3 and AMC the middle finger.
Blame the worker. Nothing’s changed since the day this film was first shown.
It's really a case of "It's everyone else's fault if I'm failing", just like today's business blaming millenials for their downfall. If you can't understand and adapt to what the customer want, and your business is going bankrupt, you're the one to blame, not the customer who is looking to spend its hard earned cash on goods and services that matches its tastes.
Of course blame the blue collar worker as the designers and engineers were management and would never allow an advert to point the blame to themselves as they were the real problem.
In the end they lobbied the government to scrap pension benefits, health benefits, union power to organise or strike and make redundancy procedure easier. Their whole argument was that it is the workers who were lazy and they shall work harder and better if they know that they could get fired in a moments notice. They lobbied against health and safety rules as been too expensive making them noncompetitive. They lobbied against minimum wage for the very same reason.
When all that didn't work they lobbied for NAFTA and went down to Mexico where there were no worker protections, no minimum wage e.t.c.
All they had to do was make a better car.
I think this was a motivational film for GM employees. If I had seen it, I would have been motivated------to go find a job at Toyota. I got a kick out of seeing the Chevy Vega being built, and being displayed as GM's great hope to compete with foreign makers in the compact car market. It had a lot of new engineering features and manufacturing engineering technology, but there were too many bugs to work out, and not enough time to do it. My dad bought a '73 Vega new, and it was a good car. The Vega was a better car than the Pinto, but the Pinto had a better engine. I still have a Cosworth-Vega. My brother and I built a V8 Vega in 1979, he still has it and makes the occasional improvement in it. I think the biggest contribution that the Vega made to American culture was popularizing the V8 engine swap. And Bill "Grumpy" Jenkins in his pro stock Vega won the NHRA championship in 1972, which was big news. He built the car for about $5000, and earned $250,000 with it. I bought a '75 Vega in 1980 as my college car for $800, and it served me for 5 years. My friend Weird Bill had a '73 VW Beetle, which my Vega would beat in a drag race or autocross, but the Beetle had a lot fewer squeaks, rattles, and leaks than my Vega did.
I recommend watching the 1986 movie, Gungho starring Michael Keaton. They use to show that movie to Japanese business people who intended to work with American auto manufacturers as how not to act. It’s a good representation of why the Japanese were beating American companies.
One of my favorite movies!👍
Con graduations...fifteeen towsannnd Cahhhzzz!
The dawn of the dark days of General Motors.
1974 to 1990. The dark ages for American cars.
look where it is today 2019 Chevrolets cars and plants are gone forever.
@@ronaldschwigel2286 not just Chevrolet, I haven't seen anyone buy a NEW sedan in a long while, but wannabe SUVs galore, #1 reason seems to be that new sedans tend to bottom out too much on speed bumps, parking lot entereances, and potholes on the highway.
ronald schwigel moved overseas to China
@@ghost-jesus I never had that problem with all those Ford Crown vics that I drove as taxis!
Hmmm. Maybe the Pinto and Vega had something to do with it....
I remember that after its introduction Pinto sales exoloded!!
Johnny Carson used to say the best gift for your mother in law was a Pinto with Firestone 500 tires.
Of the two I think the Pinto was the better car.
@@gojoe2833 Pinto was Ford.
@@1940limited it's a choice between being in an explosion or your brake pedal sinking to the floor at 65 mph because your rusted brake lines finally gave way...
Competition is generally a GOOD thing. It makes everyone step their game up. Instead, Chevrolet referred to the industry as "their industry" and it was this blind entitlement that left the door open for simple, functional, and efficient vehicles to win the heart of many consumers.
They are showing the best of the imports. The Datsuns
Mike Martin: Datsun is crap!
@@robertkoscinski8023 Ofcourse they would not all the Imports were that great, when you say Imports you have to take into consideration not just Japan and Germany. But England France Italy Sweden and now South Korea To say that Import cars are always better is too much of a general statement, as a car junkie I know that it was the British that brought the sportscar to America, I remember all the different makes and models of the 40s 50s a nd 60s but for the most part the British never made a dent in the USA when it came to mass market sedans. Why. Because they just dumped cars on the American market without either the sales support or a parts and service network furthermore Most British sedans weren't very well suited for the American market the same thing was also true with almost anything French. Personally I think many Citroens are pretty intresting but I know that alot of the Renault s that have been dumped on this country were exactly that dumped on this country as if the French were insulting our own intelligence. And almost everything Italian needs to be babied, frankly I hope Fiats new venture into the USA works alot better than Fiats in the past were, But then we get to the Germans Frankly the most important import of all is indeed the beetle, Demographics played a huge role in its success , But Volkswagen learned that in order to succeed no matter how good the bug was there had to be a parts and
d service as well as
sales network. There is even more to the story of the Volkswagen than I'm saying here but it's sufficient to say that Volkswagen realized
that America was critical to their success. Not everything that Germany imported to the US was always great .Some were overpriced. Now getting to the Japanese, they too had to rebuild after ww2 and they too realized that they had to export stuff, What this hole video didn't show you is that we were the ones who taught them the game we were the ones who helped them to rebuild but they also began to follow the example of Volkswagen and not only that they began to take over Volkswagens marketshare in the USA.
Some may think that this video is out of date,Its made the conclusion that the world has changed. Even though it was made in 1972 and the world has changed alot more since then. You see it isn't so much my country vs your country anymore,its my company vs your company on a worldwide level sometimes I don't like that but that's a bitch slap of reality right there!
Here's how the conversation SHOULD go:
GM guy: "We're losing to the competition..."
Me: Ok, what are you going to do about it?
GM guy: "We're losing market share and our profits are down. So we are going to build our cars even cheaper, to get those profits back UP where they should be!"
Hello?
Flies2FLL yes, because people tend to buy the cheaper version of something whenever they can, which makes that idea nothing more than an attempt at "adapt and overcome". Unfortunately, that approach doesn't work in a globalized market, because the cost of labor, materials, and other necessities in manufacturing are just a fraction of the cost elsewhere. Unfortunately, even if we only allowed products that were designed, tested, approved, and made in our own country, it would cause an economic collapse, because EVERYTHING is made in Asia now, which would leave us with pretty much nothing, and what little we would have would cost twice as much just because it wasn't made in a slave labor sweatshop somewhere. It might not be considered slave wages to the other countries, but if Americans were made to work for so little, they would riot in the streets while the media lambasts the company responsible until they go out of business from the controversy.
I think I just heard that in a meeting just recently. Not about cars - but same thing. Make it more cheaply so profits go up and forget about customer service that cost money. All about profits for the share holders. If customers happen to be satisfied along the way - that's just a coincidence. That will work fine for the current management who only plan on being in one place for a short time. The company as a whole suffers in the long term - but it was good for the last quarter profits. That's all that counts.
Fast food , drugs, crooked power hungry politicians and one parent house holds made Amrica weak. We should have Nuked Veitnam and won that war by killing every single commie piece of shit that lived there.
Let's see.....a Toyota Corona, Datsun 510, or (snicker) a Vega? Tough choice there if you can't decide between Datsun and Toyota! LOL!!!
I'll take a Pinto, thank you. **SCREEEEECH...BOOM!** Oh shit. Nevermind. :)
i had 2, no complaints!
My parents had a yellow '77 Pinto wagon. It never had any issues in the seven years they owned it (traded for a Tempo in 1984).
The Vegas had bad gaskets that failed I saw in other YT videos.
vegas were crap rattle buckets for sure
11:24 The foreign cars have quality, they are well built. Then they show an Austin 1300. A sweet little car but possibly not the best build quality.
That's it. Americans wanted smaller cars and Detroit said "No way! Small cars mean small profits! Sell 'em a land yacht!"
@@mosesberkowitz3298 and now these foreign car companies offer larger cars
@@robertknight4672 True...things have come full circle.
Americans want large cars. Always have. Wanting small cars in the 1970’s was an anomaly brought on by gas prices shock.
Moses Berkowitz I think it was more of a “Shit what are we gonna do!” from gm and ford, not that.
I own a '72 Datsun 240z, and a '74 Ford Maverick. One is quick, light, responsive, and fun. The other doesn't turn when the wheel does, doesn't accelerate when you hit the accelerator, and doesn't stop when you lean on the brakes. Frankly I'm amazed any US car manufacturers were still in business by the 80s.
American Auto Makers were getting eaten Alive during the late 70s into the 80s and continues today The Pickups and Suvs are what's Keeping them In buinsess today.
They are also two completely different types of cars for two different markets. One is a sports car, the other is a low-cost family sedan.
Our family had a 1974 Maverick; 302 V8, C4 automatic, A/C, and front disc brakes. It steered OK for an American compact car, accelerated better than most other cars, and the non-power disc brakes were quite good! It was a good car for the times and we didn't have that much trouble with it. If you look at sales figures for the '70-'77 Ford Maverick, you'll see it was quite a good car for Ford; they sold a LOT of them then. It was replaced by the 1978 Ford Fairmont, which sold very well its first few years.
I drove a Datsun truck ("utility") in Australia back then, tough little worker and used it to cart rocks and pull down trees. Only 4 cylinders with easy to service mechanical design.
Now Volkswagen, Mercedes, Audi and Nissan have plants in the United States.
And subaru, honda, toyota, BMW, hyundai, kia, and more.
Toyota is the largest car manufacturer in the world and VW is #2
and GM has plants in china korea and mexico.
@@wendysremix And in the UK, where Chevrolet is called Opel, for some reason.
Opel and chevy are different, Opel is no longer owned by GM and Chevy existed in europe for a few years separately until recently. Also Opel doesn't exist in the UK, it's called vauxhall in the UK.
In 1974 I was 21 years old and looking to buy my my first brand new car.
I wanted a Chevrolet Z 28 Camaro. I went to my local Chevrolet dealer and was ignored by all the sales people, finally I went to a salesman and told him I wanted to order a new car. He looked at me and said,
"Kid you can't afford one of these ".
I was furious and walked out.
Two days later I went to another dealer and ordered my car. I was treated with respect. When my new car came in I drove over to the original dealer and found that rude salesman. I showed him my new car and said this could have been your sale, and other not so polite things.
I could have very well gone to a foreign car dealership but I wanted that Camaro. I was also loyal to Chevrolet because my father was a loyal Chevrolet man also and he fought in WW 2 so that this country would remain strong.
tpcoachfix this is similar to my experience with another model! I was personally told they didn't care. Well, I purchased a different model from a different dealer and also drove by to laugh at the idiots. They looked stunned, but probably.didn't learn a thing.
@David Malinovsky you obviously would be more relevant if you had a pair.
This is exactly why the big 3 got in the bind they were in. They were ignorant and arrogant. Their pride wouldn’t let them see the forest for the trees
Your father went to the war because he got the draft - not to suppress foreign competition to domestic products lacking quality.
My dad wanted to help me get my first Mustang when I was 19 and trying to get one with my own money. We went to a local dealership and the salesman acted like he had a stick up his butt when I test drove one. The next day was a Saturday and the only day my dad had time off work to go with me to buy one and we were ready to buy. The salesman knew this, scheduled an appt with us and before we left, called my dad and said they were taking Saturday off.
We went to the next dealership and I bought a brand new loaded black 90 Mustang GT. It was hilarious when he called back multiple times wondering why we blew him off!
I want one of those new KarmanGhias or 240 Zs!
You should have stockpiled VW Busses when you had the chance.
Volkswagen, Porsche, Datsun, Toyota, VW: cheaper, more reliable, better mileage.
GM's response: "Let's make the Cadillac Cimarron!"
Only car that stayed reliable on your list is Toyota.
GM: V8 go Vrooom
Make 110 hp
As a kid we owned a Vega, then a Cavalier, and then a Chevette. I knew well what it felt like to be stranded on the roadside due to breakdowns. Chevrolet did this to themselves. 50 years later I have a 56 year old Volkswagen and it just goes and goes. PS I have a half dozen US made vehicles too, but they haven’t minted enough money for me to buy another Chevy.
Tucker was awesome!! That’s why the big three shut him down
As an American, I would like to thank Nissan for giving me a job for 12 years. Such a great company to work for in America.
As an American, I would like to thank Nissan for the multiple reliable vehicles that I owned and relied on for years.
Also, thank Smyrna, Tennessee for building most of those Nissans.
I would like to thank nissan too for 29 years of service. Nissans are made in Tennessee by Americans for Americans . The parts are made here . I like cars that don't break down and leave you stranded. That's why I drive nissan products.
@@phillipanderson2607 But how is the qualty control?
I just finished restoring my 62 vw bug. My wife loves it, she said it's the perfect around-the-town car. It's crazy to me that I can hop in a 60-year-old car, start it up which runs perfectly, and drive away as simply as a modern car. It does require more maintenance than a modern car, but I do all that myself so it's very cheap to run.
It's not burdened with a ton of expensive, failure-prone, unwanted, unneeded HIGH TECH.
@jthomas3773 I so agree. The stock heater cooks me to death within minutes. All the tech I need personally is google maps, which my phone provides so I'm good! It's still 6 volt, so I carry a portable phone charger with me. I love my bug.
Bought me a new 1972 VW Beetle for $1,900 about a year after my new bought 1971 Mustang Mach-I literally fell apart. Cost me twice what the Beetle did and lasted 15,000 miles. Do the math.
Hypothetically speaking, Just imagine if you held on to both vehicles like someone holds on to a Roth IRA or mutual funds. The Mustang would be worth 10 times more than the VW, if you did the same thing just a year or two earlier the Mustang would then be roughly 20 times more valuable today than the VW, perhaps even more. 🤔😭
@@irocitZ yes and did you know that back then?
The beetle rose in value too.
It was figurative speech. Quality of a car that costs double was way worse than the cheap one.
@@traubengott9783 I did not know that back then, just like a majority of people did I bought and sold a few cars I really have regrets about. But then, there's some who held onto cars for whatever reason are now realizing they made a outstanding decision holding onto them. I do know there are loyal VW fans, I actually know a few. I just happen to be more of a muscle car person but I can appreciate most classics.
Damn Foreign cars, with their superior build quality, reliability, fuel economy and competitive pricing!
@Real Dudes Party Nude an yet people are buying them up yep 😛😛😀😛😀😛😛😀😛😀😀😛😀😆😄😝😝😝😝😝😝😚😛😛😛😀😀😛😛😛😛😛
Damn right!
Real Dudes Party Nude aaawwww are you a triggered little girl? Or is it guy?
@Real Dudes Party Nude So even with all those issues and styling woes you mentioned, the imports still outsell American cars worldwide by huge margins I guess they're having the last laugh because no one except Americans buy their cars and at the end of the day the reason to build cars in the first place is to make money
They won because their cars were cheaper simple to work on and great on gas. And last forever.. I would say that's all in engineering
no cheaper on gas than my ,,i had 3 vws i know,,they cant out run. out stop a vair an vairs have heat too
Studebakers, and Ramblers were well engineered cars but never caught on. Studebaker suffered from poor management & Ramblers were kind of ugly.
@@animalcorvair Did you have a massive stroke while typing that?
@@MMMmyshawarma no but it got you to read it,, lol
@@animalcorvair Reading involves comprehension, and there was none of that. It was like looking at a train wreckage.
A magnificent ad for the sale of foreign cars, ever!
my father bought a 1972 Caprice 4dr Sedan off the showroom floor. I learned to park that car on the streets of Manhattan. It was a great car and always look for one for sale .
i have a 79 2dr 305 still looks like new
There is a VW parked right outside the dealership they keep showing lmao... It was probably the salesperson's car.
Blame, Blame, Blame.....Stop the whining and get to work!!
It's the CUSTOMERS who were at fault!! They wanted quality cars that would last 10 to 15 years, not oil-burning Vega's or tinny exploding Pintos.
@@billolsen4360 then why are they at fault for wanting a better product you're a special kinda of stupid 😆
@@GOBRADON502 Don't blow a gasket now
@@GOBRADON502 - Are you kidding?
Back when they were still hocking the Powerglide for the same price as everyone else's 3-speed automatics. Yeah, that's the line worker's fault too.
They even put them in Corvettes and gto's!
"Patriotism is the last refuge of Scoundrels" - Samuel Johnson, 1775
Excellent point!
I was 11 when my mother bought a new, off the lot, 1969 VW Beetle. I was with her then and right before, when she'd test driven a new, three on the tree, six cylinder, Ford Maverick, whose dealer was right across the street from the VW dealer. Both were the same price. I remember riding in the Maverick & could find nothing wrong with it from my 11 year old point of view. But instead, my mother went with a dark blue with white interior, 4 speed, Beetle.
I bet u the Beetle is still running and worth 3 times more than what she paid for it and that's even if it wasn't running now..
Well the Maverick wasn't the worst American car on the market at that time, I'm sure.
My father had a 1971 Ford Maverick. Ran great and had lots of interior room for a 2 door sedan. He then traded that in for a 1st gen 1981 Ford Escort. The Escort? Meh.
A good choice she made. My dad traded his 67 vw on a new maverick and regretted it almost immediately. The vw has 93,000 miles on it , with a replaced clutch being the only service needed in all that time. The maverick didn’t make it half that.
And yes the VWs resale value was and is much higher. The guy who said Mavericks are 25k and VWs 2k...come on man that is just simply false. Unless the maverick comes with a trunk full of crack.
We had a beetle in the 60's they were a crap coffin on wheels and really suck in northern climates . I still hate the NAZI car .
Selling badge-engineered Chevrolets as Cadillacs did not help. Brilliant move by GM accounting.
I feel like they still throw a lot of cheap Chevy parts into Cadillac's and try to hide it
@@nicholasfield6127 and that's what they did especially during the Roger Smith era.
First car in 1976 was a Chevy Vega. It made it to 49K miles. My next new cars were 3 Datsun, 6 camrys, 2 landcruisers, 2 toyota trucks, 1 forerunner , 2 corollas, 4 lexus.
And what did Chevrolet did about it? Made the mediocre Chevrolet Vega compact in 1971! 🙄 that film is the best VW , Datsun and Toyota ad ever!
kendollgt At least the Vega was generally better regarded than Ford’s Pinto. Neither as reliable and well built as Japanese and European cars though...
@Real Dudes Party Nude The "foreign toilets" damn near killed GM and won in the long run. American cars only regained their reputation as little as 5 years ago.
Malaise era american cars were crap and got punished accordingly. Europe had the BMW 2002, Japan had the Datsun 510, America had the Vega. There is no comparison.
@Real Dudes Party Nude Your ignorance is amusing.
The ''Bowel movement wagon'' was built long before BMW started cutting back on quality. It was quick (the weakest version had a 101hp 2 liter four, not bad for the early 70s), lightweight, well balanced and innovative (both fuel injection and turbocharging were options). This is without even mentioning the excellent build quality. Calling this car a useless status symbol both tells me you don't know what BMW is in europe, but given that you called the C8 Corvette a useless, overrated status symbol tells me I shouldn't have expected much.
As for why the 510 sold less well? Simple answer really, the japanese manufacturers didn't yet have a reputation for quality and reliability, they were known as making shitty little kei cars like the Subaru 360. People trusted the established makes more. A reputation must be built, and the japanese giants built theirs with the 510s and early Corollas.
Now onto the Yugo. I'll just say one thing.
I'm from Slovenia, formerly a part of Yugoslavia, but now a developed nation favorably comparable with the USA. It's primary competitor in America was the Chevette. We both know which car cost twice as much, was slower, less practical, built worse and is less numerous today. Hint: it wasnt the jugić
In addition. Nothing avoids the criticism of history. Look on the forums, recent reviews, hell, even yt comments. None of the cars I described had warping engine blocks and rotted by 30000 miles like the Vega, not a single one had build quality worse than British Leyland like the Chevette, or was a fire hazard in a rear collision, or had ancient body on frame FR platforms.
Detroit started improving in the 80s with cars like the Buick GNX, mustang SVO, Omni GLHS etc. But the 70s were unquestionably crap. Low quality, low performance, sold on ignorance and patriotism.
No one is stopping you from loving malaise era cars, but please pull your head from your ass and stop claiming they were actually good.
Japanese car's underbodies rusted out in the late 70's. Foreign cars were bought for good gas mileage. Patriotism goes right out the door if it costs more.
Lol of course, how many Toyota Corolla's i manage to see with the rusted below fenders and doors 🤣 they opened from that part like a oreo cracker🤣🤣
Uh just about everything in those days rusted out in 8 years or less
@@jtbmetaldesigns Nah man I've got a literal handful of old American cars and trucks from the 60's and 70's that were beat on and left out in the weather and are still in one piece and drivable. The foreign stuff doesn't last nearly as long as ours does.
Impact's Garage and Gaming a literal handful? How do you fit all those cars and trucks in your hand? Are you a giant?
@@officialclownbusiness7788 Of course I'm a fking giant, how else could I hold all of my cars in my hands?
Ed's Auto Reviews, anyone?
Then they just shipped all of their production out of the country anyway and still charge more.
"3 days out of 5 won't do, it has to be 5 days out of 5 to build quality cars..." 🤣🤣🤣
Yeah, let's be more efficient at building crap! As if punchcards are secret sauce to quality.
If you engineer crap, you'll end up assembling crap.
lol amen
Stop blaming assembly line workers for the auto industry's problems. The corporations who employed them did not care about quality. Cars are not hand-crafted items that reflect the experience and competence of individual craftsmen. They are engineered manufactured goods built in assembly lines that are specifically set up to take out all complexity from every position so that one worker can be easily replaced with another. Bad quality is directly attributable to management.
Milesblue right. A few years later Jimmy Carter was blaming the American consumer for the energy crisis. Seems like the 1970s were a time to blame shift and bitch and moan.
The demise of the American auto industry blamed on the buyers and builders! Amazing how the more things change the more they stay the same.
Funny how GM was soliciting GM employees to work harder to build better cars. They can only do so much with the substandard materials that were given to build such cars. GM is designed as a profit center who only cares about profits per unit. This means that corners are cut and quality suffers. You can only fool the public for so long. U.S. buyers went in droves to Japanese cars because Japanese cars were built with quality and dependability engineered into to each car. The film goes on to say that jobs are lost because of people buying foreign cars. I agree, but if GM was so concerned about the employment situation in the U.S. then why now do they build a great number of their cars in other countries today. Again they are profit centers who only care about the people at the top of GM and the shareholders. They look at the U.S. marketplace as no longer viable, so they are looking at other countries for growth. I bet if you start building your products here again and focus on your homeland GM, you will see your precious market increase here in the U.S. You know why. Because people who work become consumers who buy your cars thus increasing your sales and profits. But also build what people want at decent prices, and don't leave out quality this time. I recently read an article about a 2018 Cadillac Escalade. The person reviewing the Escalade was put off by the, as he put it. Cheap looking interior for a $90,000 vehicle. If you are going to put the name Cadillac on the car then try to be as you put it, The Standard of the World.
Same problems they are facing today and its 2019! They never learn!
When Chevrolet finally came out with a sub-compact car to compete with the little foreign cars, what did they come up with? The Vega, which was just about the worst American car ever built. The foreign makes took over because the big-3 automakers were asleep at the wheel. Of course the imported cars weren't perfect, but their dealerships had better service departments to take care of problems quickly and painlessly.
"We never even worried about it" was their stated attitude concerning imports. They described one of the primary problems of the beginning of the end of the dominance of U.S. auto manufacturing right there.
Bela Lugosi’s Dead? Who knew Bauhaus was doing GM promo films
What’s weirder is that I have the rubber duck that’s your icon picture!
Lol so OG goth
Once he lost his job at the Hollywood blood bank, he starved
Here was the problem. When their marketing people said Americans wanted smaller cars, management thought "Cheap". When they said better gas mileage, management thought "Underpowered". When they were told Americans still wanted a small car to be well built, they thought "Cheap". GM management could never get out of the "Small = Cheap" mindset. That's how we got the Vega.
The way the video lauds the USA and what it stands for, while simultaneously chastising the American people for exercising their freedom to choose the products they buy, is fascinating.
Funny they keep showing the Vega, one of the worst designed cars ever
The vega was a total waste, because if you look at it, you see how with competent engineering it could have been the great compact sports car its design suggest it to be. I think no car have ever been so bad while looking so good
That was great. I remember a little bit of the 70's and how things like this made the WW II generation really angry.
It must not have been too fun because you remember some of it. I do not recall one moment from the 1970's. Last thing i remember was july 1968, then the next thing is june 1982.
America makes great cars today.. at honda and toyota plants
Yes, the Americans working on the assembly line do great work. It blows my mind that Chevy would blame assembly line workers for what was clearly an engineering issue.
I prefer the Japanese versions of Honda myself. Don’t buy the Mexican versions
No those are not Amaerican brands. Honda and toyota have their issues as well.
Dicky Doodle Next question, how many of those are right to work states ?.
@@starxlr7863 All cars have problems the bottom line is getting people to buy your cars and make a profit that's capitalism
Damn those reliable, efficient, low priced, well engineered, long lasting, well styled, high quality Japanese imports. We still haven't learned. Blaming the workers? It begins in engineering.
And this was before the oil crisis even started...
That NYT headline is from January 21, 1972, which should help date this film.
My guess was 1971-1972 so I was pretty accurate
@@leonotarianni7733 I find it intresting that this video was made olny a short time after one of, if not the worst UAW strikes ever against GM the strike of 1970.
I worked at general motors in 79 and we always said never buy an American car after a long weekend cause it will fall apart
@jibarito Barranquitas That's funny because my 79 Cutlass, 75 Valiant, 76 Jeep CJ5 and 73 Mustang are all still going on their original engines and transmissions while I've literally never seen a Japanese car from the 70's that wasn't restored or rebuilt. The only foreign cars I've seen come close to the level of reliability American cars have are the old VW Beetles.
So what the film is saying is true. Can’t blame management if you’re working with a hangover and not getting the job done.
@@Impactjunky yea that's what a salesman would say to try to win someone over😂👍
@@Impactjunky i still drive gm from my 56 chevy to my corvirs my fiero grandam list goes on no problems with any of them but i take care of my stuff
Forgot to say,Why didn't the manufacturers ask themselves, does everybody still want a hulking great v8 and body to match ,no they did not ,they wanted reliability ,economy ,quality and a price to match.Nothing more nothing less!.And the foreign competition provided that.
Those small 1980's Japanese trucks were awesome, and are fondly missed in California.
Ye they are awesomely rugged & reliable & yet most of them in the 70s thru to the 90s were " badge engineerd" by the ' big 3' ; Ford Courier ( Mazda B1800) Isuzu ( Chevy LUV), Mitsubishi L series( Dodge) as Captive Imports.
We have only the idiotic government regulations to blame. They say they want more efficient vehicles, but they've made them illegal to import!
Even if I wanted to in 2019 I literally cannot buy a new small domestic car anymore...
But yeah blame the imports.
Ford stopped making cars except the Mustang. They're making mid and large SUV's and pick up trucks. They brought back the Ford Ranger and it's much larger than its previous design before they quit making them.
@@truthwinseverytime8805 they still do successfully in europe though :D
They are Ford Focus, Transit and Fiesta are very popular here.
Ironic... They have the designs and know how to build small cars at a competitive price in europe but cant figure out how to do so in america :D
its amazing that until those foreign cars started showing up by tens of 1000s that the US auto builders had no idea that those foreign automobiles were what the US consumer wanted..,good quality at low prices what a concept.
I never purchased a foreign automobile. I am Ford and Chevy person. I like big cars. Back when thus film was made American cars did well until than dam gasoline shortage hit in the 70's.
Honda is pretty bad ass, pissed off teens have been trying to kill them since the mid 90’s with little success
its easy to say when you have only owned 2 vehicles.ive owned 30-40 and have owned maybe 5 imports.they do some things
right and others not so much.variety breeds innovation whoever and forces people to be competitive and not a shitty monopoly
@@jdsmith556 I've seen and heard of plenty of dumb kids killing Hondas, I'm selling parts right now off of a prelude that my friend blew up and left at my shop, and I've also seen a Hispanic kid lock his motor up shifting at like 7 or 8 grand trying outrun my 68 Roadrunner.
Last summer, my neighbors had two "Hondas" in the driveway, a Civic hatchback and an Acura Integra (still technically a Honda in my opinion). The Civic died more than once because of rainwater in the engine, and the Integra straight up lost a front wheel! That, plus the reputation for reckless kids driving them (especially stolen junker Civics driven by Immigrants in my hometown, who would literally try to run me down to the point of leaving the road to do so), means I would rather push an American car than drive a Japanese one. And yes, part of that IS my own personal experience leading to a slight bias, but I also don't like the size, the styling, the sound of the engine (with OR without a fart can), or the fact that even the American cars I once loved were forced to imitate imported econoboxes to stay in business. You can say all you want that it was because they had better mileage, or better quality, but the fact is, the only reason they sold so well is because they were CHEAPER. It's the same reason Americans are known for McDonald's instead of steak, wooden houses instead of brick, and two Walmarts in every town. We have at least one economic recession every decade, so most of us end up always going with the cheapest option, whether it's because we are frugal or because we are too poor to get the better option. Even the super rich didn't get to where they are by spending more than they need to. Less materials, cheaper labor, and the evil of government mandates and insurance costs raped the American automotive industry, and then the Japanese came in to get sloppy seconds.
I am shocked seeing a Vega go through the dip tank! What was in that tank- water? Vegas had rust by the time they hit the dealer lot and it was all downhill from there. What junk. No wonder there were so many VWs in the later clips.
"Competing means we have to make better cars than the competition." And so now, Chevrolet would like to introduce its newest design for the 1970s, the Vega! Thiis exciting new design will give us a competitive edge over cars like the Ford Pinto.
Foreign companies have a COOPERATIVE culture between management and the people who do the work. American companies have built an ADVERSARIAL culture, especially in automobile manufacturing but in many other segments as well. The pay gap between CEOs in the U.S. vs. workers demonstrates the difference.
Akio Toyoda, Toyota's CEO, was paid $6.7 million in 2022 on revenue of $267 billion; Mary Barra of GM, was paid $29 million the same year on revenue of $157 billion. In Germany, Oliver Zipse, the CEO of BMW, earned $5.6 million in 2022 on revenue of $150 billion. And Americas auto WORKERS don't take martini lunches.
0:20 what's the red tuck make and manufacturer.
It always comes back to quality. At some point the vehicles were not designed and built with quality as the bottom line. It was not the workers. Decades of cheaper materials and outdated designs led to the outcome. To this day, GM cannot compete with the top brands in terms of ride, fit and finish at the high price point, and they cannot complete with the quality of the budget models. Tough place to be.
I am gobsmacked. That was absolutely breathtaking. Such brutal honesty from a large corporation like that does not come along every day. They went to great effort to point out the threat and backed it up with statistics. Their solution? Tell their workforce to work harder building the cars that led to the problem in the first place.
Loads of interesting comments here and some very sage ideas as well. From an Aussie viewpoint this film is a precursor to what happened to our GM and Ford plants here. Holden (local GM product) was known as "Australia's own car" and most models were designed and manufactured here with some input from Detroit. Ford built Aussie Falcons well after the model disappeared in North America. The cars were locally designed and engineered just like the Holdens.
Australia's car market is more fragmented than the market in the US. We have more brands here competing for limited business. Holden built great cars ...especially the final models (exported to the US as Chevy SS) BUT they weren't the cars the public wanted. Over here the market sways in favour of small hatchbacks and light SUV pickups. Holden and Ford did not adapt to the public's taste and that served to destroy their market base. Then in the period between 2013 and 2015 first Ford and then Holden decided to stop making cars here... 90 years of Holden local manufacturing and a similar number of years for Ford went right out the window. It was terrible to watch...the pride of Australian manufacturing sinking into the mud. So my comments to our American cousins here are plain... do whatever you can to keep your factories going because once they shut down that's it...all the skills and all the know how goes out the window. Australia...a country which used to manufacture everything from the socks on your feet to the tv you watched to the car you drove now manufactures very little. We are net importers and we are living off the commodities we produce in mines and on farms.
The only thing keeping Australia going is the comparatively small population to resource rich land mass.. Same for New Zealand. It's likely both Nations become Asian dominated lands once it becomes too dangerous for Western Naval forces to challange China's growing Military might in the region.
The REAL problem was/is GM management, who didn't want to truly acknowledge that they needed to build GOOD and profitable small cars for the American market! If they had actually built a high quality well-engineered small car, people would have bought them. The Toyota Corolla has gone through many generations, has remained relevant, and is the best-selling car in the world. Why? People around the world recognize that it's a good car at a good price, and it will last a long time. Meanwhile GM still continues to slide downhill.
Small car looks weak
@snowrocket . . . when it came to a potentially GOOD small car, the Chevy Vega, 1974 GT, had the potential; but the shoddy paint and poorly made engine, and components, killed it.
I had a '74 Vega GT, where the ride and handling was very good. The interior layout was acceptable; with a comfortable bucket seat.
But, in six years the deterioration of the engine, drivetrain, and body rust made it a pile of junk at 66K miles.
Compare that to a '91 Honda Civic I owned, which lasted me 21 years until something in the drivetrain broke at 235K miles.
If Chevy could have put in the quality of the Civic into the Vega, it could have reduced the tide of Japanese imports into the US.
@@bloqk16 Yeah, the Vega and Pinto could have been great small cars, but GM and Ford didn't put the effort into them like they generally did on the full-size cars. In 1974, a Toyota, Datsun, or VW was a good small car that was durable. I had two Mazda RX-3s in the 1980s, a '74 wagon and a '73 coupe. They were OK apart from the 14-16 MPG rotary engine that liked to fall apart back then. Every era has its good cars and bad cars.
1986 4 runner 22r non turbo 5 speed , 4980267 on it . Head gasket went out at 389000 rebuilt and going strong.oh what a feeling !!
who gets the better gas mileage? FOREIGN!!
the Toyota dealer in Denver was Stevinson!
& they still sell Toyota today!!
Looks like around 1972 to 1973. It's ironic that this was the beginning of the Dark Ages in American cars 1974 to 1990.
"To 1990"? Now it's 2024 and they're not only getting worse, but they've tripled the price!
@@Fred-mp1vf - You're right. The last good year for all American cars was 1973.
(1970 really).
Foreign made, but American bought. If the u.s car industry did a better job at retaining their domestic market, foreign cars would have never had a chance. A good car that is designed well, and evenly priced will sell itself.
I guess GM should have not adopted built in obsolescence (purposely engineering poor vehicle quality) as it's primary business model. If GM and the other US manufacturuers had innovated and built better products then they would have survived.
The original idea of planned obsolescence wasn't to make a car that wouldn't last very long, but to make a new model that looked more contemporary than the old one.
@@billolsen4360 they still cut costs while sacrificing quailty.
@@traubengott9783 You're right, that's what it evolved into at GM. At first it was styling "Who wants to be seen in a stoggie old 55 Belair when you can have the ALL NEW 58 IMPALA!!" As electronics & luxury became more important it was "Who wants a an old 58 Impala when you can have a 66 Caprice with a vinyl roof, AC, stereo 8-track, quiet as a Cadillac, 454 cubes, smooth as an Olds." I bought a new 83 Camaro that just fell to pieces in 3 years.
You're absolutely right! Intentionally engineering components to fail prematurely is one of their biggest downfalls. They completely ignore the "law of the harvest".
When G.M. announced they were closing the plants in Oshawa, (Ontario,) home of the GM Canada headquarters, the union president was quoted in the papers complaining about the unfair imports. Unfair how? building an attractive, safe, reliable, well equipped product that was great value for your money? That kind of unfair?