Quotes
From horseless carriages to robots?
“The future is manufacturing robots similar to the Ford courier robot. . . . I’d bet within a few decades robots in the home will be common. Imagine if you had to make a decision […]
Business strategies
Quotes
Peter DeLorenzo: Groupthink has driven model proliferation among automakers
“But the largest and certainly most demonstrable lemminglike behavior in this business is model proliferation. It’s loosely based on the philosophy that if a car company utilizes its vehicle architectures efficiently to create more models, […]
Auto Paedia
Groupthink
A tendency toward groupthink has been a chronic problem in the American automobile industry since the mid-50s. This was a key driver of the domestic automakers’ dramatic decline from the late-60s onward. More recently, foreign […]
Satire
2019 auto design: One step closer to machine guns?
This year’s Seattle auto show should have been held during Halloween rather than the second week of November. That’s because the auto industry’s latest wares were a frightful bunch. On the inside they offered the […]
Quotes
Corporate focus on making money is myopic
“An industrial company that sees its primary focus as making money rather than making good products, is not going to make good products. ‘Their obligation is 100% to their shareholders’ is not a law of […]
Quotes
AMC: The ‘mother’ of flexible manufacturing
“AMC could be regarded as the mother of ‘flexabile manufacturing’ due to the wide variety of products, with limited facilities to build them. I took a tour of Kenosha assembly in 75. As I recall, […]
Quotes
Bob Lutz: Elon Musk is ‘tired,’ ‘volatile and unstable’
“I think Elon is tired. He’s worn out. He’s obviously got some emotional problems. He’s self medicating. He has shown some disturbing signs of being somewhat volatile and unstable. I think the right solution for […]
Multimedia
Three different takes on streamlined automobiles
If you are fascinated by streamlined cars of the Depression era you may want to take a look at three helpful resources. Over at Curbside Classic, Paul Niedermeyer (2018) has posted a terrific photo essay […]
Data Dive
Is the mid-sized sedan in a ‘breathtaking’ decline?
A Ford executive recently told Automotive News that the Fusion sedan’s forthcoming discontinuance was the result of a “breathtaking” decline in the mid-sized sedan segment that has “accelerated over the past couple years” (Martinez, 2018). In […]
Current Events
Is brand management really an automaker’s No. 1 priority?
In his rousing introduction to Auto Extremist’s annual “Brand Image Meter,” Peter DeLorenzo (2018) argues that “image wrangling is now the Number 1 priority in this business.” The reason is that a “democratization of technology […]