[quote=ctr70]I’m not sure what unions played directly in the city of Detroit’s BK. But unions (and the inflexibility they caused) were a BIG part of reducing the U.S. auto industries ability to compete with Japan. If the auto industry in Michigan were run like Silicon Valley with NO unions, things may have turned out very different. Silicon Valley has NO unions and this is a big reason why the U.S. is still #1 in much of high tech and still makes some of the best high tech products and software. The U.S. certainly does not make the best cars and has not for 25-30 years.[/quote]
The U.S. automakers were destroyed by Japanese (and German) automakers who made better, higher-quality, more efficient cars. American automakers were busy making crappy cars with cheap, plastic parts that would break so that people would have to keep replacing these specialized parts for hundreds of dollars, or have to replace the cars altogether — and management did this intentionally.
U.S. automakers gave us the Pinto and Gremlin in response to demands for more efficient cars, while Japanese and German automakers gave us the indestructible VW, and cars with advertisements showing happy owners who got 200K to 300K out of their fuel-efficient Japanese cars and trucks (with little maintenance to boot).
It was management that brought down the U.S. automakers, not unions.
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By 1969, imports had increased their share of the U.S. auto market, with Volkswagen selling 548,904 vehicles, followed by Toyota with 127,018 vehicles. In response to this, the domestic auto makers introduced new compact and sub-compact cars, such as the Ford Pinto and Maverick, the Chevrolet Vega, and the AMC Gremlin, Hornet and Pacer. (Chrysler had to make do with importing cars from Mitsubishi Motors and their affiliated Rootes Group.) However, design and manufacturing problems infected a number of these cars and led to unfavorable perceptions of the cars.
The auto industry was severely affected by the 1973 oil crisis Arab embargo. Small fuel-efficient cars from foreign automakers took a sharply higher share of the U.S. auto sales market. Under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act[12] the federal government initiated fuel efficiency standards (known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE) in 1975, effective as of 1978 for passenger cars, and as of 1979 for light trucks. For passenger cars, the initial standard was 18 miles per gallon (mpg), and increased to 27.5 mpg by 1985.
