Elsewhere in Dreams

My industry is in large part driven by automotive sales. So when I say that General Motors deserves to die, I say it despite the negative impact it will have on my well-being.

But it really does deserve to die. Much like Chrysler deserved to die (but got government money instead) and now appears to be ready to die again (or more likely get government money instead).

General Motors has been manufacturing cars that are less reliable, less enjoyable, less comfortable, and less well-engineered than its Japanese counterparts for decades now. Decades! They’ve had this long to re-engineer, re-tool, re-design, and re-brand. They’ve had their chance. They’ve made vehicles that fewer and fewer people actually want to buy, and while their Japanese competition have been putting out solid vehicle after solid vehicle, General Motors has been chasing market trends around and failing time after time to actually catch those trends. When the market wants small cars, GM invests in SUVs, pickups, and crossover utility vehicles; when the market wants SUVs, pickups, and crossover vehicles, GM has just figured out that they’ve made a few too many small cars.

Contrast this approach to Toyota, who practically created the hybrid market before oil even reached sky-high prices earlier this year! Toyota is predicting or creating markets, while GM is (unsuccessfully) chasing them around. And while GM tries desperately to re-tool, Toyota has cornered the market.

It must have come as a shock to Toyota when GM announced the Chevy Volt, it really must have. GM doing something before the Japanese? Unheard of. Yet the Volt is still — still! — just a concept car without a marketable prototype.

The one single GM product that could spark some life into its flaccid branding, and it’s not even a production car, or even close. The one thing. All the while GM has to decide what to do with its insane pension and medical load, deal with cratering sales in the US market, production costs that haven’t gone down due in large part to ridiculous collective bargaining agreements with unions who have done more harm (by far!) than good, and a general public who sees them mostly as a cheaper, crappier alternative to the Japanese brands.

I think we got into this mess with a lot of short-term thinking. A lot, a lot of short-term thinking. I think we got into this mess because GM has been chasing the market instead of being the market. GM has never learned how to do something well and keep doing it well. Toyota, who used to be a joke of a brand, has consistently proven that it wants to — even if it’s just perception and not reality, even with that caveat — do something well. Whether it does or not is a good question, but whether or not it does is moot, since people think it does. That’s all that matters.

Honestly, I wouldn’t buy a GM vehicle any more. My wife’s Sunfire is a testament to the general inattentive and slovenly design and manufacturing practices GM is rightly known for: it’s neither fun to drive, nor nice to look at, nor able to drive 10,000 km without something or other failing, nor worth anything at resale. It seems designed by gorillas, engineered by apes, put together by monkeys, and generally not worth two bananas.

If my own GM experience has been that bad, is it any surprise that that the public at large are now voting with their dollars and saying that their experience has been that bad too?

General Motors deserves to die. It probably won’t: the governments of our various countries will prop up the guttering skeleton until Ford, GM, and Chrysler together are a third of what GM was ten years ago, because we as MPD socialist/capitalist countries seem to believe in privatizing profits and nationalizing losses. But at the end of the day GM richly deserves to be consigned to the dust-heap of history, as hard as that may be to see.

Laura and I have three cats. We can’t have children right now — or are actively preventing it, I should say, using methods uniformly more effective than those I have seen lead to some interesting child-rearing experiences — so we have cats instead.

I love our cats in an abstract way. They’re not people. They’re more like objects. They definitely have minds of their own, and do things that make even children seem logical and tame by comparison.

Nothing, however, prepared me for today. Today was The Great Dashboard Caper.

Laura was taking our second cat, Qubit — named after the quantum bit; and yes, she decodes 128-bit SSL in her spare time, if it’s covered in gravy — to the vet to have her claws yanked out and her uterus disposed of. Laura was carrying her in the usual cardboard carrying case, the same one we’ve had since we had the cats. Little did she know that Qubit had gnawed her way through the cardboard, planning an elaborate escape from the vet, an escape that eventually led to her wedging herself up in the car, behind the glove compartment, so far up that we could barely touch her when we reached in to see if she was still alive.

All attempts to extricate her failed. She seemed absolutely stuck. She didn’t want food, she didn’t want treats, and she most certainly seemed not to want her female bits tossed in the trash.

Ten hours later I was home from work, Qubit still stuck behind the glove compartment. I decided to do the inevitable and remove the glove compartment. Now, General Motors, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make our entire dashboard out of one gigantic piece of molded plastic, held in place with alternating Torx bolts and regular hex screws. I headed to Home Depot to buy some Torx drivers — I’ve never had to take a car apart before, you see — and an adjustable wrench.

Finally, I gave up. There was no way I was going to do it. So I took the car to Canadian Tire and they took out the airbag, revealing… balled-up cat. I performed the cattectomy the only way I knew how: By pulling really, really hard. She finally popped out of the hatch only to immediately dig her claws deep into my forearms. I crammed her into the new plastic case Laura had bought, and left to get myself some scotch.

She’s currently running around the house, a little jazzed from all the excitement, but seemingly in good spirits.

Now… she back to peeing in our plants. Way to go!