"Back in the day, money was spent on ideas"

[michaeld]

I came across this in my paper. Thought it was worth posting:

Title: Back in the day, money was spent on ideas

At a time when General Motors is trying to whittle $9 billion from its operating expenses, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz recalls the days when pinching pennies never crossed anyone's mind.

"In the '60s, design ran this place and a colossal amount of money was spent. Bill Mitchell was head of design at the time and told his crew he wanted the Pontiac Firebird V-8 to sound just like a Ferrari V-12.

"To make his point he bought a V-12 Ferrari, about $50,000 at the time, had the V-12 taken out and put in a Firebird, and then brought in the staff and told them, "This is how a Firebird should sound,'" Lutz said.

The V-12 Firebird still rests in the GM garage.


Question: Do GM's halcyon days when "money was spent on ideas" also speak of Mercedes-Benz and our cars?

[cth350]

nahh, my Uncle John worked at GM in the 60s through to the 90s. The ideas came from visionaries, like Delorian and other individuals. This is the antithesis of a successful company usually, where the bean counters can work on the bottom line and tune how and where the money goes.

A successfuly company might get that right for a while (like the firebird and camaro), but rarely do they hold it together for too long. Rarely does a company stay successful for a long time. It's effectively a controlled crash that has to keep the visionaries going forward and the bean counters keeping it from falling apart and getting the whole thing to stay balanced for the whole time.

At one point GM had 11 layers of management between the guy on the shop floor and the top rungs. That's way too much insulation from day to day afairs for the guys making the decisions, and too little control for the guy on the floor to make an impact.

In contrast, I work at Bloomberg, LP. The company isn't particularly well run, but it's not a complete disaster either. However it is amazing popular as the defacto source of market data and by all the press accounts you read a major cash cow. Could they do it better? Probably, could they do it worse, that's equally probably. However, it's a heck of a lot of fun and the company prides itself its culture of letting the little guys take on responsibilities and take risks.

The tension between the visionaries and the bean counters is one of risk and reward.

-CTH

[POS]

Back in the day, they didn't concentrate so hard on pleasing the stockholders. Hard to spend money building well-designed cars/trucks when you're focused on pleasing the business owners and not the customers. Focus on the customer, and the stockholders will get taken care of.

[300SDog]

Yeah but back in the olden days MB told customers what they want. They literally dictated how cars should be built. Same was true in the USA, when Lee Iacocca designed the Ford Mustang he told people what they want.

[Ara T.]

That story sounds a little off to me, how could they hope for a Firebird V8 that makes max torque at 1800 rpm and revs to 4500 RPM to sound like a Ferrari?

[Dubyagee]

The '53 Corvette is a perfect example of how GM's beancounters almost killed a great idea.

[michaeld]

Originally Posted by POS

Back in the day, they didn't concentrate so hard on pleasing the stockholders. Hard to spend money building well-designed cars/trucks when you're focused on pleasing the business owners and not the customers. Focus on the customer, and the stockholders will get taken care of.

Originally Posted by ellington

Mercedes-Benz measures a car's value not by how it looks but how it works. The engineers, not the stylists, hold the reins. Your investment is repaid by something more tangible than surface dazzle - by the satisfaction of driving a precision machine endowed with every technical advance needed to provide safe, smooth, reliable motoring under all possible weather and road conditions.

For those who find this approach lacking glamor, there is no scarcity of automobiles that can offer glamour galore. But for those who value function over form and engineering over styling tricks, the Mercedes-Benz automobiles in this brochure stand alone. Ostentation may be glamorous; it cannot match the elegance of intelligent design."

Some good points here.
I can't disagree with cth350. Was GM EVER a lean, mean, corporate animal? Not since the world's oldest man was in diapers, they weren't. For the past two generations they have been increasingly burdened by an entrenched management, a fossilized board of directors, and a heavily unionized "that's not in my job description" work force. They are, in short, a bureaucracy - and you gotta have lotsa layers to have one of them.

But, laying that aside, were there better days at GM when bean counting wasn't the corporate policy? Could DeLorian do his hijinks in today's GM environment? I don't think he could.

I believe that in the climate of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, GM had a lot of money. That, in many ways, compensated for their gargantuan size and bureaucracy. There was so much money that the designers and engineers could ask for the moon and get it. Those days - as we all know - are very much long gone. Also, I believe that the mentality of stock-holding has substantially changed: it used to be that one bought stock as a long-term investment, and one was then willing to patiently wait for his investment to grow. Now we have day traders, short-selling, and all kinds of short-term, short-sighted shenanigans that have altered the way the automotive industry can finance its projects. "You want how much to create your vision? Cut that in half, and then cut it in half again. You want how much time to engineer your model? Same answer.

I have never heard a "Bill Mitchell Firebird" near a Ferrari V-12, and have no idea how successful the Pontiac "Hear us roar" project was. But it seems to me that Bob Lutz is using this story to illustrate that bean counting has changed the way cars are designed at GM.

Has it changed the way Mercedes is designed and engineered as well? Do the Japanese "Big 3" (Toyota, Honda, Nissan) have the same constraints? And to what extent has the automotive industry suffered - designing and engineering-wise - because of bean counting?

240dog says that back in the day MB told customers what they want, and literally dictated how cars should be built. I think that is true. And Ellington provides a brochure to say just how MB thought a car should be built. And - and here I try to echo POS - there seems to have been a shift in thinking between building and profits. It seems that the mentality was ordered toward 1) building the best car that best represented the Mercedes vision, and then 2) profitability would take car of itself as their market bought the cars. Is that the way it still is today, or has the order changed to, 1) calculate the potential earnings, and then 2) build a car within the accounting-imposed constraints?

[MunichTaxi]

Mercedes-Benz measures a car's value not by how it looks but how it works. The engineers, not the stylists, hold the reins. Your investment is repaid by something more tangible than surface dazzle - by the satisfaction of driving a precision machine endowed with every technical advance needed to provide safe, smooth, reliable motoring under all possible weather and road conditions.

Just 1 thing I can't comprehend is why the W108 rear axle bearings require pulling the axles to lubricate the bearings. Or are they supposed to last 'forever'?