Reddit reviews Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business

I read Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, which is a surprisingly informative rant about that episode in history.

Lutz chalks it up to:

• GM's arrogant belief that people would buy its cars no matter what
  
• Fuel economy mandates, which forced the Big 3 to hastily reengineer their automobile platforms to be comparable to Japanese cars
  
• Perverse incentives and bloat at every level of GM management, aligning the business around efficiently delivering cars nobody wants to buy
  
  A good anecdote on the last subject is the paint on GM cars. GM had switched to a more matte finish, because it hid small bumps and imperfections. This improved metrics for paint job defects, but made the cars less attractive overall, and thus reduced sales.

I'm betting on this as well.

If you want some insight into how stupid and bureaucratic car companies can be, read Bob Lutz's Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business. He tells a great story about his time at Ford (I think). One of the models had used poor quality head gaskets that were failing after 15-20K miles (which is a $1K repair for the customer). When Lutz tried to get it fixed, he was told they couldn't fix it, because the company had already worked the revenue from the replacement parts into its annual budget.

A lot of people are answering your question, but I think i can add a different perspective on it so I'll take a stab at it, if you're interested in some automotive history. It does have a lot to do with the GOP being aligned with American business interests, but I would argue that the groundwork for the climate change denial movement was laid out in the response to the 1975 Cafe Laws This was a law that forced American Automotive manufacturers to consistently improve the average fuel economy of their fleet over time. This had the concurrent effect of forcing the American automakers to spend huge amounts of money trying to develop new engine and transmission technology that could meet the strict fuel economy standards. Meanwhile in nations like Germany and Japan where fuel was much harder to come by, their automakers had already been making reliable, fuel efficient cars. This created a catastrophe in the American markets when suddenly Toyota's and Volkswagen's started to be imported en masse as demand for fuel efficant vehicles skyrocketed. And at least at the economy car level these imports were completely superior in terms of efficiency and reliability when compared to their American counterparts; which were often sub-par products pushed to market simply to offset the low fuel economy of the gas guzzling family cars. You can see this difference in cars like the Chevy Chevette a terrible little car that has been all but forgotten, and the [Toyota Corolla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Corolla_(E30) which was the tip of the spear in Toyota's plan to penetrate the American market, and a nameplate that still survives today.

Now at this point you might be asking what all of this has to do with climate change denial so I'll cut to the chase. Climate change laws often force manufacturers to buy expensive new equipment and make disruptive changes to their processes, not just in Auto manufacturing but in all forms of industrial production. Bob Lutz who was an executive at Chrysler and later GM, when talking about the history of American car manufacturing in his book attributes these costly changes to what would amount to a dark age for American auto manufacturing in the 70's and 80's, era's defined by bad cars, huge quantities of layoffs, and government bailouts. In a more recent (and much less articulate) example of this logic you see our old friend Donald Trump declaring that Global warming is a Chinese hoax in order to make American business less competitive; and while I've never heard the Chinese Hoax part of that before, the conspiracy to make American business non competitive is a line of logic that has been kicked around in the business world for a while, by people much smarter than Donald Trump.

So in the end the typical republican stance of denying climate change goes much deeper than just fossil fuel company bribes. A massive part of their constituency has, and would suffer immensely from climate change laws. This is further complicated by the fact that its not just business that suffer but also regular people, in the form of layoffs and tax money being spent on bailouts. And in a job market where finding a decent paying job can be a real bitch, its easy to see why this logic resonates with so many people, manufacturing jobs pay decently well, and one could argue that they built the middle class in this country once upon a time; and the people who have these jobs are going to be opposed to having their lifestyle disrupted.

Therefore in order to make people understand that climate change is a real problem that must be dealt with, we must also concoct a system that protects jobs and our economy, and that is so much easier said than done.

Related.

Bob Lutz, who was President of Chrysler during the Neon years, wrote a book called Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business. If there was a car that represented this battle better than the Neon, I couldn't think of it.

For the most part, the Neon was fun to drive. The engineers made sure of that, especially if you got the five speed. It was lightweight, tossable, and had razor sharp cornering.

Then why was it such a piece of junk? The accountants decided that this car would be less expensive than the Japanese cars. Why? I'm not sure. The reason the Japanese cars were cheaper were due to a weak yen / strong dollar in the mid-90s as well as lower wages. But most importantly, the reason why the Japanese could sell the exact same car for less was due to lean manufacturing and good supplier relations.

Chrysler did not have lean manufacturing, good supplier relations, or a weak yen. Thus, to compete on price, they had to make the car a piece of junk. And they succeeded at this. Cut a dollar here by making the head gaskets as cheap as possibly. Cut a dollar there by making sure the weather stripping is ineffective. Cut multiple dollars by putting in a three speed automatic. Basically, Chrysler took a car that could have been a game changer and turned it into a low-price abomination that helped ruin Chrysler's reputation for the next two decades.

I can't help but wonder how different Chrysler's destiny would have been if management focused on their engineering strength instead of trying to compete on price. I always wondered if Bob Lutz was named CEO instead of President, what would have been different...

Excellent book. I also recommend this one by Bob Lutz

If you want to read a little about why some people don't put much faith into MBAs you should read this pretty short book.

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters

A lot of business majors deal with finance and as such their brains only see numbers, they tend to not be product/service focused.

This can lead to all sorts of issues if you don't at least pay a little attention to those things.

http://www.amazon.com/Car-Guys-vs-Bean-Counters/dp/1591846226