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2 days and 7 hours ago
pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/opinion-editorial/"
rel="tag"Opinion/Editorial/a/pimg width="210" vspace="4" hspace="4" height="220" border="0"
align="right" alt=""
src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/eagle-tara-armchair_opt.jpg" /We'll be
hearing more about the Detroit 3 in the mainstream media this week as their homework entitled "What
I Would Do With My Share of $25 Billion in Government Loans" gets turned in to Congress. While
Detroit deserves much of the ribbing that's on the way, it irks our ears every time we read an
op-ed piece from folks who flat-out do not know what the Hell they're talking about. Take Karen
Wagner, whose opinion letter was published by the a
href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-081118wagner_briefs,0,6629816.story"Chicago
Tribune/a in which she claims that Ford should cancel launching the 2010 Mustang in order to
receive federal loans. There are not enough appendages on the human body to count the reasons why
that is a stupid idea, let alone an entirely unrealistic one. In her reasoning, she seems to
believe that selling fuel efficient vehicles would equal a healthy, profitable automaker and
therefore save millions of jobs, while not realizing that the Mustang has done infinitely more to
help Ford's bottom line than the Escape Hybrid.br /br /Then there's entrepreneur extraordinaire
Michael Arrington, co-editor of Tech Crunch, who claims in a recent a
href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/29/a-modest-proposal-for-the-auto-industry-stop-building-cars/"op-ed
piece/a that what works for the tech industry will work for autos, too. His idea is that auto
companies should outsource all production of their vehicles to third-party companies just like
Apple does with the iPod. He also criticizes the auto industry for its business model of vertical
integration, questioning why there isn't an Intel of engine manufacturers that sells to all the
automakers. Well, guess what Mike, the Apple model doesn't work for everybody (it didn't work for
Apple in the early '90s) and there are a tens of thousands more parts in a car than an iPod that
might make outsourcing their production to the lowest bidder a logistical nightmare. br /br /While
it's easy to dog on the domestics for the sorry shape in which they find themselves, don't listen
to every Karen and Michael out there who voice their ill-informed opinions on how things ought to
be. There are such a myriad of factors that have contributed to the current state of the Detroit 3,
some of which is their fault and some (like bad mortgages ruining the credit market) which aren't,
that there just is no silver bullet fix beyond continuing to lower costs and building better
products. br /br /[Source: a
href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-081118wagner_briefs,0,6629816.story"Chicago
Tribune/a, a
href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/29/a-modest-proposal-for-the-auto-industry-stop-building-cars/"Tech
Crunch/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/opinion-stop-arm-chair-quarterbacking-the-auto-industry/"OPINION:
Stop arm-chair quarterbacking the auto industry/a originally appeared on a
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Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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