Whoops.

[thebitterguy]

Well, between MGK.com and multiplexer, I almost feel sorry for not buying a shitty American car.

"Sure you got a safe and fuel efficient vehicle. But now the world will be plunged into a new dark age! Ha ha ha!"

Comments

[gurudata.livejournal.com]

Hiho,

I wonder if this is how the world reacted when Packard and Studebaker and AMC bit it. Or, you know, when the Kerosene and horse-and-buggy and blacksmith industries died off... Meh...

CU,
Andrew

[thebitterguy]

I don't know if those companies/industries accounted for 10% of the employment in the country, though.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

And while there are other companies right inside our own borders wanting to capitalize on the situation...the situation re: ZENN just galls me to no end. They've got the perfect product to ride this particular wave, but Ottawa and Washington still seem wedded to Detroit's Big Three.

[autobotsrollout.livejournal.com]

ZENN doesn't have shit. Their car is the perfect example of environmental design ignoring practical needs. It's theoretically supposed to be a second car for families, but the ZENN has room for one passenger if you don't want to pack anything, meaning that Mom can't take along her baby grocery shopping.

Really, it's a fundamentally stupid company and not investing in them was the right way to go.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Never heard of prototyping, scaling-up et al.?

[autobotsrollout.livejournal.com]

If ZENN didn't present their cars as a consumer-ready product - and they do - this might be a point. As it is, I have precisely zero faith in them; their entire business plan screams "give us a research grant" rather than "we want to make money ourselves," and while I don't have a problem with research grants, I do have a problem with people aiming to get them in place of actually doing the work themselves in the first place.

[gurudata.livejournal.com]

Hiho,

Are 10% employed by the auto industry as a whole, or specifically by the big three?

Cu,
Andrew

[thebitterguy]

GM employs 2.5 Million people. It would take down that many again in ancilliary businesses.

edit: It appears that these numbers are different from what I can readily find, but it is the 9th largest corporation in the world. That can't go down without a few ripples.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Damn. All that time we could have spent building up the infrastructure and job counts of viable competitors and the Big Detroit Three made us waste it with their lobbying.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Wunnerful. Do the right thing, and watch it screw up everyone around you in the end?

Time to fix things so that life doesn't keep doing that to us.