As a former employee to a supplier of heavy and medium duty truck parts I absolutely can vouche for this bureaucracy in dealing with the heavy/medium duty truck segment (not pickups but heavy delivery truck type segment- think GM Kodiak and Chevy Topkick- think Uhaul, Penske, type truck cabs and chassis).

In 2002, the company I worked for purchased a similar equipment but struggling product lines from a competitor company which was not focused on this type of equipment. We got some good products with some good heavy truck customers, but with this purchase, we also inherited a certain ~bad~ product and truck frame attachment system for the product that was not even close to heavy truck industry standard. Sole customer was GM trucks which somehow had latched onto this product and mounting system even though the option to install this combination was just barely advertised and just an option line on a truck order form. We had to keep making this product and attachment system even though it was at a money loss due to contract terms. Even trucking company end user customers laughed at the bad product - usually removing the product and mount upon it being damaged and replacing it with industry standard products.

My company's sales guy and I went around and around with the GM engineering practically offering our standard product and mounting system for free in order to discontinue production of the bad product and mount.

I was laid off from that supplier company in 2006 but kept up contact with the sales guy. It was ~2008~ when he told me that the supplier had finally gotten GM to discontinue the bad product and mount system by getting GM to adopt a similar function but less expensive competitor product. He said that he was given a high five by the company president when GM switched over since no one cared about losing that minute market share- they just wanted to stop making the money losing bad product and mount system.

So no one can wonder why Toyota's Hino brand trucks are selling so well with issues like this...

@gabrewer: I actually followed some of the marketing back then. GM did, in fact, market the Aztec to the college crowd but it was overpriced for the price point and didn't attract enough of the wealthy college crowd to have mommy and daddy buy it new for them due to its looks with the grey cladding.

Via its original design intent it appeared to have been closer sized to say the Matrix or at least 3/4 the size it ended up. Another feature was that I remember it was supposed to be 2wd and Awd and the AWD didn't make it in the initial roll out. So much for off road...

I remember thinking that dealerships should autowrap it with fashion camo (like blue, pink, etc) and make it more urban assault looking or utility looking. I even mentioned this to a Pontiac salesman at the time and he commiserated that "I don't know if anything could help sell this freakshow." but of course he did nothing.

@quail: One of the auto industry books quoted something like Ford or GM marketing people going to California in the mid 1980's for market research. They asked age 20 something people what they thought about which ever US brand was being researched. The Detroit marketing people had their minds blown when the responses included that some 20 somethings knew nothing about that US brand- ie they had never known anything but Japanese car brands and no family members or friends had a car by that US brand and that some of these 20 somethings reported that they had never ever been in a car made by that US brand.

Failure to understand that from the gilded castles in Detroit led to the downfall...

@u1itn0w2day: This says it all:

"Everyone knew Detroit's reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures," Steven Rattner, head of the task force, wrote recently in Fortune magazine. "Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found."

GM screwed the pooch with the various design sharing that went on in the 1980s. Heck, there was even a tariff to raise the price of Japanese cars in the early 1980s in order to allow US carmakers to "catch up". Only what happened was the US car dealers raised prices to match the Japanese auto's tariff pricing...

@RogerTheAlien: You especially don't want an orphan car with ultra low production volumes that suffers mechanical failures as the aftermarket parts industry will never support parts and repairs for it (other than boutique $$$ brands like high dollar sports cars).

@Trai_Dep: A different kind of car for a company which wanted the same old, same old... of course it was going to die as the margins on SUV and Pickup sales soared while gas prices declined...

versus the Japanese strategy of having all the markets covered.

The funny thing is, the Aztek - under the sheetmetal - wasn't a half-bad vehicle (esp. compared to past vehicles in the Pontiac lineup). Semi-independant aluminum rear suspension? That was cool, actually.

It wouldn't have taken much to make the car better-looking. Removing those god-awful holes in the front above the hood cut line would have been step #1. Then it would have looked a bit like the front end on the new Corrado.

The Aztec may not be pretty, but ugliness doesn't seem to stop a lot of other models from being widely accepted. I recall reading a marketing case study a few years back comparing the Aztec and the Scion (to which my reaction everytime I see one is "some people will drive anything") which basically examined how Scion was able to identify and find it's niche -- mainly younger drivers with a noncomformist bent. GM just threw Aztec out there to see who might buy it.

@Snarkysnake: I think the ' useless junk ' of the 70s & 80s examplifies Detroit's reaction or inaction to the foreign competitors .

What puzzles me to this day after a couple of gas shortages in the 70s and early 80s by the mid 90s Detroit STILL was ignorant enough to base their survivability on a fragile strategy . I would have figured that the executives who were in there 20s & 30s during previous gas shortage where there was rationing or you had to turn off the engine and push your car to pump would have said no to the even the minivans of the 90s .

But aren't bureaucracies SLOW to react because isn't a bureacracy's unwritten priority to preserve the status quo which means in Detroit's case keeping the unions employed/happy and the executives rolling in bonuses/excessivelly high salaries ?

That said ... that you'd use the failings of a private-sector bureaucracy, i.e. GM's, to complain about public-sector bureaucracy — thereby implying that private-sector bureaucracies are somehow "better" than those in the public sector — is paradoxical on its face. If you'd attached this comment to ... say ... an article on the foibles of HCFA, i.e. the government bureaucracy in charge of Medicare ... then this comment would make sense. Tacked onto an article about GM's bureaucracy, though, it doesn't.

It was purple.

I really love the Cube...

@admiral_stabbin: "Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept."

Although there is actually some good a bureaucracy can do (standard process insuring quality of work), it can VERY EASILY get out of control.

So please explain why the Obama administration decided to find out these issues AFTER spending a squagillion dollars trying to save the company.

Nothing irks me more than people who try to inject a thinly veiled highly charged political statement. Grow a pair and grow the fuck up.

@trujunglist: Honestly, the Cube seems to be just following design cues from the Element - which is also a close second to the Aztek. It always looked more like the box a car would come in to me.

And I think the stupid Cube is about ten times uglier than the Aztek any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

What we should have done was let the banks go through the bankruptcy process and sell the assets that had worth to responsible banks. We're not helping anyone by rewarding failure.

Of course, we have to look at why the problem happened in the first place, and that was interest rates kept artificially low by the Federal Reserve. "Artificially" because interest rates change naturally based on the amount of savings -- the more savings in banks, the cheaper it is for them to lend, and vice versa. But as the savings dwindle, the interest rate rises. The Federal Reserve can keep the interest rate low by pumping money into banks.

That's how companies got "leveraged up" in the first place. Without the Federal Reserve manipulating the interest rate, we wouldn't have had a housing bubble.

GM made a very good small car, the Corvair. It had some design issues with its suspension which could have been cured but the Nader bandwagon got the car discontinued. Oddly, it was probably no less safe than the darling of the small car market, the VW Beetle which had a disturbing habit of winding up on its roof.

In any bureaucracy, the principal goal is not to fail, or at least not to be considered the one responsible for the failure. That leads to over-papering everything, taking no risks, and making decisions only when forced to do so. The cars the world loves are the cars made by entrepreneurs who don't give a damn about meetings and paperwork, people like Ferry Porsche and Enzo Ferrari. Even DeLorean had a good idea, but fueling a car with coke was probably a mistake.

I (reluctantly) supported the bank bailouts because a domino failure of our major banks would have been very bad. Also, with a little regulation, they can be profitable again, without creating a systemic risk to our economy.

But I don't think GM needs help getting back on its feet after too much partying. It's a broken organization that seem incapable of changing their ways. Their only reaction seems to be to squeeze their suppliers more and ask the union for more cuts, while making no strucutral changes that are needed. They need to be allowed to die. Use all that bailout money for public works programs to keep people employed and doing something useful. Have them build regional rail, wind farms, solar farms, repair our bridges, etc.

While I don't think bodyside cladding and sloped backs are a good look for vehicles, I have to admire the GM designers who made a tent and a removable center-console cooler options on the Aztek.

How long have you been reading this site? Telecoms/cable companies, airlines, HEALTH INSURANCE, and even some retailers outdo all but the worst aspects of government, and health insurers even beat that.

Hell, even what used to be a specialty of government bureaucracies, multiple agencies with overlapping responsibilities which actually prevent anyone from taking responsibility for anything, has been taken on by financial institutions (see: mortgages where the actual owner cannot be determined).

GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACY is still a conservative talking point, but they've been taking a back seat to private industry for decades.

Someone finally tells it like it is, the corporate culture of fear and greed that pervaded the "old" GM.

Mr. Reuss, current head of global engineering, was serving as the executive in charge of one of the most ridicules cars in G.M. history, the Pontiac Aztec.

The Aztec was half-car, half-van, and universally branded as one of the ugliest vehicles to ever hit the market. Mr. Reuss had little to do with the design, but his job required him to defend it as if it were a thing of beauty.

It was brutal, he said during an interview as he drove, to grit his teeth and pretend that the Aztec was something to be proud of.

Chrysler needs to be put out of their misery. They can't make anything mechanically sound and can't seem to run a business any better.

GM can't evolve and has been burning through cash like a crack addict.

At least Ford had some ability to change directions and not end up at the verge of collapse.

I understand jobs hang in the balance but we have to stop putting money into these clearly failed businesses. Take that money and use it for extended benefits for those who lose their jobs. Or use it as seed money for those employees to buy defunct factories and make something useful like the EV1 or Tesla's sedan.

Only in the wildest Aynarchist Randroid fantasies is government the owner of large, ineffective, and incompetent, bureaucracy.

Suppose you want to redesign the handle for the front doors.

You send in your design plans and through out the 8-16 week process, the letter is reviewed by the letter handling board which then determines that the letter is from someone in the design team and is a valid letter.

the letter is then passed on to a design committee who will review the design change and make changes in order to make the new design more cost effective to do. After 12 weeks of processing, the committee determines that the cheapest way to change implement the new design into the current production line is to not change it at all and keep the original design.

The modified design plans are now sent off to the design board where implementation of the new design can be discussed. The complex legal speak and money speak confuses the design board and after 24 weeks, they end up implementing the design but only they mistook the door handle for car body and now the body of the car looks like a door knob.

The finalized design is sent off to engineering team so they can design the inner workings of the car around the new body. 8 weeks later, a design plan is made.

the finalized design and engineering plans are sent to a marketing and finance department, 30 weeks later, 5 workers are fired for speaking bad of the company and calling the new SUV one of the worst pieces of crap they have ever seen and they were not trained to advertise crap this bad.

A new team is hired and they spend 18 weeks discussing how to advertise the SUV and name it in such a way that it gives less of an impression of, and they come up with this
"now introducing the all new pontiac aztek"

The full range of design plans are sent to the management board who find the new car great and they send the plans off to the assembly line 20 weeks later for the new car to be produced.

The original designer finds the new SUV and is shocked to find that they were able to add an engine and wheels to a door knob, The designer then gets angry to see that his redesign of the doorknobs for the front door was never done and sends in a letter requesting a re-review of his original design plans.

@SeattleTed is proud to like Robert Zimmerman: Hot sister? More like the fugly duckling. Or is that the Psion xB?

@SilverBlade2k: +1

@Paladin_11: Why should we retire the phrase? They took a shit load of money because they couldn't see the writing on the wall. It's sad that one company did so much work to not take money, but it looks like GM and Chrysler saw it coming and didn't care one bit.

@trujunglist: @Orv: I have seen the cube in person, I think it looks worse in person, but I suppose that's just me.

I'm pretty sure Nissan is going for the title with the Cube now though.

@Orv: so Gm actualy beat toyota to the punch, years ahead, even with bureauracy???
just like they did with EV1? before that same bureauracy killed it??

...a lifetime supply.

Disclosure: I drive the hot sister of the Aztec, an element.

Horrible quality, overpriced cars, overpaid workers, extremely overpaid management, producing gas-guzzlers instead of fuel efficient cars until the Japanese did, they scrapped the EV-1 program in favor of SUV's and Hummers, and they haven't done a thing to deserve any government money.

The government should ask for everything back, plus interest, and let GM fail and burn.

Depends on the government. The government was probably surprised because this was a PRIVATE entity and one would assume this would have limited bureaucratic structures. And yes, contrary to the Bush administration, a government should NOT be run as a private corporation and vice-versa.

Bureaucracy =/= bad. It is necessary to run anything, but really, it appears that GM overdid it!

But then I did some more research and found that they can be uncommonly prone to mechanical failures. Or at least the year I was looking at.

Fast forward to the early part of this decade. It was obvious that GM was dangerously dependent on big ,honking ,dreadnought- class SUV's and trucks to make any kind of profit. After 9/11 , the company basically reacted as if gasoline would go down in price instead of up. They doubled down on SUV (and truck ) production ,set up Hummer as a new nameplate and gradually starved Saturn of new product and R&D. It was a perfect storm of stupidity.

GM has basically been selling corporate assets (at a pawn shop discount) for years to keep the ship afloat and the bonuses flowing. When they ran out of money , the cynical bastards stuck you and I with the bill.

@Rectilinear Propagation:

My guess is "no" and then two swear words.

"The Aztek had among the highest CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) scores in its class, and won the appellation of "Most Appealing Entry Sport Utility Vehicle" in 2001 from J.D. Power and Associates, an independent consumer survey organization who noted: "The Aztek scores highest or second highest in every APEAL component measure except exterior styling.""

[en.wikipedia.org]

Seriously, I still can't figure out what NFS means in your comment.

Government Motors should have been left to collapse. Ford saw what was coming and they prepared for it, Chrysler and GM should have done the same thing!

And yes, the Aztek is HORRIFIC! It doesn't regularly get voted the ugliest car ever made for no reason.

You should see the bureaucracy in the Indian Government. Oh. My. God. That would shock even the GM people.