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Walter White drives an aztek, and he's a badass.
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Walter White drives an aztek, and he's a badass.
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Did they also reward failure? That can make upside-down bureaucracy look intelligent.
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@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 wait a second... members of the GOVERNMENT bureaucracy were astonished by the levels of GM's bureaucracy? I didn't think it was possible to be more bureaucratic than the government.
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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.
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@ChrisC1234: You Sir (or Madame) have never seriously had to deal with a large corporate bureaucracy. As someone that has, please note, that the government is not even close to some corporations. Health-care bureaucracy, in particular, is egregious. I won't even go into some longer lived business segments like Hollywood adn energy.
Only in the wildest Aynarchist Randroid fantasies is government the owner of large, ineffective, and incompetent, bureaucracy.
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!
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@ChrisC1234: Well, at least US government.
You should see the bureaucracy in the Indian Government. Oh. My. God. That would shock even the GM people.
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My wife LOVES the Azteks. We were thiiiiiis close to buying one for her back then they first came out. Her favorite part was the optional camping package that included a tent that attached to the back hatch door. *shakes his head*
@osiris73: Ha, that's actually very funny to me. As I was reading your comment I was formulating a joke to make about the camping package. I will shake my head with you, my friend. :-)
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To be honest, I've always regarded the Aztek as a GM trolling the SUV aficionado. As such, I am in full support of such a thing.
@Applekid: This entire situation could be a massive troll and GM's bureaucracy is really Anon with the massive amount of paperwork being ED and 4chan postings in disguise. Somehow this idea has increased my faith in humanity.
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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.
@gqcarrick: One of the descendants of Henry Ford was CEO back in the early 90's. He wanted to start making green fuel efficient or electric cars. The rest of the executive structure wanted to do the SUV route so he stepped down.
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.
@gqcarrick: Thing is, though, there are markets where GM regularly kicks rear- like China (seriously, I have never seen nearly as many Buicks on the road in America as I have in China; also, they confirmed that they were getting their own farkin' pavilion for the World Expo before America as a whole even started getting funding for its own).
@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.
@trujunglist: The Cube is definitely in \"so ugly it's cool\" territory for me. It actually looks better in person than in photos, I think.
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@Orv: I agree with that, but my judgment is suspect because I owned an AMC Gremlin back in 1973.
It was purple.
I really love the Cube...
@trujunglist: @Orv: I have seen the cube in person, I think it looks worse in person, but I suppose that's just me.
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@gqcarrick: Can we please retire the phrase \"Government Motors\" from all use here? I'm not opposed to the politics behind the sentiment so much as the stunning lack of original thought involved. Of course you'll probably call me a \"sheeple\" or something...which will only serve to prove my point.
@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.
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@gqcarrick: Because, similar to the people who type Micro$oft, it makes you appear juvenile to resort to name calling. A lot of people will simply ignore you for this reason.
@Fett101: Although I fear that there might be people who actually think their OS is spelled \"Windoze\". (shakes head)
@gqcarrick: The truth is a little more complicated. Ford got lucky before they got good. They were in deep, deep trouble in 2006 and mortgaged the entirely company for $26 billion. They've made some good decisions since then, but it was touch and go for a while.
@gqcarrick: It wouldn't have been quite so ugly if not for all the plastic cladding that Pontiac slathers onto all of its cars.
And not a mention of how UAW killed GM? Well they own it now...
@uclajd: Explain to me how the union forced them to make crappy cars? If we had full medical in the this country 30 years ago like the rest of the world, there would be no issue with unions. Medical and retirement are the only issues that unions have been pushing for 40 years, now that they're all on top of work safety.
@uclajd: Yep, union executives, union HR \"efficiency experts\" and union buzzword-talkers doomed GM...
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This explains much about why Saturn was killed. A unit producing fuel-efficient cars in a consumer-friendly fashion rather than overpriced SUVs sold by predatory salespeople would threaten the entrenched bureaucracy that GM has become. Even though Saturn's vision would have made GM perfectly positioned today.
Ironically, GM made its original bones being better at speaking to the customer and providing what they both needed and wanted. Sort of like BofA's ugly transformation.
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@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.
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@Trai_Dep: I love my Saturn but more importantly, I loved the Saturn dealership and the service department. I have been through a LOT OF CARS and the Saturn experience made everyone else pale in comparison. I really, really miss them. They treated everyone very well. I never worried about their quality of maintenance work on my car. The dealership service department that works on it now is just like all the rest - doesn't care about the customer.
@Trai_Dep: The basic problem with Saturn is they lost money for pretty much their entire life as a division. GM wasn't going to keep them around as a loss leader forever.
@Orv: Which goes to show how badly GM bungled things. You have to shift your business model to sell Toyota-type cars, which GM was loathe to do. Not when there were ways to figure out how to fit more cupholders into an SUV!
Shame: it would have been nice for them now if they did, huh?
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@Trai_Dep: That much has been known for quite a while. GM left Saturn to die on the vine despite the promise it showed because the bureaucracy couldn't figure out how to accommodate their approach to business.
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Is it me, or did it look like they just pumped an old Ford Escort full of air until it was about to pop?
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Ugly on the outside but a beauty on the inside.
\"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.\"\"
@IfThenElvis: I test drove one, and I must admit it was a very comfortable and spacious vehicle. They're also dirt cheap. I almost considered buying it despite its outward appearance.
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.
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@jc364: Yeah, they were. My aunt and uncle had one briefly, and while it was really comfortable to ride in and had a lot of great interior features, they finally had to get rid of it because it was, in the words of my (engineer) uncle, \"a mechanical nightmare.\"
And I think the stupid Cube is about ten times uglier than the Aztek any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
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@jc364: That's because GMs are uncommonly prone to mechanical failure. I think shitty cars, coupled with the red tape processes, is what killed GM.
@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).
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Hmmm... I don't know what it is since everyone else seems to disagree with me, but I actually LIKE that Aztek.
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Retina thrashing though it was ,the Aztek was NOT the final nail in the General's coffin. Actually , the Az was light years ahead in dependability ,utility and efficiency compared to the junk that GM was shipping in the 70's and 80's , when they began losing customers by the millions (exactly like Sprint is doing currently ,in the wireless market).GM management in essence told unhappy customers to go to hell in those days and many stopped by a Toyota ,Honda or Nissan dealer on the way and discovered that there are great cars made and sold a different way. Many , if not most , never came back. I know this first hand because I am one of those (former) customers.
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.
@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 ?
@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...
@Snarkysnake: This. The reason I wouldn't consider an American-made car has less to do with external design decisions than it has to do with the preponderance of giant, gas-guzzling SUVs. This has thankfully started to change, but the fact that it took massive gas hikes and virtual bankruptcy for these companies to figure out that the age of the SUV has mostly come and gone is still ludicrous to me. There are now some cars from U.S. companies that I would consider purchasing, were I in the market for a new car, but when all they had to offer was yet another giant truck or SUV that got three miles to the gallon... thanks, but no thanks. There was a complete lack of situational awareness and understanding of consumer needs that was just breathtaking when you consider that those are the primary jobs of any company (any company that feels like making money, anyway).
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GM Killed the electric car!
@mexifelio: That's not proper grammar. GM killed *their* electric car. That California mandate should not have existed in the first place.
GM should have been allowed to totally collapse.
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.
What do you call 2 Aztecs in parking lot?
...a lifetime supply.
Disclosure: I drive the hot sister of the Aztec, an element.
@SeattleTed is proud to like Robert Zimmerman: Hot sister? More like the fugly duckling. Or is that the Psion xB?
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But bureaucracy is fun. imagine the joy in doing something like this.
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.
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.
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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.
@ARP: It's a bogeyman. A lot of the people were deceived by the fear-mongers. Those assets were \"toxic\" because they weren't worth anything. We transferred the risk from the banks to the government.
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.
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In the mid 80's our business professor, who worked in the executive offices of GM for a year, talked about the foibles of GM. When they were being told that small cars were wanted by the American public in the 70's they simply looked out their windows at their own parking lots. The execs said, \"No they don't; look at all of the big American cars people are driving.\" Seems that they forgot that their workers got a killer GM car pricing guarantee.
@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...
@quail: That is hilarious. And poignant. It's like the stereotypical way of American thinking. Then, I remind myself that stereotypes didn't get pulled out of thin air; they're usually based on some bit of truth. This anecdote seems 100% spot on: if you don't like the truth, make shit up!
It's a good thing we want to introduce another bureaucracy into our health care system then...
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@RedwoodFlyer: You probably weren't aware of this, but there's already a lot of bureaucracy in healthcare. It's called \"managed care companies.\" I used to work for one of them, and believe me, they're \"bureaucratic.\" Bureaucracies exist in both the private and public sectors ... and those in the private sector are, on average and collectively, no better or worse than those in the public sector. (The extremes of GM's bureaucracy are beyond what's typically found anywhere.)
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.
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@RedwoodFlyer: You're a troll. And I'm going to feed you. I'm going to feed you a nice cup of shut the fuck up.
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.
The best thing about the Aztek is it provides serious competition for the Edsel and some of the American Motors cars for the title of world's ugliest car.
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.
The Pontiac Aztek - it sacrifices you on the altar of stupidity, showing your still-beating heart to you before you die.
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let's add cup holders, and replace the microwave with an AM/FM radio... gentlemen, we've just invented the Pontiac Aztec.
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Epic Bureaucracy ... the federal government is the ultimate.
So please explain why the Obama administration decided to find out these issues AFTER spending a squagillion dollars trying to save the company.
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I love this! And I own an Envoy...all this conflict, just one reader.
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.
@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.
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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.
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...
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Yeah, but if they hadn't made the Astek, we wouldn't have the ugly ass prius design we have today!
@Oranges w/ Cheese has 2 cats! ahahaha.:
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.
@Oranges w/ Cheese has 2 cats! ahahaha.: Actually, the Prius looks the way it does because of aerodynamics. It has a particular profile known as a \"Kammback,\" invented by a German researcher in the 1930s, that makes sure air detaches cleanly from the back of the car. It has almost as much efficiency as an ideal teardrop shape, but is much more practical for road vehicles. You're going to see that look on a lot of cars as fuel economy becomes more important.