The part about Lee Iacocco introducing the Mustang reminded me about this passage from
In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters by Merrill R. Chapman
> In the auto industry, a classic example is the Ford Falcon. The brainchild of "whiz kid" Robert McNamara, the Falcon was designed from the get-go as a "people's car." In other words, it couldn't go very fast, it got good gas mileage, and it was economical to run. Extolling these virtues was the car's deliberately plug-ugly design, one that proclaimed the vehicle was in the service of the lumpen proletariat, those who only drive and serve. The lumpen proletariat didn't appreciate the sentiments the Falcon reflected, and although people who couldn't afford anything more bought the Falcon, they drove the car without joy and bought few of the optional accessories that made selling the car profitable.
> On the other hand, the Ford Mustang when it was released in 1964 was a phenomenon, and Ford couldn't make enough of them to meet demand. Mustangs were fun, sexy, and desirable. Mustang owners were intelligent and cool people with a great sense of value, the type of folks you wished would invite you to a barbecue at their place. Of course, the Mustang also wouldn't go very fast (though it looked like it could), got good gas mileage, and was very economical to run. This is because it was, underneath its alluring sheet metal, nothing more than a reskinned Ford Falcon. But by dint of good design and the addition of key features that proclaimed the car wasn't for old farts (such as a snazzy steering wheel and bucket seats) and sporty options (such as high-profit, high-performance engines), the Mustang became a car you could aspire to whereas the Falcon was just a cheap set of wheels.
Bobby Baker, who was one of Lyndon Johnson's closest aides, had this to say about Robert McNamara (who was Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War):
"The biggest disaster in the history of this country was [Robert] McNamara. Henry Ford was my good friend and he said, “The best thing that ever happened to me was getting rid of that bastard.” He almost wrecked Ford back then, and he really wrecked the Defense Department. The Vietnam War - President Johnson did not know how to get out - that was the greatest tragedy of his Presidency."
If you believe that the tragedy of the Vietnam war was due to one man, I have a bridge to sell you. The sheer hyperbole of saying that greatest disaster in American history was a single man should make you immediately question the speaker. Note that this quote was from a 2009 interview - so Baker had Nixon, 9/11, Iraq/Afghanistan and all the other much, much darker times in American history to choose from.
I would also reject that the idea that he was a particularly bad actor in the Vietnam War. There were so many presidents and generals that didn't realize what was happening and messed things up royally. Just read about how out of touch Westmoreland was. This is like blaming the goalie or the kicker for losing a game when it's actually the combined efforts of the whole team over the entire game that wins or loses a match.
The other speaker in the quote is Ford - who we should note is called by Iacocca as 95% jerk - apparently, he didn't get along with anybody.
Other people credit McNamara and his fellow Air Force buddies as turning Ford around after World War II. Wikipedia even says that Henry Ford II made him president (although it was only for 5 weeks).
(I'm not a defender of McNamara, but I also think this lopsided view of him is unjustified - we need to have nuance in the way we view people)
I agree with you -- I just think it's funny how these two completely different sources dunked on McNamara. Bobby Baker seems like he wanted to redeem his image (and Lyndon Johnson's image, too, I think), so you can see this as an attempt to shift blame.
Baker is himself a pretty fascinating figure for a peep into the insane corruption of mid-20th century US politics. Basically the fella was a pimp who ran a private intel/blackmail service using his ladies.
> insane corruption of mid-20th century US politics
Not sure things have changed that much in the meantime, to be honest. Nowadays you've got the US Dept. of Education being run by the sister of the guy that runs one of the biggest and most despicable mercenary companies in the world, and regarding sex-related blackmail I still regard the escort-related thing that happened to Eliot Spitzer as a blatant set-up. If it matters I'm not an American and I've never set foot in the States, these are just my opinions on the American political life as seen from half a world away.
I agree with you completely (as an American), and I always bring up Bobby Baker specifically to get fellow Americans thinking in this direction. I mean, this is known -it's even in his Wikipedia entry. Imagine all the filthy tricks going on elsewhere in the modern day with small recording devices. Spitzer was probably a setup. I also look at Dennis Hastert as being controlled by someone. He was eventually convicted of money laundering to cover up raping a young boy. American media acted like it never happened!
What about Dominique Strauss Kahn as president of the IMF at the time. People in finance where referring to a certain position in the market as the London whale.
Yes, I remember this. I wonder what a proper historian would do with modern life? Court intrigues didn't go away with Royalty: they just more pervasive. Yes, I feel like a prophet mentioning this before Epstein was arrested again....
I don't really think it was as dramatic as you're making it sound - the Ford Falcon sold 1 million cars in the first two years, and the Ford Mustang sold 1 million cars in 18 months. The Falcon continued to be sold for years afterwards, and it appears that there are many enthusiasts who would reject the definition of the styling as plug ugly.
Also, if you read the article, it makes it sound like McNamara understood Iacocco's genius salesmanship, and promoted him into a position he could be effective.
In the same article, it talks about how Iacocco was president during the Pinto debacle, so it would seem that he had both successes and failures.
Overall, I think we need to have a little more balanced view than a simplified retelling of history that says that Iacocco was a hero and McNamara was a tone-deaf robot. Both contributed greatly to Ford and both had their blind spots.
Similar distaster (like Falcon) happened in India with Tata Nano. It was touted as India's "cheapest" car. It definitely was the most economical car ever introduced and there was lot of hype of how it was going to enable 4-wheels for every household.
Except nobody bought. A car is more than its functionality. It is also a symbol.
Curiously, in the Soviet Union the Volga - the Soviet copy of the Ford Falcon - was the most desired car of all. An ordinary citizen had nearly no chance of acquiring one because most went to party functionaries, government organizations, and, for some reason, taxicabs.
I drove a Falcon to high school one year. It was a perfectly fine car, it got very decent mileage for that day, and one could comfortably get in and out of the back, which I don't think was the case for Mustangs.
On the other hand, Steve McQueen never chased bad guys through San Francisco in a Falcon...
Outside of the US, the Falcon continued to be mass-produced in a number of international markets (and in some, like Australia, became wildly popular) and one of those markets was Argentina where it was used by both the police and paramilitary death squads which I assume is what the reference was to.
Passage from an ebook by Charlie Cook (The New Profit Rules):
> Lee Iacocca became president of the near-bankrupt Chrysler Corporation in 1978 with an ambitious recovery plan. Had he approached Chrysler’s problems sequentially – making cuts in operations, then making changes in marketing, next making improvements in product lines - the company would have been belly up long before his full plan went into effect.
> Instead, Iacocca took on every problem at once; firing inept management and replacing with his own trusted team, putting two new untested products on the road at once, offering a new, better warranty without possibly knowing what the future cost could be to the company, even placing himself in the company’s commercials as pitchman.
> Iacocca’s understanding of the critical need for speed is exemplified in one classic story. In 1981, no major American car manufacturer had built a convertible car for five years. Sensing an opportunity, Iacocca asked his lead engineer how long it would take to make a convertible for him to test a new convertible. The answer? Three years.
> Iacocca didn’t understand why it should take so long. It would take him 4 hours to take a chainsaw to a sedan and end up with a convertible, he said. Within a few days, Iacocca had a freshly-topless car to drive around to see if women would stare at him (his key indicator). They did, and the LeBaron convertible was born. It was a huge success, selling 21,000 units over projection in the first year.
Most Americans may not realize it, but Iacocca was a hero to many international younger generation kids -especially engineers, mainly because his book Iacocca was the first inside glimpse of a top american car company with a story of a hero operator vs owner. The book can still be found on the streets of any developing country. RIP!
My wife and I identify thrift stores, in part, by the number of copies of "Iacocca" (his autobiography) that are on the shelf. ("This one has a high Iacocca coefficient...") I suppose I should actually read it at some point. Maybe this is a good occasion to do so.
(I tried reading "Future Shock", our other perennial thrift store classic, and couldn't make it thru.)
> My wife and I identify thrift stores, in part, by the number of copies of "Iacocca" (his autobiography) that are on the shelf.
Another thrift store metric is the number of copies of "Jerry Maguire" VHS tapes. A video performance group called Everything Is Terrible has collected over 15,000 Jerry Maguire tapes. They've hosted pop-up video stores that only rent Jerry Maguire. Their new project is raising $500,000 to build a Jerry Maguire pyramid in the desert.
Thank you for the Mustang, Lee! I had a '67, and adored that car. It looked great, was easy to work on, and I had to have one after a high school buddy offered me a ride in his, and he promptly floored it. Wow! I burned up a lot of tires on mine.
All the fellows had a muscle car, or was trying to get one. What a great time to be in high school! None of these silly "boom cars" or whatever.
I think we're looking at Mr. Iacocca with some rose-tinted glasses. He sought government bailouts, fought against requiring seatbelts in cars (because a few dollars worth of nylon would "ruin" his margins), and also fought against environmental standards, particularly requiring catalytic converters (to be fair, catalytic converters probably did ruin his margins).
He is definitely an icon, but do not forget that he was a cutthroat businessman that would do anything to make sure his businessed thrived.
That link isn't very fair, in 1956, he pushed ford to roll out safety as a sales point, they got plowed over by GM that year, and determined rightly, that safety doesn't sell. He was in favor of seat belts, opposed to airbags (I still think airbags have a poor rate of return - dollars for lives saved).
Please don't do that. Although airbags are much less controversial now than when they were first introduced, there is still legitimate debate about cost vs benefit, especially given that airbags themselves are quite capable of causing injury.
No, the debate is fine of course. But you framed your question as an oblique attack, implying some sort of ethical deficiency on the part of the parent. It presumes the least charitable interpretation of Aloha's comment -- that they are doing nothing more than comparing lives to dollars using a binary criteria.
In reality, the debate over mandating safety technology is nuanced and not at all straightforward. Airbags are a great example. Yes they save a lot of lives, no question. But they're also explosive devices aimed at your head from two feet away, which can easily add tens of thousands of dollars to your hospital bill. Ask all the folks whose wrists are broken by airbags that deploy in otherwise relatively minor fender benders. Never mind the fact that airbags are a lethal threat to small or frail people like kids and the elderly and disabled.
Airbags themselves are quite expensive. They add thousands of dollars to the purchase price of a new car, and they cost thousands of dollars to replace, if their deployment didn't cause your insurance company to total your car, which it frequently does.
I keep only liability insurance on my car, because that's what I can afford, but that also means I probably can't afford to fix my car even after a minor accident if the airbags deploy. I appreciate the airbags' protection in the event of a catastrophic wreck, but I also live in just a little bit of fear of them because they can conceivably total my car and break my arms if I get rear-ended. It happens often enough that there are attorneys who have built careers on airbag lawsuits.
So yeah, there's lots of room for argument here, and no surprise that there are strong feelings about it. And it also shouldn't surprise you that passive-aggressive comments to the tune of, "So exactly how much is a life worth to you?" might get you frowned at a little.
It was a valid question to the statement. He's saying the costs are too high for the safety they provide. Obviously this is categorically false on its face, considering car companies wouldn't use them if they didn't save lives.
Secondly, I welcome a debate, instead all I got, before this last fine post, was you asking me to "please stop." and little else added to the conversation that isn't already obvious. My statement may have been a loaded question, but it was certainly not a passive aggressive statement on the order of politely being asked to sod off.
Car companies use then because they are mandated to do so - when they were offered an an optional thing in the early to mid-70's virtually no one bought them.
Airbags were mandated because not enough people wore seatbelts.
I'm not saying airbags are worthless, they're not - they work, but is the reduced injury in most cases worth the cost? I don't know - when worn with a Seat Belt, Airbags don't generally save lives, but they reduce injury level - the core issue is, we pass regulations with the idea that everything we do ought to be perfectly safe.
A good example is backup cameras, a backup camera adds somewhere between 250 and 1000 dollars of cost to a car, yet only about 200 people or so a year are killed in such a way that they might have been prevented by backup cameras. We sell 17 million cars a year or so every year, which means, the added cost of backup cameras is somewhere between 4.25 and 17 million dollars a year - meaning assuming the regulation 100% effective, we spend 21,250 to 85,000 dollars per death prevented - most of which could be prevented if the operator of the vehicle just did a walk around before pulling out of a parking space. Is that 17 million a year well spent? Airbags lead to a similar set of questions, is the cost injuries prevented enough to offset the cost of the airbags?
I don't know, I would suggest we should be asking these questions, rather than just scream 'for the children' and put another rule in place - because in the end all of these rules add a cumulative cost - and the poor pay it first. Bear in mind, I'm not suggesting we get rid of all emissions and safety standards for everything, I'd just like some more choices in what I find acceptable for my personal risk level - I, for example, might not buy a car with 16 airbags or however many you can get now - I might chose to only buy an option with two airbags, or none at all (one of my cars is without airbags). Similarly I might chose a backup camera as an option, because it will save me body damage when backing in or out of parking spaces - but I should still get that choice.
You've broken the site guidelines in quite a few comments today. We ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in its intended spirit? We'd be grateful.
I'll concede your point and try to be more pleasant, but you definitely need to put a stop to these passive aggressive commentators. May I suggest a new rule to that effect?
In your original comment you never mention bank bailouts. A far more appropriate comparison would be the more recent bailouts of US automakers in which the TARP loans were all repaid. Granted, the partial ownership of the companies that the government took on during the bailout resulted in a loss- but I'm not sure if it would have been more appropriate for the government to hold the stock until it recovered.
TARP was primarily about the banks, but the money authorized was expanded to cover automakers as well. The government made a profit on it overall, and both the bank and auto parts were profitable.
The problem with TARP was the government should have got a lot more equity in return for what it provided (for example, Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffett also invested, and got better terms, but the government's impact was even greater, and should have gotten as good terms, if not even better ones than Buffett and Goldman).
GM bondholders, many of them retirees, were also screwed. The govt overrode traditional bondholder priority in restructuring, in favor of the union. This was wrong.
I think the comparison to bank bailouts is fair: in his autobiography, Iacocca complained that he had to go to Congress to get a billion dollar loan, but the Federal Reserve routinely loaned similar amounts to banks (although I don’t know how well he understood banking, so his definition of loans to banks may have been unfair).
The bailout that Iacocca oversaw didn't cost taxpayers anything. Those were loan guarantees; the federal gov't essentially co-signed a loan from Manufacturers Hanover (now JPMorgan-Chase). At no time was public money given, only risked if the loan defaulted.
“He was widely credited with saving the company from bankruptcy by persuading Congress in 1980 to approve federal loan guarantees of up to $1.5 billion.”
Loans that were repaid. Compare and contrast to the bank bailouts, which were used to give bonuses to the very execs who ruined the banks in the first place.
Of course, the government should have gotten a much better return for the risk they took, but for a program that has been reviled as $600bn giveaway, and is remembered that way, a $100bn profit is an incredible gain.
Yes, but this is an uncomfortable truth for those that want to blame banks for the 2008 collapse (especially ignoring the federal mandates that they make a lot of the loans behid the 2008 collapse).
Henry Ford II really did Chrysler a favor by firing Lee Iacocca but also in firing Hal Sperlich who came up with the minivan concept while at Ford that Henry Ford did not like at all. Needless to say he was hired by Chrysler and given the green light to produce it on the K car platform that was the platform to save Chrysler
Now I cannot find backing for this story, I seem to recall at the introduction of one of the new models, perhaps the minivan, the door handle either did not work or detached.
One of the other things that Iacocca did, which I don't see mentioned as often, was the acquisition of AMC from Renault.
Lee wanted the Jeep brand; IIRC Hal Sperlich and others didn't think it was worth it, but Lee got his way. Along with the Cherokee, Wrangler & Wagoneer, they also got the highly-underrated AMC design and engineering teams.
What I found fascinating about that was how well the corporate integration was handled-AMC/Jeep wasn't run as a separate subsidiary for very long, and AMC people were integrated into roles of responsibility in the new organization, and products gradually began to incorporate components from both prior companies.
Compare that with GM, which owned Adam Opel for almost ninety years without fully integrating its operations, or the way Daimler handled its merger with Chrysler....
The first car I drove was a 1964.5 white fast-back mustang that my dad refurb'ed in the late 80's, with me being his "shop gopher". I remember to this day the sound of that engine firing up when I was behind the wheel. Even though it sounded the same as every other time it started, it still felt other-worldly. The gas pedal had that slight resistance to it, so when I pressed harder and the raw power pushed me back into that seat, the exhilaration felt has rarely been matched all these years later.
In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters by Merrill R. Chapman
> In the auto industry, a classic example is the Ford Falcon. The brainchild of "whiz kid" Robert McNamara, the Falcon was designed from the get-go as a "people's car." In other words, it couldn't go very fast, it got good gas mileage, and it was economical to run. Extolling these virtues was the car's deliberately plug-ugly design, one that proclaimed the vehicle was in the service of the lumpen proletariat, those who only drive and serve. The lumpen proletariat didn't appreciate the sentiments the Falcon reflected, and although people who couldn't afford anything more bought the Falcon, they drove the car without joy and bought few of the optional accessories that made selling the car profitable.
> On the other hand, the Ford Mustang when it was released in 1964 was a phenomenon, and Ford couldn't make enough of them to meet demand. Mustangs were fun, sexy, and desirable. Mustang owners were intelligent and cool people with a great sense of value, the type of folks you wished would invite you to a barbecue at their place. Of course, the Mustang also wouldn't go very fast (though it looked like it could), got good gas mileage, and was very economical to run. This is because it was, underneath its alluring sheet metal, nothing more than a reskinned Ford Falcon. But by dint of good design and the addition of key features that proclaimed the car wasn't for old farts (such as a snazzy steering wheel and bucket seats) and sporty options (such as high-profit, high-performance engines), the Mustang became a car you could aspire to whereas the Falcon was just a cheap set of wheels.