How screwed are the Big Three?
From Jon Gertner's NYT Magazine piece on the success of Toyota:
The biggest-selling vehicle in the United States is not the Camry (448,445 sold last year) or the Accord (354,441) but Ford F-Series trucks (796,039). Not far behind in sales are the full-size trucks from Chevrolet. These are among the most lucrative consumer products around, yielding anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 in profit for every unit sold. “To the American automakers, that’s their bread and butter,” Jeff Liker, from the University of Michigan, explains. “They break even on passenger cars, lose money on small cars. But all their profits come from large S.U.V.’s and trucks. For the American auto companies, this is the last hill that they dominate.”
And if the new model Toyota Tundra breaks through? And if Americans really do stop buying big trucks?
The other thing I note about Gertner's article is that it contains almost nothing about Toyota's labour situation, other than to mention that its factories aren't unionized and it has only 1600 American retirees (hardly surprising since its first US-made car hit the market in 1986). Toyota's relatively progressive environmental R&D program and customer-service-oriented mentality are important, but what's the cost in terms of worker benefits? Maybe negligible or at least worth it, but Gertner's article doesn't give much information to base an opinion on. They never do.
The biggest-selling vehicle in the United States is not the Camry (448,445 sold last year) or the Accord (354,441) but Ford F-Series trucks (796,039). Not far behind in sales are the full-size trucks from Chevrolet. These are among the most lucrative consumer products around, yielding anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 in profit for every unit sold. “To the American automakers, that’s their bread and butter,” Jeff Liker, from the University of Michigan, explains. “They break even on passenger cars, lose money on small cars. But all their profits come from large S.U.V.’s and trucks. For the American auto companies, this is the last hill that they dominate.”
And if the new model Toyota Tundra breaks through? And if Americans really do stop buying big trucks?
The other thing I note about Gertner's article is that it contains almost nothing about Toyota's labour situation, other than to mention that its factories aren't unionized and it has only 1600 American retirees (hardly surprising since its first US-made car hit the market in 1986). Toyota's relatively progressive environmental R&D program and customer-service-oriented mentality are important, but what's the cost in terms of worker benefits? Maybe negligible or at least worth it, but Gertner's article doesn't give much information to base an opinion on. They never do.
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