A rather cogent and amusing diatribe from a friend on another car group. Makes
me wish I'd said that!
<<Triage means "A process for sorting injured people into groups based on
their need for [urgent] medical treatment. Allocating scarce resources for
the trearment of injured people." The implications in my context being that
these car marques were allowed to get into serious trouble before anything
was done to save them, and then, the efforts made were only to keep them
(barely) alive. In retrospect, some might use "hospice" to describe the
treatment. But that implies making them comfortable as they approach the
inevitable end. What was done to MG B's and Midget, as an example,
certainly didn't fit, as the rubber-bumper treatment was more like
infecting a terminally ill patient with a painful and disfiguring disease.
If there had been anyone left in authority in the British auto industry in
the seventies, with a marketing I.Q. higher than a manifold-vacuum reading
in Bar at wide-open throttle, they would have euthanized these grotesque
mutants before they destroyed the brand value of the marques, particularly
in the U.S. And that implies they should have been planning ahead in the
sixties or at least early seventies for replacements. Obviously they
weren't. They were just putting the absolute minimum, first-aid effort into
bandaging up these aging designs and sending them back to hold the space on
the showroom floor.
In contrast, Porsche was faced with a parallel situation and achieved just
the opposite result. They had an aging design in the 911, which was really
a descendant of their first sports car, the 356. But rather than bandaging
the patient, they turned it into the Six Million Dollar Man. Porsche kept
improving it through the seventies and eighties. They made it faster,
improved the handling by reducing the oversteering problem, made it more
reliable with fuel injection, added turbocharging, gave the body an
effective facelift, and added creature features. And they did it with an
AIR-COOLED engine! The brand value actually increased. But they did plan
ahead for the end of the air-cooled-design's life cycle. Now they have the
new 911 and the Boxster and people lined up to buy them, and pay OVER
sticker price for the Boxster.
Did the British-auto industry plan that BMW would own BMC/BL/Rover Group
and the Rolls Royce brand, that Ford would own Jaguar and Aston Martin, and
that Volkswagen (!!!!) would own Bentley? Great plannig lads! If these
fools are now government planners, will The Houses of Parliament be
developed into condos by Maylaisians or turned into a shopping mall by
Donald Trump?>>
Bill Spohn
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