Word: auto
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...high technology without delivering much in the way of specifics. Many Wall Street experts see few major contributions so far from GM's acquisitions of EDS, Hughes Aircraft in 1985 and Britain's Group Lotus, the maker of rakish sports cars, this year. But as cars and auto factories become more electronic, GM's space-age alliances could help the company pass its competition. Indeed, none of GM's rivals have taken the giant's poor third-quarter performance as a cue to throttle back. "It's a fluke," says Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca. "I know...
...colors, price tagged for all pocketbooks, in a glittering, growing, chromium-plated cavalcade seemingly without end, they continue to cruise into U.S. showrooms and, with slightly less frequency, back onto the streets of America. Under the impact of that four-wheeled flood, the $230 billion-a-year U.S. auto marketplace is being pushed, pulled and pummeled into new forms and shapes as one of the most diverse, sophisticated and, above all, brutally competitive selling arenas in the world...
...frenzy? And why now? The main reason is a hike in global automaking capacity that has already dramatically increased output around the world and will do so for several more years. South Korea is showing that a developing country can build an auto industry almost overnight and quickly crack the American market. Japan, the premier auto exporter of the '80s, is still fighting hard for U.S. market share and is rapidly building up its own American manufacturing capacity, largely in so-called transplant factories that depend heavily on imported Japanese parts. Meanwhile, American auto companies have entered into...
...clear view of the prospect. Says he: "The good news is that North America is the only automotive market in the world where there's a good shot at a profit. The bad news is that everyone knows it." Agrees Donald Ephlin, a vice president of the United Auto Workers: "We are talking about fundamental changes in the world where we live and the market where we compete...
Change -- painful and profound -- is something that U.S. auto companies, especially Detroit's Big Three, have been struggling with for years. Battered in the early '80s by recession and imports, GM, Ford and Chrysler were bolstered by short-term protectionist measures, chiefly the imposition of "voluntary" export restraints on the Japanese. By 1984 the Big Three had rallied to their highest profit level ever: $9.8 billion...