Word: automen
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Cars When? Two days after WPBoss Krug let out his plan, he hustled to Detroit. There he conferred with automen on plans to reconvert the auto industry, biggest...
...regional sales chiefs to Detroit last week to hear news of the company's postwar plans. The news: Ford will build a new, low-priced car which will be 20 to 25% cheaper than the regular Ford line (TIME, Oct. 11, 1943). This is the car which automen have gossiped will be the up-to-date flivver, will sell for $500. Actually, the company carefully refrained from putting a price on the new car; it still does not know whether its prewar line will be sold at 1941 prices, or higher. But Ford made clear that, while it tools...
Solemnly, with due regard for the ears of competitors at the same table, the automen sketched in the dark picture. C. E. Wilson, white-thatched General Motors president, estimated that by Jan. 1 G.M. would have only 17% of the machine tools needed to turn out 50% of its prewar car production (the quota tentatively set by WPB). The rest of the tools are not even promised until next June 1. K. T. Keller, the chunky, soft-voiced boss of Chrysler Corp., deftly added some dark shading. "Before Chrysler can build its first car, it must clear...
...stuck to his prediction. He knows that the Ford company can do what most others cannot-it can make its own machine tools in the integrated Rouge plant. But he also knew something which had been carefully soft-pedaled before the newsmen. Come V-E day, the hyper-competitive automen will clear their plants of Government-owned equipment and materials in their own way, argue with the Government later on how it should have been done. Thus the two days of foofaraw simply boiled down to the fact that the automen sensibly wanted to scrap now the tangle...
...conference showed that the auto industry is not really fighting off reconversion. Plainly, while willing to take Federal control over military production, the motormen want none of it, if possible, in peacetime carmaking. Actually, Detroit's reconversion plans are way ahead of Washington's. At the meeting automen stressed that what they really need is machine tools. If the Government will release these, the automobile industry will be three-quarters of the way along its own private road to reconversion...