Word: gm
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...subject of Government regulation of the automobile industry, GM's boss had emphatic comment...
...Detroit factory it will turn out a line of small (1 to 6 cylinders, 22 to 160 h. p.) lightweight Diesel engines at the rate of 50 a day, produce engines up to 1,200 h. p. at factories in Cleveland and La Grange, Ill. Secrets of GM economy are new light alloys and a production schedule using the same parts in engines of the same cylinder size. Suitable for direct drive operations on tractors, pumps, hoists and the like, the engines will also come in "packaged power" units (engine & generator teams) to power theatres, parking lots, small industrial enterprises...
...GM predicts that its Diesels will operate at half the cost of gasoline engines and with greater simplicity. Impatient prophets who interpret this as a sign that automobiles with Diesel engines are close at hand will have to burn while General Motors fiddles, according to Boss Kettering. Said he, opening the new plant: "You would not buy a Stradivarius violin and give it to a man to play in Carnegie Hall the same night. We have got a good fiddle, we know that, but we have got to do a lot of practicing...
President Knudsen began by reading a statement which revealed that GM's 1937 inventory of $290,000,000 was a new high, that costs rose 13½% per car in 1937, that GM waited until October before raising prices only 87%. He gave a brief history of this year's business...
...showed increases as high as 10% to 20% above year earlier levels last fall, will be down to within 3% to 5% of those carried at the fiscal year-end in 1937." Automobile factories work on an order basis and so have rather small current inventories of cars. But GM dealers alone, according to President Knudsen, now have some 200,000 cars, 60,000 more than normal. This led Pundit Hugh Johnson to comment last week: "The essential cause of this slump was too much inventory in the whole automobile industry...