Insanely Great: What if Steve Jobs ran one of the Big Three auto companies?
7th December 2008
Cringely lets his dreams take shape.
And dream it is:
But what would happen if just one of those companies — say Chrysler — decided that two years from now it would no longer actually assemble ANY of its own vehicles? Instead they’d put out an RFQ to every company in the world for 300,000 Chrysler Town & Country minivans as an example. Now THAT would be a dramatic move. And a good one, frankly, because with a single pen stroke most of the overcapacity would be removed from the U.S. car market. Chrysler would have to shut down all those plants and lay off all those people, true, but doing it all the way all at once would change the nature of the company’s labor agreements such that there wouldn’t be a whimper.
Whimper? No. Nuclear explosion. UAW -> Congressional Democrats -> Chrysler: “No you won’t. The law to make sure that you don’t will be on the President’s desk within fifteen minutes, and Our Boy Barack will sign it if he knows what’s good for him.”
But keep dreamin’. It makes for entertaining reading.