So much for Toyota's job creation

It's funny. I do the same but in reverse. Everytime I travel I get a big-3 car and everytime I get suprised about how bad they still are. I think hertz is one of the main reasons I don't even consider the big 3. Last time I was lucky and got a mazda 6.... wow is that a better car then the pointacs and mustangs I've been driving (in all honesty I haven't gotten then new 500, fusion or mustang yet).

 

Same here, I've rented the Chevy Trailblazer, Ford Taurus, Chevy Uplander, some Pontiac and I'm sorry to say they sucked. Best rental I ever had was a Camry in Las Vegas, 4 cyl., performed great.

 

It's funny how you know everything before it even happens, Malorn.
It's also funny how your "honest" opion is biased since you are a Chevy dealer but you would never admit to it, would you?

 

I rent american cars also, but not by choice. That is what is available at the cheap places I go to. The latest was a 1 year old Neon. What a POS that was. I know that fleet cars are driven often hard and recklessly by renters, but it was hard to imagine that car being of quality construction.

I know Detroit does a large fleet business to keep it's "market share" numbers up, but it never occured to me how much bad publicity they might be getting for free.

 

Is he really a chevy dealer?

 

yes, he is a Chevy/Ford dealer. he told as so

 

Answer to a similarly uninformed post on another site.

1985 N.A. Auto/Light Truck production: 11,360,000 units
2005 N.A. Auto/Light Truck production: 15,768,000 units

In 20 years the auto industry production has grown by 39%. This is hardly an industry in the throes of death. It's pretty damn vibrant if you ask me!!


P.S. Here, btw, are the references for the NA stats. I forgot them in the original post.
1985 production: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104789.html
2005 production: http://www.morgancom.com/automotivenews.htm
page down to Jan 20th release.

Enjoy. Oh btw, note the production of Toyota in NA in 1985 vs 2005.. and the resulting difference in total NA production. Are the two linked in some way?

Oh, additonal sources. Pls look here, bullet #4 CAR report.
http://www.pressroom.toyota.com/

More? NYTimes yesterday: (may require registering email for free )

Ford Eliminating Up to 30,000 Jobs and 14 Factories

quote:
"Because of their growth, there has been no net loss in American automotive jobs over the last 10 years, according to James P. Womack, an author and specialist in manufacturing efficiency. Auto industry employment has held steady at about 1.1 million workers, including those at parts companies, he said.

In fact, those foreign companies, which collectively employed about 60,000 workers at the North American plants last year, are expanding their factories. Later this year, Toyota will open a new truck plant in San Antonio, and it is building another factory in Ontario." Unquote

Yes it hurts in Wixom and Hapeville, but the 2000 jobs being lost in GA are moving to Texas. People in TX and AL are in fact happy about what is occuring. Its been occuring here in the US since the textile mills began moving out of NE to the SE 100 yrs ago. It's the natural progression of business to move to more efficient producers.

 

Yeech... even I should chime in on this:

I do the same, in the past year I've rented a Taurus and a Sebring, (within the last two years or so, a Malibu, Trailblazer, and a Grand Marquee) and BY FAR, I'd rather drive my mom's '04 Accord...

h34r:

 

Me too. I rent almost exclusively from Avis, which means I drive almost exclusively GM cars on vacation. None yet has compared to my 1994 Camry. And it's 2006...

By the way, malorn, I have money ready to buy a GM EV1. Please let me know when they are available, so I can send my money to General Motors. I am dead serious, I will drive, and love, and sing the praises of my GM car: as long as it plugs in.

Nate

 

I take you heartily recommend that every country outside the US avoid American made goods, due to local job loss ?

Have you demanded from GM and Ford that they stop exporting cars ?

I would hate to think you are hypocritical.

 

Toyota is a Japanese company, they don't HAVE TO create jobs for people here. They do it because they are smart and methodical (yes there is a plan).

I have had quite a number of vehicles over the years and recently attended the car show in SD. I could not believe how uncomfortable cars like the Fusion, Dodge's big station wagon (the name escapes me right now) or the Hummer were. These thing are huge but make poor use of the space they have. I have done 3 road trips in my car since getting it in 8/05. I am so comfortable and free from worries. I could sleep in it if need be. And I don't have to sell and arm or a leg to feed it!!

 

AFAIK, the main reason Toyota and Honda set up factories in the US was to circumvent trade barriers in the form of import car quotas.

A little googling, btw, brings up a very interesting history of how the US has used it's political might to force countries to accept US company's goods and commerce. Only now, that the US companies are inferior, do we hear the Malorns of the country cry foul.

 

To follow on EricGo's point here is one example that shows that a might of US foreign policy brings down Japanese state of the art technology and one can find hundreds of such examples mutually within all very powerful contries globally. It's not exclusive to the Chinese, Japanese or American. Capital paired with political might brings spheres of influence upon all nations, there are no exceptions. Globalization is partially responsible for these trends.

Read below article

What is the world's most widely used operating system? It's not Windows, Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices.

ITRON emerged as an ambitious Japanese initiative known as The Real-time Operating system Nucleus (TRON). Launched in 1984, TRON was designed to replace disparate computer systems with a unified, open architecture for a "total computer environment."

Its ultimate goal was to create "highly functionally distributed systems" in which all system components are connected to a real-time network. Professor Ken Sakamura, spiritual father of TRON, conceived the project as a social infrastructure akin to the electrical power grid or water supply system.

Now, the T-Engine Forum, an offshoot of the TRON project with more than 250 member companies, has been working to create a standardized development environment for embedded applications based on ITRON. Vendors of proprietary solutions are worried -- or at least should be.


ITRON Is First

ITRON, the first in a series of open-source specifications for the TRON architecture, answered a pressing need for Japan's electronics firms, which traditionally have written their own software for embedded systems, a time-consuming and cumbersome process that often results in a plethora of different and incompatible systems.

The ITRON specification is a standard real-time OS kernel that can be tailored to any embedded system. ITRON already has been ported to a wide range of microprocessor architectures and has quickly become Japan's de facto standard for embedded systems. Today, the specification is used in an estimated 3 billion microprocessors.

ITRON has been followed by several other specifications -- among them Business TRON (BTRON), a multilingual, ubiquitous computing environment with a programmable GUI, and Communications and Central TRON (CTRON), a real-time, multitasking operating system akin to Unix.

Japanese telecom giant NTT has embraced CTRON and made it the de facto standard in Japan's telecom industry.

Impact Deferred

The TRON Project is not new; in fact, it was poised to its mark more than a decade ago, in Japan's PC industry, but the U.S. government intervened. In 1989, Japanese electronics giant Matsushita introduced a BTRON PC, a machine that stunned the industry with its advanced capabilities. The BTRON PC had an 80286 Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) chip running at 8 MHz and a mere 2 MB of memory, but it could display moving video in color in a separate window. Also, it had a dual-booting system that could run both the BTRON OS and MS-DOS.

When the Japanese government announced it would install BTRON PC in Japanese schools, the U.S. government objected. It called the Japanese initiative "actual and potential market intervention" and threatened the move with sanctions. The Japanese, dependent on the U.S. export market, quickly dropped the plan. The U.S. government later withdrew its threat, but the damage had already been done. Nearly all Japanese companies involved in TRON-related activities had canceled their projects.

Nevertheless, ITRON survived, and today it powers millions of Japanese gadgets, household appliances, automobile electronics, robots and even satellites. ITRON is also widely used in factory automation systems in China. Industry insiders claim it is the number one OS for embedded chips in both Japan and the United States.

ITRON Survival

Earlier this year, U.S.-based Accelerated Technology, the embedded systems division of Mentor Graphics, was appointed as the North American Liaison Office of the TRON Association. But can ITRON survive the growing popularity of Linux and its real-time version, RTLinux?

Steven Searle, who worked on developing TRON's multilingual environment, argues that ITRON has several advantages over real-time versions of Linux. "TRON is an RTOS; Linux isn't," Searle told LinuxInsider, adding that ITRON has a smaller footprint and superior real-time performance.

"RTLinux switches tasks in milliseconds, while ITRON switches tasks in microseconds," he said. "RTLinux' footprint is measured in megabytes; ITRON is measured in kilobytes."

Recent developments suggest ITRON and Linux are finding a middle ground. The T-Engine Forum, which formed an alliance with Linux developer MontaVista earlier this year, aims to standardize embedded systems at the CPU level, incorporating TRON's real-time OS, security architecture (eTRON), middleware modules and MontaVista Linux.

The MontaVista Partnership

MontaVista is actually helping to create a non-native kernel extension of TRON called T-Linux -- an environment for running middleware. T-Engine and Linux will form a base for developing application software that will include the eTRON chip, an encryption device that offers secure data transfer across wireless networks and the Internet.

"T-Engine offers several benefits, among them new options for CPU architecture migration and more flexible commercial-licensing terms, in that T-Engine is not subject to the software patent," Bill Weinberg, director of strategy and evangelism at MontaVista, told LinuxInsider.

"At some point in the future," said Weinberg, "the T-Linux architecture is intended to support execution of both legacy ITRON code over T-Engine and native Linux code on the native Linux portion."

Linux Alliance

This alliance between TRON and Linux could put more pressure on vendors of proprietary embedded software. Proprietary software is costly -- vendors usually charge royalties for each microprocessor running the software -- and licensing terms are often restrictive. Moreover, nearly all of the giants in the consumer electronics industry are rallying around open-source solutions.

In late September, Microsoft surprised the industry by joining the T-Engine Forum. Microsoft intends to work with the Forum to establish specifications for an environment in which the T-Kernel and Windows CE can coexist on the T-Engine hardware reference platform.

Microsoft will continue to develop its own OS, but the company hopes T-Engine developers will be attracted to Windows CE's user interfaces. The company will demonstrate prototypes derived from the joint effort at December's Tokyo TronShow.

Microsoft's decision to join the T-Engine Forum is not without irony. The company was the main beneficiary of U.S. government actions against the TRON project in 1989. Tom Robertson, Microsoft's Tokyo-based director for government affairs in Asia, is a former official of the United States Trade Representative office that issued the threats against the Japanese government.

 

I have to ask, "What is your point?" In previous posts, you've said you're just trying to make some interesting discussion.

Then you claim to support our right to choose our product as long as we're more informed about our decision. You've been a proponant of the media conspiracy.

In this post you seem to be saying, we're losing jobs overseas, buy GM!

You should divert your energy to web sites that are visited by people who are wavering between imports v. domestics. Do you really think someone here is going to say, "My God, Malorn was right! I'm trading in my Prius for a Tahoe!"?

I believe people at this website are very educated about their decision to buy a Prius. No one pulled the wool over my eyes. GM sucks...I'm sorry to say it. I buy a new car every 3-4 years, and unless they make something worthwhile, it will never be a General Motors car. In fact, I think the more I read your annoying posts, I may start actively trying to convince others not to buy them... :lol: (Would never do that...like mom said, "If you have nothing good to say...")

 

So I should spend my hard earned dollars to support an inferior product?

 

maybe GM and Ford should build things right the first time, quit paying warranty labor to dealerships and paying for replacement parts.

that would be a money saver...