In this outdoor vlog, the speaker reflects on the golden era of American car culture in the 1950s‑60s, recalling iconic models like the 1960 Cadillac and the ability to identify every make on the road. He shares personal anecdotes about his brother‑in‑law’s early adoption of a Volkswagen and a 1960s Toyota, highlighting how those imports were seen as radical yet superior engineering choices. The monologue then pivots to a critique of General Motors’ downfall: the stock price dropping below $10, a market cap of roughly $6 billion versus tech giants, and the loss of market share to Japanese and German manufacturers. He attributes GM’s decline to a combination of union labor costs, resistance to fuel‑efficiency standards, and a homogenized, low‑quality design philosophy as described by former GM vice‑chairman Bob Lutz. The speaker frames GM’s potential bankruptcy as a cultural and economic omen for the United States, tying the company’s fate to broader questions about American identity and global competitiveness.
Chapters
So it's a gorgeous day here in Connecticut, and I thought, you know, it's a great day to shoot outside. And I thought, ah, you know, I'm going to talk about cars, so why don't I stand in front of my car and talk outside? So here you go. Road trip. So I'm in the shower this morning and I listen to— I listen to the radio in the shower and I hear a commercial and it's a commercial announcing that Toyota Toyota is about to, uh, is having a sale, and the sale is in anticipation of their new model year. Their new models are coming out for Toyotas. Now, that got me thinking about what it used to be like when new models of cars came out in America. You know, I grew up in the Bronx in the '50s and '60s, and We knew every car on the road, every car on the street. You could name them, you know. Of course, the classics: '57 Chevy, '58 Chevy, '59 Caddy, '60 Caddy. I learned to drive on a 1960 Cadillac. I'll see if I can find an image of a 1960 Cadillac for you to see the car that I learned to drive on and the car that I learned— that I got my driver's license that I took my driver's license test on. But the thing— but the fact is, even the, you know, the cars that were kind of esoterically different, you know, could you tell a Chevy Impala from a Chevy Bel Air? Could you tell a 6-cylinder Chevy from an 8-cylinder Chevy by the emblems on the side of the cars? That was nothing. We could all do all of that. Why? Because in those days, cars mattered. And not just cars, but American cars. That was all we had. Oh yeah, after the war we had, of course, we had Volkswagens here in the US. And the Volkswagen was really the first imported car to make an impact on the United States market. I remember my brother-in-law, who's gone now, was an experimenter. With cars. Joe had the first Volkswagen in our family that anybody knew, and you know, it was a crappy little cold thing in the wintertime and hot in the summertime, but it got, you know, I don't know, a bazillion miles a gallon, and it was reliable as the rain, right? I mean, it just did everything you really needed a car to do. Then in the '60s, Joe bought a Toyota. Now, you can't imagine What a radical decision it was for a New York City bus driver, my brother-in-law, to buy a Japanese vehicle in, I guess it must have been 1963 or 1964. Excuse me. I mean, that was like, you know, flag burning. You could imagine the grief that he got in the bus yards from his fellow drivers. For driving this piece of— and you'll pardon the vernacular of the day, but I need to use it to help you to understand— for driving this piece of Jap crap. You know, he took a lot of grief, but why did he do it? Here comes a helicopter. We have a lot of corporate helicopters that fly overhead here in Connecticut. Might be Jeff Immelt on his way from Crotenville to Fairfield. Um, uh, why did he do it? He did it because he knew cars, and he knew back then in the '60s that what he was looking at was a superior piece of engineering. Now, yesterday, yesterday, uh, and again this morning General Motors stock price went under $10 a share. Now that's the cheapest a share of General Motors stock has been since about 1950-something, about the time when we cared about cars. And what that means is that the General Motors Corporation market cap— market capitalization, how much the company is worth, was about $5 billion, 5, almost, I'm sorry, almost $6 billion. Now by comparison, Google's market capitalization is $170 or so billion. Now how did this happen? Well, there are a lot of people who will tell you that it happened because of the unions, that the unions' healthcare and pension benefits destroyed General Motors, and there's no question about it, the union contracts had a serious impact on General Motors. But it seems to me that any company that loses as much market share as General Motors lost could only have lost it by ignoring their customers, which is what GM did for decades. I don't know if you remember what it was like in the '70s and the '80s to see GM cars broken down on the side of the road while Japanese cars and German cars, but predominantly Japanese cars, were zooming by them, getting superior gas mileage, having superior quality, running while the GM cars were breaking down. Of course, GM did everything they could to fight every possible gasoline mileage standard up till just a few years ago and resist this so easily foreseeable trend towards more economical, fuel-efficient cars and vehicles. What did they do instead? Well, You know, if you read Bob Lutz, the vice chairman of General Motors, if you read his blog, he's a great, great blogger, one of really one of the pioneer corporate bloggers. Lutz will tell you that they took their eye off the ball of design and they started making cars that all looked alike. They were cookie cutters and they did not have the basic fundamental qualities that the customer wanted. Wanted in the car. What were those fundamental qualities? Well, they wanted quality performance. They wanted a car that wasn't going to break down in the warranty period. And they wanted a car that was fuel-efficient and yet powerful enough to live up to the American standards of car performance. That's what we wanted. Who delivered those? Honda, Toyota, and of course, my friends here in Germany who make the Audi that I drive. It's an awful, awful day when the General Motors Corporation is about to go bankrupt. It's an awful day for the United States. It's another landmark in a series of, you know, you could only call them depressing developments for the United States. We're in a tough time right now here economically. We're going through some difficult times trying to figure out who we are in the world as the lone remaining superpower, as we call ourselves, I think perhaps euphemistically. But as we do so, seeing one of the real hallmarks of American culture, the General Motors Corporation, on the brink of bankruptcy gives us all pause. So just something I wanted to note today on this gorgeous, gorgeous Connecticut morning. So y'all take care and I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.
