Even though it was losing $4 billion, the company was sending the signal that it was business as usual. Stempel was saying GM’s problems were recession related. They’re not. The overhaul must be a lot more than the president. They must start getting rid of the dead-wood at the top.

Chrysler asked everyone to sacrifice. GM must do the same. How could GM expect union support when it continued to raise the dividend? Everyone, white-collar workers, shareholders and the unions, must share the pain.

I guess my only sadness is that I did everything I could to get them to face their problems while they still had a lot of money. I did everything I could to keep them from spending $5 billion on Hughes. I just was not able to do it. Think how good that would feel today if they still had that.

Ray: What they don’t give the American buyer credit for is catching on to the fact that there are other car companies that make a lot better stuff. You pull up at a traffic light and you have your eyes closed, and the car next to you sounds like a bucket of bolts, you know it’s not going to be a Toyota. The American workers are capable of putting [a good car] together. If you give them crap, you can’t fault the, American worker for turning out crap at the end of the assembly line.

Tom: It goes deeper than that. Buick is winning all kinds of awards. But even if Buick is as reliable a car as you could buy, how many Americans want a Buick? They used to say, “Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?” There are many, many segments of the population who say, “No. I wouldn’t really rather have a Buick. Because it’s too big and I cant park it or it rides like the Queen Mary.”

Ray: The Saturn is as good -albeit barely-as good as the Japanese cars. It’s as good as a Honda Civic. The real question is, will [GM] continue to make the changes necessary to keep it in step with the Honda Civic over the next three, four or five years?

Their upper-end cars are pretty nice. I like the Seville STS. It’s $38,000-plus. The Buick Park Avenue Ultra is a terrific car. The Bonneville SSEi, we loved. It happens to be expensive.

Tom: They can make a car if they want to. It’s just they don’t know what the hell to make … They have lost sight of who Americans are.

Ray: They think all Americans live in Michigan. The hierarchy of GM is mostly men.

Tom: Big fat men. They want a big car so they can fit their bellies behind it, and they can’t conceive of a 100-pound woman not wanting to drive a road monster.

There just aren’t that many people who want or can afford a Cadillac. So what are they wasting their time for, making a wonderful Cadillac? Make a wonderful Cavalier.

Lots of companies say they’re customer focused, that they have quality programs. Quality, however, leads them to concentrate on not making mistakes, and on sending out cars with zero defects. That’s very different from really understanding how to incorporate customers into the process of designing the product.

They should announce that they’re going to build no more factories in Mexico, keep the plants open in the United States and start designing and building the cars that consumers want. If you build cars in Mexico and throw people out of work here, they can’t buy a Pontiac Grand Prix from the wages they get from the unemployment line.

GM was getting free market research from its customers-about fuel inefficiency, lack of safety, the emphasis on style at the expense of value engineering. Only the Japanese were listening … What the company should do is split their divisions off into separate firms. That would solve the problem of bureaucratic multitiered management and unleash a lot of energies. The breakups of AT&T and Standard Oil increased shareholder value and deconcentrated those corporate bureaucracies.