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Originally Posted by Ming
I can't say I disagreed with everything they had to say. They had some points. But it was their sense of overwhelming pride, bordering on arrogance, that had bothered me the most.
how excited could I get about GM product? What loyalty could I have for a company that "ties up" with other auto companies and is almost always on the receiving end of product (at least in the public eye) and not the other way around?
The answer? I would have no loyalty for a company without its own strong base of engineering and confidence in its ability to produce class-leading product.
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I liked the article as a whole, but these two parts kind of, well, seem hypocritical. I really think it is good for a company to be confident in itself, all of the car buying public siding with Toyota drives me nuts as most of them don't have a clue. And hence I really agree with this article, I am strongly of the impression that Toyota will end up winning if this happens, they will sap all of GM's engineering away, and be credited with it themselves, and a Toyota Corvette will get great praise for it's superior engineering while the Chevy it is a direct copy of will be labeled as crap because it is "American".
God forbid GM takes a Toyota and re badges it, it will be hard to say how the press will treat it, will they dare bash a precious Toyota, or will the GM badge obliviate it from the almighty Toyota and make it 100% GM crap? If not, I can assure you that any praise will be immediately and without hesitation followed by the reasoning for it's greatness being that it is a Toyota. Sort of like the Vue having the Honda engine. The engine/tranny is labeled as perfect but the rest of it...."Saturn everything else". This is of course more of a product of the press and not so much the fault of Toyota or GM. If it wern t for the biased press, I'd say a GM version of the Camry would be excellent for our market, and Toyota could benefit from the knowledge of how to actually build a real sports car.
All in all, in a perfect world, this would end up working to benefit both companies, but we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a "foreign is better world". So we all know Toyota will get more from this than GM will, product and press wise. And I'm still not sure I would want any help from Toyota in the first place.
I'm of the opinion that a merger with Toyota could be equated to an emergency blood transfusion from an AID's patient.