I read it, and it left me with more questions than answers, but it makes claims with certainty that I want to believe - they just stopped short of giving that info. I feel cheated, LOL.
I'd also love to know why GM was so dominating and always a darling in the eyes of the government. Having a monopoly on a strategic asset would make sense. What was it?
I meant did you search for the 600 page book that guy put together? It’s not really a book per se. It’s a collection of articles he’s written over the years about this stuff.
I’ll let the car out of the bag just so it can be argued about.
The author claims that GM was the dominating car manufacturer and retained that top spot not because they made the best cars (they didn’t IMO) or because they were the most forward looking.
He claims (and I don’t doubt it one bit) that Kettering (who was friends with Henry Ford BTW) was working on additives to make gasoline less detonation prone. So was DuPont and I think Dow chemical. I’d have to go back and verify the third one, but there were three separate entities working on it.
Any way, they all came up with tetra ethyl lead. Since Kettering was GM’s top scientist and he was partially (at least) responsible for “discovering” lead for anti knock purposes, GM was given a 3 cents per gallon royalty on ALL fuel sold.
Think about that! Over the years that right there was worth BILLIONS and BILLIONS of dollars that no other car manufacturer had. And they didn’t have to design, develop or build anything. They just sat back and collected the revenue.
That allowed GM to pay wages far above what anyone else could. Benefits too.
It also meant that GM could spend orders of magnitude more money on advertising. And that’s huge. Plus, they could sell could subsidize aftermarket parts and drive the costs down so Chrysler and Ford couldn’t compete.
That single revenue source made them the king of the market. For decades.
Of course, when unleaded fuel was mandated, all that revenue dried up. And it hurt GM. By that time GM was a bloated, slow, lethargic company that was set in its ways and was too top heavy to unscrew itself.
So lead made GM the top dog. And kept GM there. Who knew? I didn’t. But I have often wondered how GM could produce something cheap and crappy like the stud mounted rocker and sell it as the “best” system out there.
Or why the decks were shorter than everything else. Or why the driveline stuff was so fragile. Or how GM, for decades could produce a starter so crappy that racers made adapters so you could bolt a Chrysler starter to a GM car just so they would start. How many races were lost because some dude couldn’t get his junk GM starter to fire his engine?
And yet people bought this stuff. I now know that at least a big part of it was marketing that was only possible because they had a revenue stream no one else had.
I now wonder if all those efforts to make the general public think the ball/stud rocker was the best thing since sliced bread wasn’t funded by GM as a marketing tool.
You can t make this stuff up and truth is surely stranger than fiction.
Now im out....
