From the fools who bet on EVs as being the Next Big Thing: Volkswagen and Mercedes.
Yeah… screw you and your little Duracell cars, screw you for buying into the Big Manufactured Panic stemming from the Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© hucksters, and screw you for trying to force us into buying your shitty fad products by cutting back production of regular internal combustion-engined cars and trucks.
And while we’re on high-level fools in Big Auto, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Stellantis. This is what you get, and deservedly so when you let finance people run an engineering business. Let me count the ways:
- Misreading your core customers
- Forcing inferior and low-demand products onto the market
- Reducing product offerings when your competition offers choice (and having those remaining products be simply me-too choices, which you’re always going to lose especially when your products are less reliable and more costly)
- Making long-term decisions based on doomsday (and fallacious) predictions
- Sacrificing long-term growth for short-term profits (see below)
- Ignoring basic marketing principles, e.g. when faced with growing reserve stock levels, increasing prices rather than cutting them.
Stellantis has broken each and every one of those oh-so basic rules, and the people who will pay the price are their employees, who are going to be laid off as their workplaces end up being shuttered. Now, of course, they’re scrambling… in the face of being sued by shareholders.
Sadly, the people who have made all these disastrous business decisions will be fine thanks to generous severance packages and bonuses. (Tavares’s compensation last year was worth $40 million, for example.)
instead of facing the proper consequences of public flogging followed by hanging.
“This is what you get, and deservedly so when you let finance people run an engineering business. ”
Was I the only person who thought “Boeing” after reading the above line? Fuck Jack Welch and his ideas.