did you know that many union line workers at our factories make 70 dollars per hour!?!?!?
here's my take on where Chrysler went wrong: (excerpted from the Lee Iacocca wiki page)
Career at Ford
Iacocca joined Ford Motor Company in 1946 and after a brief stint on engineering, he quickly asked to be moved to sales and marketing where his career flourished. While working in a local district for sales, Iacocca gained national recognition in 1956 with his "56 for 56" campaign, offering $56 monthly payment loans for 1956 model year cars. His campaign went national and Iacocca was called to Dearborn where he quickly moved through the ranks to become President of the Ford Division on his 40th birthday, October 15, 1964.
Iacocca was involved with the design of several successful Ford automobiles, most notably the Ford Mustang. Also, he was responsible for the Lincoln Continental Mark III, the Ford Fiesta and the revival of the Mercury brand in the late 1960s, including the introduction of the Mercury Cougar and Mercury Marquis. He was also the "moving force," as one court put it, behind the notorious Ford Pinto.[2] He promoted other ideas which did not reach the marketplace as Ford products. These included cars ultimately introduced by Chrysler- the K car and the minivan. Eventually, he became the president of the Ford Motor Company, but he clashed with Henry Ford II and ultimately, in 1978, was fired by Ford, despite the company posting a $2 billion profit for the year.
[edit] Career at Chrysler
After being fired at Ford, Lee was aggressively courted by the Chrysler Corporation, which was on the verge of going out of business (at the time, the company was losing millions, largely due to recalls of the company's Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare, cars that Iacocca would later claim should never have been built). Iacocca joined Chrysler and began rebuilding the entire company from the ground up, laying off many workers, selling Chrysler's loss-making European division to Peugeot, and bringing in many former associates from his former company. Also from Ford, Iacocca brought to Chrysler the "Mini-Max" project which, in 1983, bore fruit in the wildly successful Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager. Interestingly, Henry Ford II had wanted nothing to do with the Mini-Max, which doomed the project at Ford. Hal Sperlich, the driving force behind the Mini-Max at Ford had been fired a few months before Iacocca and was waiting for him at Chrysler, where the two would make automotive history.
Iacocca arrived shortly after the introduction of the subcompact Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon. The front-wheel drive Omni and Horizon became instant hits, selling over 300,000 units each in their debut year, showing what was to come for Chrysler. Ironically, the Omni and Horizon had been designed alongside the Chrysler Horizon with much input from the European division of the company, which Iacocca axed in 1978.
Realizing that the company would go out of business if it did not receive a significant amount of money to turn the company around, Iacocca approached the United States Congress in 1979 and asked for a loan guarantee. While it is sometimes said that Congress lent Chrysler the money, it, in fact, only guaranteed the loans. Most thought this was an unprecedented move, but Iacocca pointed to the government bailouts of the airline and railroad industries, arguing that more jobs were at stake in Chrysler's possible demise. In the end, though the decision was controversial, Iacocca received the loan guarantee from the government.
After receiving this reprieve, Chrysler released the first of the K-Car line, the Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliant, in 1981. Like the minivan which would come later, these compact automobiles were based on design proposals that Ford had rejected during Iacocca's (and Sperlich's) tenure there. Coming right after the oil crisis of the 1970s, these small, efficient and inexpensive, front-wheel drive cars sold rapidly.
As mentioned previously, Chrysler introduced the minivan, which was by and large Sperlich's "baby," in the fall of 1983. Twenty-five years later, Chrysler continues to lead the automobile industry in minivan sales[citation needed]. Because of the K-cars and minivans, along with the reforms Iacocca implemented, the company turned around quickly and was able to repay the government-backed loans seven years earlier than expected.
Iacocca was also responsible for Chrysler's acquisition of AMC in 1987, which brought the profitable Jeep division under Chrysler's corporate umbrella. It also created the short-lived Eagle division, formed from the remnants of AMC. By this time, AMC had already finished most of the work with the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which Iacocca desperately wanted. The Grand Cherokee would not be released until 1992 for the 1993 model year, at which time Iacocca left Chrysler.
Throughout the 1980s, Iacocca appeared in a series of commercials for the company's vehicles, using the ad campaign "The pride is back" to denote the turnaround of the corporation, while also telling buyers a phrase that later became his trademark: "If you can find a better car, buy it."
the "automotive history" was where they took a car company focused on luxury and the type of cars we're discussing right now and turned it into a company focused on cheap, flukey gizmo infested, CRAP.
