Besides making them more desirable and cost efficient, how can American carmakers increase sales?

Answer 1

Make them more suited to the female population .You ladies know what I mean . If they had more women making the big decisions at the board meetings they probably would sell more cars. right ? I mean most automakers gear their sales towards men well wake up women buy cars too.!!!!

Answer 2

That's a very subjective question without hard facts and numbers (financial key performance indicators). A fly by ear judgment based on the recent Ford and General Motors (FM&GM) discussion on mergers:

- Increase export research with appropriate products through market localisation, where cars are suited to Europe and the emerging markets.

- Pressing congress or senate (the system is not clean of buying senators so though unethical, it happens in practice) to negotiate trading rights such as removing specific U.S. subsidies in exchange for open excess to emerging markets.

- Lip service paid in R&D of prototype "green" and alternative fuel vehicle by GM to placate Non-Governmental Organisations or Civil Society Organisations as they known, could be further researched into to develop a feasible revenue flow & marketable model. This is a matter of timing and no one wants to be the first guinea pig. (Reference: GM's CEO's statement on concept cars. The site is still up, just can't locate it.)

- Streamline revenue structures, as opposed to cutting costs and laying off workers, reviewing dealerships and other commercial contracts.

A temporary measure to stop the bleeding will be to resist the management imperative of saturating the market. Instead, they should focus on high profit margin products and re-egineering less profitable vehicles to meet market demand. The opportunity gained by engineering out or induced early obsolesence is to study consumers segments with new products in mind.

The worst case scenario would be to model Nike or Reebok by eliminating manufacturing through outsourcing and retaining Design, Marketing & licensing.

The reason being American cars, provided Q.A. (Quality Assurance) exercised on production, are really good cars. The age old rule is that value for money seldom go hand-in-hand with discounted production material and methods. Most outsourcing exercises are acceptable because the skills required of labour and substitution of materials meet Q.A. standards of that particular production line.

Any more provision of detailed reports and you might be giving this job to outside of GM or FM.

Answer 3

They need to innovate. They always seem to be behind the curve when it comes to needs, and that leaves them always playing catch up. They relied way to much on trucks and SUV's for their profits and of course those sales have been way down with the increase in fuel costs.

Answer 4

I would like to see compact cars make a comeback