I agree ... the great recession led GM to shit the bed on just about all accounts. Quality is down, dependability is down, innovation is non-existent, concern for the customer is 100% gone. Ford had their issues 5 yrs earlier and came out of the recession strong and their product today shows it.
We have a GM foundry in my town and several close friends have worked for/with them. GM management is grossly incompetent. A recent story a friend told me: He is upper management for a sub-contractor that does quality control (think measuring block castings to make sure they are in spec). At 4 pm on a Friday he got a message from a GM manager, "hey we're almost done with a run of 357 blocks that have to be shipped monday" his response, "are you expecting 100% inspection. How long have you been working on this run?" GM response, "yes 100% we've been working on this run since last week" his response, "so you've been working on these for over a week, haven't delivered us a single block to start our inspections, you're expecting us to inspect every dimension on every block, you want it done and ready to ship monday, and you don't even inform us about it in advance? I don't even have enough trained inspectors to do that if I had every one of them come in for maximum overtime. I'm going to have to train new people and there is probably going to be a high reject rate on the blocks bc we have the new folks err on the side of caution" GM response, "oh.... you can't reject any of them we only have the exact quantity to fill the minimum delivery quantity" his response, "what do you think we should do with blocks that don't pass quality? Are you saying we should still ship them if they're out of spec?" GM response, "oh no, we can't ship bad blocks" his response, "so you tell me on friday I have to inspect 357 blocks by monday morning, you didn't cast any extras to account for rejects. Do you routinely expect the impossible to happen? Send us the blocks, we'll onspect and ship what's good and you can deal with the fallout from not having enough to meet the order. And maybe next time you'll plan ahead a little bit and involve your QC folks in the communications a little sooner"
