Bryan Appleyard
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Bryan Appleyard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was only because Clara, his wife, was so revolted by the idea they stopped him.
well there were two people both utterly different the the big one the big name was alfred sloan and sloan and ford were the two opposites in the in the car business and sloan was so boring to meet i mean he was catastrophically boring i mean it still is because if you look at wikipedia he's got about third the length of ford's
entry people can't find anything interesting to say about him this was because he was concealed himself from the world he he had something to hide i don't know what it was but he certainly wanted to hide himself uh paralyzingly boring when if you can look up youtube videos of him and he talks as if you know like an undertaker on a bad day um but he had perversely
His idea, he wasn't boring in his idea, which was the way to sell cars was to market them. Ford sort of did market cars, but he did it on the assumption that if you told your customer about the Model T, they would buy it. You know, if you build it, they will come. And he was right for a long time. But after 1920...
the end of the 20s, he stopped producing the Model T and never came up with anything to compete with it. And as a result, General Motors became the big competitor for Ford. And it did so by marketing. He got in, Sloan got in, Harley Earl, who built most extravagant cars imaginable, the opposite of Ford's puritanical small cars, light, small, everything. The opposite.
He just built massive, heavy cars that we all, by the time they got into the 50s, we all recognized them, the great Cadillacs and so on. Absurd cars with gigantic wings at the back, which made no sense sort of in engineering terms. But they would, because people, as Ford also introduced planned obsolescence so that, you know, he would build a new car model every year.
model of the same car every year which had very little difference but he would say you had to have the new car and people had if the people saw their neighbors had the new car they then went out and bought one themselves so he created a marketing system which is kind of like the parallel of Ford's production system but applied to marketing and it was just hugely successful but it didn't produce great cars
There was a brilliant, brilliant Japanese engineer called Taichi Ohno. And he was working for Toyota, as it was called now, and later Toyota, because Westerners found it easier to pronounce. And he developed a new production system based upon Ford's production system, Ford and General Motors production systems. But when he looked at the production system, he could see all these flaws.
One of the key flaws was that if you have men doing one thing at a time, Occasionally they'll do it wrong and it would go to the end of the line and you'd have to take the car and put it all right. So all these Ford type production systems had a sort of room beyond the production line where they were putting cars right. He saw this as catastrophic and stupid.
And he designed that out by saying any worker working on the line who saw a mistake or a fault could stop the entire line. Which sounds like craziness, because you'd think that has reduced production. But of course it didn't, because you had to work out why exactly it had stopped, what had gone wrong, get it right, so it would never go right and wrong again.
Whereas the Fordian system was reproducing the same errors, but just fixing them at the end. That's a huge change. Combined with this other change, which was that Ford just got his stuff delivered or manufactured it himself at River Rouge, and just chucked it into the bins where the workers were working. But Ono said, no, no, we're not paying for all that stock.
We're just going to make sure that the things arrive just in time. So he created the just-in-time production system. Now, it took a while for it to work. The problem was that Americans were resistant to non-Detroit cars or non-American cars generally.
And the only car that was making any inroads was the German Volkswagen Beetle, and it was being bought by young people who regarded it as deviant, eccentric, wicked, you know, because they bought this car. But it was a groovy car. When it really got going, everybody wanted one. And that was a sign, a warning that Detroit should have noticed, but it didn't, or it decided to ignore it.
And along came the Japanese. First of all, they started to invade the market in the 50s and 60s and make serious inroads thereafter. And this appealed to young people because young people were increasingly anti-corporate in those days. So they thought, we'll stick it to the man in Detroit and buy a Japanese car. And again, the Detroit didn't believe it at first.
They couldn't believe this was happening. But these were good cars, you know, and they weren't spectacular cars. They were just good. They worked. They lasted.
They made a big mistake, Ford and General Motors. They thought, you see, if you built a big car, you could then persuade the customers to buy it, and then you could put on all these extras, so the car comes out a lot more expensive.
Now, when they analyzed a way of doing a small car, they decided it wasn't worth it because they'd have to make sort of 10 or 20 small cars to make the profit they did on one heavily loaded Chevrolet. And so they made the mistake of thinking a small car simply wasn't possible for them. But people did want small cars. They're easy to drive around towns. They don't consume as much gas.
Increasingly, they showed it by buying them.
To me too. I think the era of the car as we know it is coming to an end. I think this process will accelerate and we won't be seeing internal combustion cars. I don't know whether they'll be electric cars replacing the hydrogen, but one or the other. And we're also seeing increasing computer intervention in the driving conditions. We already have that. I mean, it's very interesting.
If you look at a car, it's becoming more like an iPhone. An iPhone works because it doesn't work unless you're connected to something. And it's becoming like that with cars. I mean, Tesla now doesn't even have to ask you about changing the software. It just drops it in from the cloud. Now, so far, the attempt to make them self-driving is stalled.
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