clean diesel

Yeah, seems like there is a pretty extensive history of cheating on emissions. So why didn't the EPA discover this? Don't they test and certify cars?

This VW thing looks like it involves millions of cars, 11 million maybe. VWs market cap is only $52 billion, so the liability may be more than they are worth. They can join the crowd...

It's impressive, how many car companies have failed.

Diesel contains about 10% more energy per unit volume, so the raw price is about 10% more (for instance, today it's 1.35 vs 1.5 $/gal, per

Why? The same thing happens in many businesses. Automakers before WWII were smaller companies which needed to merge to fully exploit mass production. With production lines assembling so many cars the market could not support every company shipping that many cars, so most were bought out creating a smaller number of large companies with the capital to mass produce in the most efficient ways.

Electronics companies when through the same sort of events with many smaller companies being bought up by the larger ones as the cost of engineering chips and building fabs increased. I bet there are 10 times the number of failed semiconductor companies as car companies.

Whoa - not so fast. Ford totally vertically integrated and GM took the ball away from him. Multiple smallerish carmakers lasted for decades until say, 1960. I would not accuse Nash nor Studebaker of not being mass market.

Nah. The dealer networks narrowed. Had distribution been less about real estate, they all coulda survived.

And then in the '70s, the number of marques started going up again. Jeremy Clarkson talks about the similar thing in Britain at various points. It's kind of an endless churn.

Probably. The cycle time is at least 10 times faster.

Yeah, Ford was the first to embrace mass production to the extreme. He was no "small" automaker.

GM was a conglomerate which illustrates my point. The larger, the better.

Multiple is not "most". Many small car makers had no choice but to be bought out as I said, because the market could not support everyone utilizing mass production on a large scale. Anything less resulted in higher prices which drove them all out but the big four, then the big three, now the big two plus a foreign owned maker.

My family had a couple/three American Motors cars and they were very much behind the times and used lots of duplication across the small number of models they produced. This was a direct result of the limitations of a smaller company trying to utilize the large scale mass production required to be cost competitive. In the end they just couldn't sell enough cars because they couldn't innovate on the too low profit margins that the larger companies could work with. AM's big innovation during the gas crunch was to introduce a car with a 22 gal gas tank so you could go longer before filling up. lol

I'm sure dealerships were a factor, but if the cars had been profitable, dealerships would have opened up.

GM grew through aquisition.

Of course.

Prices for autos never followed any reasonable path. I can imagine I know what the choke points were on production, but nobody really does.

Yep.

But there were parallel examples at the time that did. I'm not 100% sure that Datsun/Toyota/Honda were really in the same business, but that that did happen.

It's mostly that all cars of that era were sad.

:)

I suspect the economics of dealerships are much more sinister than you give it/them credit for.

But I got called to jury duty over a dispute between people over a dealership. This led to reading and no doubt bias.

Yes, that is the point. By acquiring other, smaller companies, they became big and leveraged the power of size in many respects. In the end this gives a tremendous advantage on costs which allows them to make more money, undercut the competition or both.

No, they are not only different car companies, but different entities in all ways. Old Japanese companies are derived from families.