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Just as I was going to Stuttgart – one of Germany’s rich auto cities with Porsche living one suburb and Mercedes in another – and which apparently is nicknamed ‘Benztown’ by the locals, to visit friends and view a cool exhibition they are currently showing it was announced on telly that Daimler-Chrysler is putting many people out of work over in the U.S. Of course this is worth a little chuckle as usually it’s the evil multinational American corporations buying out local industries and then destroying all the jobs and for a change, so it’s refreshing to see the whole global corporation thing work the other way round as well.
That said, I don’t actually care too much about the automobile industry or their workers. And both Daimler and Chrysler are probably among the big suckers of the industry as they want to earn money by building big, fast and inefficient cars (because that’s what the market wants,
as their bosses will say without doubt) rather than making an effort to find a viable compromise between people’s desire for individual transportation and whatever ecological disasters we are going to face.
During a report in the news on the topic, they showed both companies’ amusingly similar logos – the essentially circled three and five pronged stars, they showed the company headquaters and some cars. And I couldn’t help but think that just seeing those of Chrysler made it clear that buying a company residing in headquarters that look like a Borg spaceship and building cars that look like clumsy miniature trucks must have been a terribly bad idea to begin with. Who’d want any of that?
[This also made me wonder how it can be that over in the U.S. they were perfectly capable to fly people to the moon but they apparently aren’t able to build a half-way decent car. – Hehe, my brother got a DVD with a special Top Gear show on the topic for christmas which even seemed amusing to the car non-enthusiast that I am.]