GM and Toyota, Passing In The Night

From today's WSJ, in the article about GM's possible plant closures:

While the details of GM's plans remain unclear, GM officials have said that their long-term strategy is to shift more production to lower-cost locations outside North America and to make plants that remain in the U.S. more efficient and flexible, able to build more than one model.

It kills me that Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai are expanding in the U.S., while the “American” automakers are so desperate that they can only take the typical Wall Street driven view of “needing” to move production to low-cost countries. How about making your plants “low-waste” as opposed to chasing cheap leabor?

GM didn't understand a decade ago that their plants need to be more flexible?

Yet another reason that Toyota is clearly the leader in this industry and the other Asian automakers are catching up fast.

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