Get the Pitchforks

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the basic, elementary mistakes that the senior management of the American automakers have made over the past few decades, culminating in the near-destruction of what was once the most powerful industry in the world. Most of this is not really news – we’ve been reading news stories about “planned obsolescence” and the inability of the Big Three to grasp that what their customers actually wanted were smaller, more fuel-efficient cars that lasted longer since the 1970s. However, unless you or a loved one has actually been employed by an automobile dealership during this period, you’ve probably missed some of the worst management practice of all. Even today, the news is focusing on the dealerships being eliminated by the American automakers, and not on how these (usually) loyal franchise holders have been given the shaft all along…

Consider, for example, the issue we’re having with our Pontiac Torrent this week. Over last weekend, we discovered that the hatchback was failing to unlock, either from the remote keychain transmitter or from the “unlock” button inside the car. It’s not a safety issue, since the hatchback isn’t intended as a passenger door, but it IS a nuisance, in that there is no other way to open the hatch. The people who designed the Torrent evidently thought it would look better without keyholes (except for the emergency one on the driver’s door), and expected that the owner would just use the remote to unlock the hatch and the passenger doors. Which is great until the electromechanical actuator that unlocks the hatch fails and there is no other way to get the hatch open. Which results in angry Torrent owners descending on the Service Department of their local dealership demanding immediate (warrantee) service…

This actually happened to us once before, in Los Angeles, before we came to Michigan. Only in that case, all of the actuators failed – the only way to get ANY of the doors open was to manually unlock the driver’s side door and then unlock the doors by hand – which gets old really quickly, especially when you’ve shelled out the money for power door locks. We went to the dealer we bought the car from, and after a few days of trial and error (during which they had to cover the cost of our rental car) they were able to solve the problem. What makes this an abuse of the franchise holder is that the dealership didn’t design the Torrent; they didn’t select these faulty actuators and they certainly didn’t fail to work the bugs out of the car’s systems before clearing them for distribution. But they are the ones having to clean up the resulting customer service nightmare…

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg; the companies have also ignored the dealers’ input on what cars would sell and what designs were ugly/faulty/impossible to unload (who thought the Pontiac Aztec was a good idea? Or the Chevy Vega?), produced cars that were literal rip-offs (the Cadillac Cimarron?) or death-traps (the Ford Pinto and Explorer), and used contracts to punish or destroy any dealer who complained. A favorite trick was sending an uppity dealership a consignment of nothing but pink cars and requiring them to try to sell them (generally at a horrendous loss) as part of their contractual obligation. The final indignity – cancellation and/or non-renewal of those contracts isn’t even a little surprising to anyone who has been paying attention over the past 30 years or so…

I’m not suggesting that the dealerships are as pure as the driven snow, of course; plenty of them have been nailed over the years for everything from passing used cars off as new ones to gouging customers (and their insurance companies) for repairs. But what I think is getting overlooked in all of this is that a dealership is a franchise, and franchise holders are, in fact, customers; one could even argue that they are the automakers’ primary customers. And given the way these organizations have been and continue to be treated by their franchisors, I’m often amazed that they’ve never gathered together en mass and marched on Detroit with pitchforks and torches…