I think the whole automotive industry should follow Apple computer's business plan. Because apple has such a streamline of products, instead of making so many, they focus on the few that the have and perfect them. And instead of going after each customer's tastes, they create a taste which is uniquely "apple" which brings customers to them, having them assimilate the company's "taste" instead. This not only saves time, but resources, manufacturing costs, and customer stress. Imagine of Ford only had 1 SUV, 1 Sports Car, 1 Minivan, and got ride of all there other smaller affiliate companies. So instead of having internal competition with itself, you make all these factories "FORD" only, and have them all making the same cars. henry ford said it best when he said, "sure you can pick a colour for you car, as long as it's BLACK". Another prime example is "General Tire", while they do have a limited number of tire models to pick from, each one excels in it's own category. The automotive industries' branched way too far for the limited customer pool that exists, and now their paying for it during this recession. Frankly, i'd like to see one of the BIG 3 fall, because it's needed to stabilize the industry, there's just wayyyyy to many companies. However, VW is the only exception, and all other companies should bow down to the "people's car"
In a sense, VW is Apple in the automotive sense, except in the last decade or so, they've been pumping out too many models as well, one of the things that has actually been keeping VW in a very good state, has been their TDI's and Diesels. I remember seeing a video report during the Clean TDI press converence that stated that 50% of their Jetta sales in NA, were diesel. The reason being, VW is one of the very few companies in NA that sells diesel. If you look at the Diesel sales during the recession compared to the Gas sales, Gas has taken a nose dive, while TDI's have been stable. Now, this may be in part of the high gas prices, but still, even when diesel prices were higher, they were still pretty stable.
