General Motors’ seemingly intractable descent into chapter 11 has been a common subject here, so I took notice of this Sean Gregory/Time magazine article that explores the following question: why are the U.S. manufacturing plants of foreign automakers thriving while GM is shuttering nine of its plants?:

According to the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), the number of manufacturing jobs created by foreign-based automakers in the U.S. has risen 72% since 1993, to about 60,000. (The Big Three currently account for around 240,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S., down from 340,000 in 1993.) The Asian companies have grown the fastest. Toyota, which plans to overtake GM soon as the world’s largest automaker, has 11 U.S. plants and expects to open a truck factory in San Antonio, Texas, in 2006. European brands, including BMW and Mercedes-Benz, are also growing. CAR estimates that foreign automakers operating in the U.S. add 1.8 million jobs to the American economy, including white-collar, dealership and supplier positions–from partsmakers to the bartenders at post-whistle watering holes.

Why do overseas firms seem to thrive, building profitable cars with U.S. workers, while Detroit languishes? For example, in the first quarter of 2005, Nissan made $1,603 on every vehicle sold in North America, while GM lost $2,311, according to Harbour Consulting. For starters, the transplants, generally with reputations for higher quality than American brands, don’t offer the deep discounts that U.S. makers employ. And foreign manufacturers don’t carry the legacy costs that drag U.S. companies down. Workers at foreign companies’ nonunion shops make roughly the same in wages and benefits as unionized employees in Detroit. But Asian and European firms, with younger workforces in the U.S., aren’t saddled with crippling pension and health-care obligations. GM spends $1,525 per vehicle in the U.S. on health care, compared with $300 per vehicle at Toyota.
Thanks to newer technology, the foreign manufacturers are more efficient too. The Big Three are closing the productivity gap; GM takes 23 hours of labor to produce one vehicle, down from 32 hours in 1998. But that’s still longer than Toyota’s 19.4 hours per vehicle and Nissan’s 18.3. The real question, of course, is what kind of cars Americans want. Honda’s timing at East Liberty was near perfect: its fuel-efficient Civic rolled off the line just as consumers were looking for ways to save on gas costs. “We’re in a battle for survival right now,” says CAR chairman David Cole. “Without decisive action, the domestics will not stay in the game.”

It doesn’t seem that long ago that GM and Ford were doing well selling high-margin SUV’s and trucks. However, people’s taste tends to change over time and higher gasoline prices have a way of persuading folks that they don’t need all that space that SUV provides. Rather than plan for such changes, GM and Ford bet on the continuing popularity of their big brands, and now they are ill-equipped to compete with Toyota and Honda’s slicker, gas-efficient models. Higher health care and legacy costs are certainly burdensome for GM and other American auto manufacturers, but better planning during the go-go days of a relatively short time ago probably would have avoided the Enronesque experience that GM is experiencing now. Hat tip to Daniel Drezner for the link to the Time article.
Meanwhile, Brad DeLong — referring to this Robert Samuelson WaPo piece — opines on what ails GM:

As I see it, GM has three big problems:

It paid its workers in the 1980s and 1990s in backloaded pension and health care benefits so that now workers have cash-flow rights but no control rights over the corporation, and this is an unstable and dangerous corporate control situation.
Oligopoly profits have been built into GM’s wages for a long time, and these oligopoly profit components are very “sticky” — they remain even though the oligopoly profits are long gone.
GM management has bet very heavily on a low price of oil and a high price of SUVs.

Samuelson thinks that these are less important than (4): a culture of management that focuses on maintaining stability rather than taking advantage of change. He may be right.