4536 Ghosn With the Wind

Was this Sousaphone case part of the underground airliner that brought Carlos Ghosn to the relative freedom of life in Lebanon?

True or false: Fugitive car maven Carlos Ghosn escaped from his mansion in Tokyo by hiding a musical instrument case?  Answer: who knows.  But when you think of Ghosn (rhymes with “bone,”) brass is not a stretch.  After all, he took the shaky hidebound Nissan auto company of Japan and the hidebound shaky Renault auto company of France and combined them in such a way as that everyone appeared to be making a profit.  An impossible task according to most. 

But Ghosn did it.  Not as a merger or takeover. The companies are “allied” or “affiliated,” two words that we know have rubber meanings.  But it seems to be working.  

Earlier this week, Ghosn (sounds like “groan” without the r) appeared in semi-public to defend his secret mission to the Middle East.  He would not disclose how the trip was arranged.  But this fella has more passports than you have matches for your campfire. 

His main thrust was that he was railroaded by Evil Forces at Nissan who didn’t like his American-ish management style and his lack of Japanese-ness.  Of course no one at Nissan will acknowledge this.

So they filed a bunch of charges… misusing company funds, mingling of liabilities and debt and other things finance-types pretend to understand.  And, like more defendants than you can count, he said he can’t possibly get a fair trial in Japan.

That’s possible.  Here are some facts:  the prosecution wins more than 90% of similar cases in Japanese courts.  Tokyo police have some interview tactics that would scare Dick Cheney into confessing he shot JFK.  Japan is not a good place to be arrested for a crime.

So, is Ghosn a fraudster?  A huckster? A brilliant businessman? A guy who is responsible for bringing new life to automakers heading for the scrap yards halfway around the world from each other? A guy who curls up small enough to fit inside a Sousaphone case?  None of the above?  All of the above? 

Will he live out the rest of his days confined to Lebanon, a country that never met a pressure group it wouldn’t knuckle under to?  Lebanon, acting on an advisory notice from Interpol, tells Ghosn he cannot leave the country.  Cannot?  He “couldn’t” leave Japan, either. That didn’t exactly work out.

 Can Japan steal him back?  Does Tokyo really want to? Sure they do.  But if this is a face-saving contest, round one goes to Team Ghosn (Rhymes with drone.)

SHRAPNEL:

--The Sousaphone is often mistakenly called a tuba, and it plays in the same semi-subaudible range and is named for the bandleader and march writer John Philip Sousa who caused its creation. The original versions’ bells pointed up, not out. If you played one of those, you risked drowning if you marched in the rain.

--My social security “benefit” rose by a few bucks in 2020. I guess I should write a thank you note to trump. “Thanks for the raise, now… what’s the catch?”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Comments? please send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

1407 Auto Bottom Feeders and the Naked Hitchhiker

Suggestion: Merge Fiat and Renault and make one gigantic, monopolistic global manufacturer of clunker cars.

Call it Reniat or Finault.  

This space predicted in 1999 that the “alliance” between Nissan and Renault would drag Nissan down and it has.  Everyone knew what to expect when Fiat bought Chrysler out of bankruptcy:  Your Dodge Dart would suddenly become a Fix It Again Tony special and it has.

“Shipping crap” as Lee Iacocca called it once was the territory dominated if not outright owned by the American manufacturers, although the Brits held a minority stake in bad and still do.

But Detroit’s once lofty position at the bottom of the heap has become a worldwide phenomenon.  In fact these days you’re probably in better shape with a Buick than an Infiniti.

America’s auto industry: Teacher to the World.  A triumph of bad build.

Granted every maker has benefitted from two outside sources as they race down the toilet.

First is the major supplier of air bags, Takata.  The bags can melt.  They can explode.  They can fail to deploy.  And almost everyone gets their bags from Takata.  Even the good guys like Honda and Toyota.

Second is the infotainment technology, developed by the same kind of brilliant minds that gave us things like Windows 8.  Most of these are more distracting than cell phones, CB radios and naked hitchhikers combined.  Not only are they distracting, but largely serve no useful purpose.

When your computer crashes, it’s a glitch. When your infotainment center crashes, it’s a real crash … or can be.

Back to Finault.

The Fiat 500 is generally at the bottom of the reliability ratings.  They’ve now infected the “all new” Chrysler 200 with the same bottom feeder ranking.  It’s like they sat around at the boardroom in Turin to answer the question “We’re pretty bad.  How can we make things worse?”

The Renault-Nissan arrangement is too complicated to unravel, with more moving parts and joint or overlapping and unbalanced percentages than can be untangled.

And this shows that even a supposedly great man can fall victim to the Peter Principle (managers rise to their level of incompetence.)

Carlos Ghosn (pronounced goan; rhymes with phone) is probably the best car guy still employed.  But he’s running the whole Renault Nissan show, flitting from France to Japan so often he may be the world champion Frequent Flyer.  And in his spare time, he’s also chairman of the Russian company AvtoVaz, which makes cars that pretty much look like Renaults instead of the 1929 Packard clones they made until 2008.

Over in Turin, is Fiat’s Sergio Marchionne, no slouch of a car guy either.  But Marchionne doesn’t have those frequent flyer miles.  And he’s running one company, unlike Ghosn who is running something more like the United Nations.

Sweden is down to one brand, Volvo, owned by a company in China.  It started its deterioration under ownership by Ford and continues down the same path today.

Germany has problems of its own. Look at some of the reliability figures for Daimler, Audi, Volkswagen and BMW.  Germans with quality and engineering problems?  

Look out, y’all.  GM is creeping ahead you.  And that company, back from the dead, is driven by (shudder) a girl!

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014