2008 Automotive Management Briefing Seminars - Day 1

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MANAGEMENT BRIEFING SEMINARS-TRAVERSE CITY
Day One-Getting Acclimated
By Steve Purdy
TheAutoChannel.com
Detroit Bureau

Early August means we find ourselves in beautiful Northern Michigan for perhaps one of the automobile industry’s most important conferences – The Management Briefing Seminars hosted by the respected Center for Automotive Research of Ann Arbor. Formerly part of the University of Michigan, CAR has become one of the world’s premier automotive research organizations branching even into areas like advanced transportation infrastructure.

Your dedicated team from TheAutoChannel.com, Steve and Thom, will be floating around here this week looking for those interesting tidbits that will be of interest to our readers. I’ll stay away from issues too technical or esoteric, though I can’t say the same for Thom. He likes that stuff.

The scholarly folks at CAR have chosen another broad theme this year – “Transcending Turbuleance.”

What exactly does that mean?

Well, the US automotive industry, as well as OEM’s and suppliers around the world, are still struggling to adjust to intensifying globalization. It’s been going on for years now as developing countries with lower labor costs suck more and more work away from the developed nations where strong middle class workers need to maintain their standard of living. Technology continues to advance at a blinding pace allowing creative and hard-working folks in all parts of the world to make parts, create services, assemble vehicles and even create new vehicles from scratch that are equal in quality to what the developed word have been producing.

We’ll hear this week from the Governors of Michigan and Ohio, top level leaders from the major OEMs (LaSorda from Chrysler, Fields from Ford, Colliver of Honda) and we’ll soak up knowledge and opinion from researchers, business leaders engineers, scientists and all manner of experts on the auto industry. We’ll also be schmoozing with these fascinating people at social events all week. Our heads will be spinning by Friday.

With world economies in flux, triggered in part by the credit difficulties in the US, investment in new products is a struggle. Fuel prices have everyone focusing on squeezing better mileage out of everything, including big luxury cars where the issue has been irrelevant in the past. New products, and even new categories of products, continue to surprise even us industry watchers. Wild currency fluxuations make international decisions risky. And, amazing advances in manufacturing technology change the way we make cars and trucks so rapidly it makes our heads spin.

So, stay tuned this week and we’ll do our best to entertain you with the surprises we encounter here in Traverse City.