Rick Wagoner Quotes

"There was an almost an 80% decline one year from 640,000 vehicles to 200,000, and now it's grown back. Our share has grown a lot."
-Rick Wagoner

"I think it's going to be silly not to take the competitive threat seriously. If we haven't learned any lessons from Japan and Korea, we deserve the things that befall us, ... On the flip side, the growth in China continues to be so strong that our guess is that most of the capacity in China will be used to meet Chinese needs."
-Rick Wagoner

"History shows you don't know what the future brings."
-Rick Wagoner

"All of our business units except GM North America are on or above track, and that has the extreme attention of us all. Progress is moving in the right direction ... but we still have more work to do."
-Rick Wagoner

"If you look from 1992 to 1997, we've really reduced the number of car models from more than 100 to about 81. Our strategy is to have the right number of products. Segment the brands better. There's a lot of work being done on the distribution side of the business. And the data's showing that our new products are doing a very decent job in the market."
-Rick Wagoner

"Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning."
-Rick Wagoner

"We've been able to use NAFTA. We import a lot more products to fill niches. We don't have to assemble them locally. We've consolidated a lot around pickup trucks. Rather than build everything to sell in Mexico, you can ship finished products back and forth. You get the production efficiencies of scale."
-Rick Wagoner

"There's been a consistency of approach and a consistency of execution. Moving to a common system and common metrics has really helped us."
-Rick Wagoner