A great article on the reason to buy American cars.

[rwhite692]

Hi Darren, what I was trying to say is that in this day and age, world class companies doing business outside of their home country are going to outfit their manufacturing plants with equipment and processes that they already know and understand completely, and have one set of engineering resources in place to support. They just aren't going to spend additional engineering time and money to change a known process, no matter how seemingly small, just so that they can put some local resources and suppliers to work. Aside from higher cost, this also causes them to lose a measure of control because they are now vulnerable to the potential failure of at least twice as many process variations, and potential supplier failures, than they started with.

If you would like a larger example, look at a company like Intel. Everywhere that they build a high volume wafer fab plant in the world, they employ hundreds if not thousands of local people. But plant equipment? That's all coming straight from US companies: Applied Materials, KLA Tencor, FormFactor, Novellus, etc just to name a few, and in turn, the US suppliers that support those companies. Intel spends hundreds of millions of dollars in the simple pursuit of having every process be exactly the same and therefore, having a totally predictable process that performs as designed, every time. They can also move processes between facilities as their needs change, at a minimal cost. This flexibility is also what allows them to have quick changeover of their plants between designs as well.

Do you think that a company like Honda is not concerned with rapid changeover and manufacturing flexibility?

Don't get me wrong...there is plenty that I don't like about the way that foreign compaines are allowed to do business in the US. (All of my cars are American, also, by the way) But it's not realistic to expect ANY world class, large scale manufacturing company to do what you are saying. I'm not aware of any large scale manufacturing company (from ANY country) that is going to go into a foreign country, and significantly re-tool and change their known processes that they already know and understand, just to benefit the local economy. Sorry, it's just not going to happen.

I'm done. -Rob