It's the health care costs.  And union contracts that pay the same wage to
janitors and skilled workers is dumb.

"Detroit draws on the same talent pool as the rest of global industry, and
must pay a competitive wage. Its executives are no more overpaid or
incompetent than anybody else's. Nor is it necessary to rub its face in
the superiority of the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. No car company could
humanly hope to compete in the basic sedan segment with a deadweight cost
disadvantage of thousands of dollars per car. Detroit would be foolish to
try."  - Excerpt from Same Article

Van Nuys was built in 1946 as part of Al Sloan's "replace transit with
cars" campaign, in which GM gobbled up and shut down transit
operations, notably electric streetcar operations, all over the US and
Canada.  At the time, GM was already getting the Key System in the Bay
Area disassembled and replaced with GM Coaches, and had their sights
on Pacific Electric in LA, and the Fremont and Van Nuys plants were
supposed to sell Chevies to all those who formerly rode street cars in
those areas.

Originally, Van Nuys was dedicated to Chevrolet production only, as
the huge neon "bow tie" sign on top of the assembly building
proclaimed.  Higher end cars, such as the Pontiacs, Buicks and
Oldsmobiles, were built at the nearby South Gate plant on a rotating
basis....one week Oldses, one week Buicks, etc.  Cadillacs still only
came from Lansing at that time.  Later, during the "Roger Rabbit" era,
the Van Nuys plant was folded into GM Canada's operations, and made
only Camaros and Firebirds starting with the "new" '79 year model.
Just before that, Van Nuys was the assembly plant for Chevy's best
seller in California, the Malibus, including the SS variants.

GM lower and middle management at Van Nuys and South Gate were some of
the worst, most incompetent anywhere in the corporation, and UAW
simply reacted as they should to protect their membership.  After many
tries at getting GM to save Van Nuys (South Gate was gone by the '70s)
by offering "collaborative" work rule deals, GM simply hosed it all
off and bulldozed the plant rather than concede any power.  The real
shame was that the plant, a state-of-the-art facility in '46, was
built to an "open" floor plan and could have assembled any number of
vehicle types.  GM simply strung the UAW along until it was ready for
the unsuccessful "new" Cramaro/Fireturd series to be built in
Youngstown using Buick V6s on a much-belated new platform.  The F car
platform that GM was cranking out until the end of the '92 run had
been around, essentially unchanged, since 1979!

The local economy after the GM closure, which nearly coincided with
the Lockheed plant closings in nearby Burbank, was decimated, as tens
of thousands of well paying jobs evaporated overnight, causing a
record tanking of the real estate market around both plants.  The San
Fernando Valley has never recovered from the loss, and all those lower
budget houses and apartments that formerly housed UAW and IAM plant
workers and their families are now chock full of illegal aliens.

Thanks, GM.  Hope you go bankrupt.

So what if they were crap, they were selling. Many of the sales were to
foreign governments that put a bid out and the low price got the sale.

My point is that we are competing on a global scale.  While the company and
union was arguing about wages here, the government of Burma or Sudan or
wherever bought the backhoe from Kubota.