Originally Posted by
mjdehlin
The biggest question on my mind recently is whether or not it was a good thing that John ramped up production...
It was obviously bad for the company back then and played a major role in accelerating the failure...BUT in the grand scheme of things are current owners better off that this was the way in which the company went down?
What I mean is, did they really stand a chance of lasting much longer than they did? Would quality improvements and a turbo engine really have saved the company? It's possible that they would have failed anyway from overextending into other ventures like the ATV, DMC bus, aircraft tug, etc. Those projects all came to an end when the DMC-12 sucked the company's capital dry, but had they slowed things down with the car the company could have still went under from those other projects continuing on. Then we'd be left with 3000 cars and a handful of busses instead of 9000 cars.
Or maybe they would have survived for a few more years and eventually hit the same production numbers?
Either way, if they were in fact on an eventual path to failure I'm glad they at least went out leaving us with a sizeable stockpile of cars that still exist today.