There was a time when General Motors had products in so many different industries. It dominated the locomotive industry, the bus industry, held a strong foothold in diesel, sold highway semi-tractors, and much more. The General has pulled back somewhat from its old domineering ways, which is sad. But did you know that General Motors also owned satellite TV provider DirecTV and Lotus at almost the same time?
As the story goes, it’s the mid-1980s and GM CEO Roger Smith wanted the company to be the most technologically advanced automaker on the planet and he wanted to make it happen quickly. As the New York Times wrote, Smith thought electronics were the future. GM facilitated this by purchasing Hughes Aircraft (of Howard Hughes fame), beating both Ford and Boeing. Hughes Aircraft and Delco Electronics were then merged, creating Hughes Electronics. In 1990, Hughes Electronics announced a new satellite television service, DirecTV. The satellite TV service wouldn’t launch until 1994, after GM’s sale of Lotus in 1993. But for a short time, General Motors technically had its hands in both satellite communications and Lotus.
This morning, Matt ended his Morning Dump by asking about the weirdest pairings of automakers in history. V10omous gave us a great answer:
GM owned both Directv and Lotus at the same time.
You could argue that this isn’t exactly true given the fact that DirecTV didn’t officially launch until 1994. But still, it’s fascinating that GM owned both brands. Ash78 delivered a terrific line:
And neither one worked very well when it rained.
One of the more hilarious parts about being a member of the Autopian team is that everyone gives pretty vague estimates on time. If David tells you something, like buying a truck, is going to take a couple of hours, double or triple that time. I also seem to give inaccurate estimates on time. Wesley Brooks noticed this:
David estimated that the entire errand would take two hours, even though Google maps said that’s just the driving time one-way?! Engineers are supposed to be *good* at guesstimation.
The replies were even better. From Totally not a robot:
David was calculating without accounting for wind, friction, temperature and pressure changes, etc.
And Phuzz:
He was assuming a perfectly spherical Aztec in a vacuum.
Engineers must be like wizards. They are never late nor early, but arrive precisely when they mean to.
Finally, the responses to my bra leakage article were totally unexpected, but they fill me with joy. Look at Chronometric here:
Thank you for keeping us abreast of the situation.
Also Harvey Park Bench:
That’s hilariously unexpected. I would have thought bras were made of fabric and wire, but I guess not!
Also, one quarter female readership for a car site, that’s impressive and a testament to your inclusive and welcoming attitude. The commentariat is also very well behaved for the most part.
Thank you for helping us keep this place great! Have a great weekend.
Note for whoever manages the website. At least in my browser (Firefox), when I click on an external the page opens in the same window, taking me away from theautopian.com. External links should open in new tabs so you don’t lose the traffic you’ve worked so hard to get.
I agree! Sadly, it’s a platform problem that we do not currently have a good solution for. Our iteration of WordPress automatically opens links in the same tab. We can manually set those links to open in new tabs, but that takes prohibitively long.
Weirdly, we’re also having another bizarre issue where links are getting replaced with a picture of an International. Still haven’t figured out that one yet.
We run our company’s website on WP and use Divi, and some of the things you have to do to make it work the way you want is downright 90s vintage HTML. There are easy solutions to all of these challenges. How much do you want to spend?
I refuse to buy into your International conspiracy.
That’s not a bug, thats a feature.
They get a 5 cent kickback from International every time a user is shown that photo.
Either that or it’s a data Harvester.
Might be a Combine of the two.
First world problems 🙂
Try the trick that worked forever, which was “Ctrl-Click” to open a link in a new tab. I’m kind of in the opposite camp, I get a little sick of the default click opening a new tab even when I don’t want it. So much clutter.
Ctrl-Click is what we used to have to do in the dark ages, when your browser options were Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. We have evolved. Enough website have figured out how to manage their external links that such clickery is the exception, not the rule.
Even the cheapest mice have clickable scroll wheels now, which will do the same thing as ctrl-click
Then middle click instead
Middle click? Mouse?
Thanks dad… /s
two finger click on the touch pad = left click on the mouse, pick from dropdown
well in some environments
or touch both middle fingers to thumb and tilt head to left, but for the sake of all your descendants don’t do this standing on your left foot! HELL, TO BE SAFE DON’T STAND AT ALL !!!
The weird things people will stan over…
OMG! That’s the first time I’ve ever made CotD!! (Even including the old place).
Do you think I should include it on my resume?
Welcome to the club! Including any mention of your membership may negatively affect your credit score.
I’m still waiting on my jacket
I’m still waiting on my check. There is a bonus check coming, yeah?
It’s 20% of your annual Autopian salary. 😉
While we’re reminiscing about past activities of the General, don’t forget Frigidaire appliances, Terex earthmovers, New Departure and Hyatt bearings, Ternstedt hardware, and Guide Lamp machine guns.
and EDS (Ross Perot’s company) for a while too!
Perot was something else. I remember when he got first got involved his quote was ” I don’t know much about cars but I know all GM cars leak oil ” .
I grew up in a GM household. My dad graduated from General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) and worked for New Departure-Hyatt, which is why I was born in Ohio instead of Connecticut like my siblings. When my dad briefly left NDH in the early 70s we moved from Ohio to Cape Cod, into a house my parents had built and furnished with Frigidaire appliances. The refrigerator lasted almost 50 years before crapping out in my mother’s basement a couple years ago. I was going to grab it, fix it, and stick it in my garage as a beer fridge, but she had it hauled away before I knew what was going on.
It was heresy when my dad traded in our ’73 Impala wagon (power clamshell tailgate FTW!) for a Volkswagen Rabbit so he could commute back to Connecticut from the Cape for work until we could move to Connecticut and he could eventually get back in at New-Departure Hyatt. Full circle.
Having managed engineers, I came to realize that “two weeks” translates to somewhere between “not today” and “before the heat death of the universe, maybe” six weeks on the other hand is about six weeks.
Can confirm. Engineers are great at estimating lots of technical things. Estimating how long that estimation will take though, not so much.
Source: I’m an engineer.
We love managers like you.
I’ll tell you why in a couple of weeks.
If you ask and engineer (at least this one), how long something will take you’ll usually get an honest answer. If you ask engineer if they can do something in x amount of time you typical won’t
Well, there are two different things.
One is Implementing a known plan. That is fairly predictable, and lots of engineering is like that. There is this waterfall analogy that is popular. You make a plan and follow it. Making a new iteration of an existing design falls into that category. Designing a screen door or a new version of the small block Chevy would be like that.
The other is trying to solve a problem, where you have a nearly infinite number of combinations of sub-solutions. Many of them are great solutions but are incompatible with each other. Many are interdependent and rely on each other. The whole thing devolves into a traveling salesman problem if you aren’t careful.
The second kind of project was the kind I was always working on, and most of it was software.
Once after finishing a project, a new version of the software environment we were running in was released that solved one of their problems by turning off all the interrupts in the CPU when they had a timing critical thing happening, essentially breaking the operating system. This meant I had to rewrite our product in assembly to overwrite their registers rather than send messages to their published API because the language we had written it in no longer worked to read the hardware that we had already built a thousand copies of.
That overlap of DirecTV and Lotus is ever so slightly reminiscent of that meme that was going around a while back about how the fax machine was invented in the 1840s, the samurai class was abolished in the 1870s, and Lincoln died in 1865 so there was an overlap where Lincoln could theoretically have sent a fax to a samurai.
“Need security detail STOP. Ford’s Theatre tomorrow STOP. No backup plans plz hurry bro STOP.”
“Stop” is for a telegraph – not a Fax.
Here – let me draw that for you – I’ll fax it over shortly….
I’ll make sure my secretary doesn’t toss it in the trash with all the other all-inclusive cruise vacation ads, lol.I was imagining Lincoln dictating it and the fax operator was trying to explain how it worked but he just couldn’t understand. Old people, right?!I was explaining the telegraph to my middle schoolers the other night, and the broader context was “do we really have that many truly new inventions?” They had some fun with the idea that telegraphs were really just text messages in the 19th century.It must have been mind-blowing the first time we had instant long-distance communications. Telegraph, radio…everything since then has really been just improvements on the same basic concept. TV was the only big leap beyond radio’s idea. And the internet was just more of the same, except it was two-directional and on-demand.
Too small to operate in a snow storm?