Success Quote by Rick Wagoner

Cars “built to sit” is a deliberately damning image: metal, labor, and capital frozen in place, not doing the one job they were designed for, which is to move. Rick Wagoner’s line isn’t just about inventory management; it’s a diagnosis of a cultural sickness inside the auto business, especially the late-20th-century Detroit model where production targets often mattered more than actual demand.

The phrase “the wrong kind of behavior” does a lot of quiet work. It points to the incentives that pile up when factories keep churning and dealers become storage units: pushing volume through rebates, subsidized financing, and end-of-quarter fire sales; training customers to wait for discounts; and letting marketing paper over product weaknesses. Once a system learns it can “solve” mismatch with money, it stops learning how to match supply to what people want. Inventory becomes a buffer that protects bad decisions - and prolongs them.

Wagoner is also speaking as a CEO who lived through the era when “market share at any cost” was treated like a moral good. Lots full of unsold cars signal that cost structure, forecasting, and product strategy are out of sync. His intent is managerial and ideological: argue for discipline, tighter production, and a healthier feedback loop between consumer demand and corporate planning. The subtext is a warning about rot: when cars sit, so does accountability.