Planned Obsolescence

Cars were lasting too long in the 1970s, according to Detroit auto management who wanted to have customers turn in their cars and buy new ones, rather than sell them as used cars later. So management purposely made cars of poor quality, so that they'd be more expensive to fix after 8 years than to just buy a new one. It was arguably one of the dumbest management moves in history, because in the speed bump created by our making lousy cars, Japan jumped into that slot and quickly came to dominate the world industry.