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I concur with some of the other answers that the case had far too many problems for any one prosecutor’s competence to be the dealbreaker.Consider this little-told story from Johnny Cochran’s memoirs: The night before trial was to begin Garcetti called him up and asked, not for the first time, if he’d consider a plea. Cochran already had a very good idea how weak the state’s case was, and wasn’t seriously considering taking one to O.J. unless he said he wanted one, which he didn’t think O.J. was likely to. But, for shits and giggles, he decided to ask the DA what he was offering: “Two counts of involuntary manslaughter”, the least serious intentional homicide charge in California’s penal code.He politely rejected the offer and was even more confident … if, for all the talking up the case Garcetti and the DA’s office had been doing in the media, talking the media obediently parroted, that was the best offer he could make when he had the best negotiating position he was going to have, even Garcetti had to know the case had serious problems and this was his way of attempting to get rid of it as quickly as possible.(Why? Part of the problem was that the LAPD and DA had become so used to cutting corners and cheating to win cases that even when they knew the spotlight would be shining right on them, even when they knew they’d be up against a defendant who would have resources equivalent to those of the state (but for all the bleating about how OJ “bought” his way out, the state still spent more money ($11 million) than he did ($7 million) and had more lawyers appear for them at the trial than he did), they still couldn’t help themselves).Even Marcia Clark knew this. Before the trial, she reportedly told her friend at the time, fellow ADA Lucianne Coleman, who had doubts about the case even then and expressed them to Clark, that yes, the case was “a loser, but it’s going to make me.”However, from what I’ve read she nevertheless managed to find some ways of her own to screw things up beyond what the LAPD and her bosses already had. She’s not blameless, however she and her apologists have tried to spin things since.Joe Bosco was one of the four book authors who had been granted a permanent seat at the trial. And while one of the others, Jeffrey Toobin, wrote the better-selling but poorly-sourced The Run of His Life, a book that is at odds with most of the other ones (perhaps because, as Bosco writes, Toobin was rarely present as he had a young son back in Brooklyn and spent a lot of his time back there), Bosco’s A Problem of Evidence: How the Prosecution Freed O.J. Simpson became the best book about the trial that no one read (probably because it didn’t come out for a year, by which point everyone was mightily sick of reading or hearing about it). It is hard to find these days but very worth your time to try if you’re really interested in the real truth(s) about the case. A lot of what I have to say about the case comes from A Problem of Evidence.Peter West’s answer gets at something I only saw Bosco report. Yes, Clark and Darden were part of the Special Trials team in the LA County DA’s office. That is not entirely, however, a function of them being the best possible prosecutors in the office. It was a function of them being the best prosecutors available …. who would never make viable candidates to challenge the incumbent DA in the primary. The last thing any LA County DA wants is some underling becoming nationally prominent from a highly publicized trial, enough so that someone in the local Democratic party or its base who has a grudge against the DA for whatever reason can gently start hinting to that prosecutor that they might make a better DA than their boss. Garcetti wasn’t the first one (and not the last either, I’ll bet) to farm all his real stars out to satellite offices in Foothills, Santa Monica or Ramparts or wherever to keep them away from the cameras (and, likewise, to make sure any big name trial they might work went downtown, where his office was just upstairs).Marcia Clark was perfectly safe for Garcetti … having previously worked as a stripper, she could become many things, and indeed has, but LA County DA was never, and is never, going to be one of them.But she wasn’t the crack prosecutor she was sold as. Much was made of the conviction she won in the Rebecca Schaeffer case (where the defendant was, interestingly, represented by Shawn Chapman, who later left the public defender’s office and went to work for Cochran, putting her on opposite sides from Clark in the OJ trial as well). But in that case she’d had a defendant who admitted being on the victim’s front step with a loaded gun, a defendant with clear mental issues who insisted on testifying because he thought he could explain to the jury how it was really all an accident. Her cross was indeed devastating, but he had already done 95% of the job for her, much more than was done in the Simpson-Goldman murders.That said, here’s how she made things worse for the People:Taking the case to trial in the first place: The situation with the one witness before the grand jury who had supposedly tried to sell their story to the media before testifying making the preliminary hearing necessary was actually a face-saver for the prosecution. According to the ADA who was presenting to the grand jury, the chance of getting a no-bill was pretty high, and he warned her of that before the grand jury was to vote. If the grand jury was that dicey about it, what else would you have expected at trial?Of course, this decision was probably out of her hands to begin with. It must be remembered today that in the 15 or so years prior to the OJ trial, the LA County DA’s office had lost, or been badly embarrassed in, every high-profile case it prosecuted: McMartin preschool, Twilight Zone, Rodney King, and right before OJ the first Menendez brothers trial. They were damned if they weren’t going to get their makeup (and when they didn’t get it on OJ, they took it off poor Winona Ryder).Making the past domestic violence so central to the case: Certainly that 911 tape did a lot of damage to O.J.’s image before the trial even began. But as effective as it was on the public, a lot of prosecutors elsewhere in the country were sort of scratching their heads. There didn’t seem to be the pattern of escalating behavior that usually works to convince a jury this led to murder, and indeed juries had acquitted in cases with worse 911 calls.She also was insistent, perhaps for good political reasons, that the jury had to be mostly female and black. Certainly that might have attenuated any unrest in the case of a guilty verdict. But it also put the case in the hands of a jury very unlikely to find the victim sympathetic.You don’t need to be black to believe that black women would find Nicole Brown Simpson the epitome of the Becky stereotype: A blonde white woman who’d barely worked a day in her life comes into a successful, famous black man’s life and steals him away from the black woman who’d borne him two children and raised them while he was getting famous. Cochran and Carl Douglas were black, and they knew this in a more than theoretical way.But even they were surprised, when they went to Phoenix to test aspects of their case with their jury consultant, by just how strong the antipathy to Nicole was among black women. Some of them practically came right out and said she deserved this.And … the prosecution got the same results, more or less, with their own jury consultant, Jo-Ellan Dimitrius (at the time Michael Crichton’s wife; one of the best-kept open secrets of the trial, according to Bosco, was the affair between her and Garcetti that neither of them tried too hard to hide). Yet still Marcia Clark insisted to her superiors that black women could get past this. Which she might yet have helped them to do but for …The very beginning of her opening statement, in which she more or less apologizes to the jury for having to put O.J. Simpson on trial. Never do that. It would be a very self-destructive move in any criminal case. But, in one already well shot through with racial tensions, it came across as very patronizing, as if the jurors were all three-year-olds having to hear the murder case against Barney the Dinosaur.Ron Shipp: In just what universe is it probative to put on a witness whose major claim against the defendant is that he heard O.J. say he dreamed of having killed Nicole? A soap opera, maybe. Carl Douglas’s cross, in which he confronted Shipp about having been severely drunk at the time he claims to have been alone with OJ, exacerbated the racial divide—white commentators thought he was being too harsh, while black ones thought he was right on target (In fact, it was learned after the trial that Shipp had been the prosecution witness the jury trusted least, as they believed he intended to profit from his testimony. The fact that he never did does not, contra Vincent Bugliosi, invalidate that impression). Alan Dershowitz said that would have been his lead assignation of error had he had to appeal a guilty verdict, that it was grotesquely unfair to allow that testimony yet exclude most of the Fuhrman tapes (long story behind that one too, by the way, that never got much coverage).The way she buffaloed the timeline witnesses: Pat McKenna, one of the defense investigators, says all the five witnesses the defense put on to establish the timeline (i.e., that the murders happened later than the prosecution claimed, which makes it much harder for O.J. to have done them) had originally gone to the prosecution, out of good old civic duty—but then were disgusted and alienated when they were leaned on hard to change their testimony so it supported the “plaintive wail” timeline. And when the defense got their names in discovery, these people were delighted to talk, even though some of them still believed OJ was guilty. But they weren’t going to lie to convict him.In her post-trial memoir, Without a Doubt (about which more below), Clark really trashes these people hard, sneering at Denise Pilnak as “Miss Clockophile” and, after acknowledging that she may indeed have come down too hard on Ellen Aaronson and Danny Goodman (known to trial junkies as “the couple on the first date”), coming down hard on them again anyway, suggesting that Aaronson was so falling-down drunk as not to be believable on anything.If that was what she was like in a book written after the fact, just what was she like in a room with these people?Making a big deal of the thumps Kato heard : They are IMO the biggest red herring in the case, something brought into it by Mark Fuhrman to explain the other glove, which like the first one at Bundy he was conveniently alone when he found, being in the vicinity. In her closing statement, Clark made those thumps more clearly be from the a/c than Kato had. As most people who’ve ever had window air-conditioner units know, those things go “thump” all the time for no reason whatsoever. The defense got a call from some guy who’d repaired it or done routine maintenance on it a couple of weeks earlier; he told them that one had been particularly notorious for its thump noises.(To be fair, at some event a couple of years after the trial Clark admitted that she wasn’t really sure, and maybe never was, that the thumps meant anything with regard to the murder (With regard to Fuhrman planting the glove, of course, they mean a lot))EDIT: As noted in comments below, Kato said the thumps were on his wall, not the A/C unit.Having Dr. Golden’s boss testify at length about the results of an autopsy he didn’t personally perform: There are all sorts of reasons given for why Dr. Golden didn’t testify at the trial; one that I believe is that the DA’s office felt he was too honest and gave the defense stronger support for the multiple-killer theory in his testimony at the preliminary hearing. But for whatever reason, the OJ trial became notable for being one of the few murder trials in American history where the medical examiner who had actually performed the autopsy was available to testify yet did not.General immaturity and lack of professionalism: According to Bosco, whenever the cameras weren’t on, Clark got all flirty, often but not always with Cochran, in full view of everyone in the courtroom—Ito, the jury, the other lawyers and the public. He said once to Gerry Spence during a break that “she flirts with the air”; Spence told him he liked that line so much he was going to use it on TV that night. I don’t know if he did; Clark and her apologists have tried to portray most of the criticism she got as sexist.Be that as it may, there was in Bosco’s opinion merit to this one. One of the times she was most flirty was … well, many times, during the week when the prosecution had Dr. Lak (the coroner, whose people the police had kept from the scene for the first 10 hours after the murder) on the stand. Accompanying him were easels with blowups of graphic crime scene photos, turned so the public and cameras could not see them. Only after that week did Ito relent and allow the media, one at a time, to walk past them and see what the jury had been forced to look at all week. In Lawrence Wright’s An American Tragedy, it is recounted that some of the reporters looked physically ill. AP reporter Linda Deutch recalls wondering how the jury would feel about whoever made them look at these scenes all week.And Bosco recounts that everytime the cameras weren’t on, there was Marcia Clark standing there all smiles and giggles with Cochran or whoever. In full view of the same jury, right next to all these horrible pictures. Only to get back to being all serious when the red light went on.She also had a habit of responding overly harshly to some little things they defense did. Alan Dershowitz, whose main role on the trial team was to prepare for an appeal if OJ had gotten convicted, nevertheless had to make occasional trips out to LA to appear, for (ahem) appearances’ sake. In one of those, he stepped up to argue some really minor point, in his usual sober and scholarly way. Clark responded on the people’s behalf with extreme stridency, raising her voice, as if some horrific wrong had just been perpetrated in the courtroom. i.e. “This is SICK! This is DEPRAVED!” As he took his seat at the defense table, mystified, Robert Shapiro turned to him and whispered “welcome to the Marcia club” or something like that.Before the trial, Coleman, Clark’s friend and fellow ADA (the two had often double dated) up until after the trial came to her and warned her about Fuhrman. Coleman had known Fuhrman in her capacity as a filing DA, and when the story broke about his past racism she said, offhandedly, to another detective, can you believe this crap about Mark? Instead of joining her in laughing it off, the other detective said, I wouldn’t put it past him.Coleman (and eventually the defense) learned about how after this detective had married a Jewish woman (wow … really unusual in LA!), his locker had been defaced with swastikas. Fuhrman’s fingerprints were all over it. Fuhrman was confronted by his commander, Peggy York, also Mrs. Lance Ito, about this, and apparently because of that and his behavior in that meeting earned himself two weeks of additional unpaid vacation that year (upheld on internal appeal but overturned in arbitration). A lot of people in the know can’t read York’s affidavit about not really remembering Fuhrman when she supervised him without thinking she perjured herself.So Coleman warned her friend and colleague about possible problems with this witness. Marcia’s response? Not “thank you” but “Why is everyone trying to insert themselves into my case?”Shortly after the trial, former LA County DA Ira Reiner (who has an albatross around his own neck on this in the form of the aforementioned McMartin trial) publicly criticized his former office generally and her specifically. Asked about it on TV, she responded “Ira Reiner has never tried a felony case” in this sniffy, singsong tone that one would expect from a child.You could say that she was under a great deal of stress at the time and excuse all this. You could … until you take the time to read her book, Without a Doubt. If you do, it is hard not to come to the carefully considered, objective conclusion that Marcia Clark is a complete bitch.You’d like to think a publisher who’d handed her a fat advance would at least want to better recoup it by assigning Clark the sort of editor who would send some manu- (or type-)script pages (or, more likely, transcribed rants) back after getting them with large passages circled and the note “I want you to sit back and really think about how saying this will make you look … Are you really comfortable with this?” or something along those lines (ahem) in the margins. And maybe they did, in which case I wouldn’t be surprised if Clark threw a tantrum and the editor was either reassigned or told just to stick to worrying about her author’s grammar and clarity. Or maybe whoever was in the first meetings with her knew better than to subject any talented book editor they wanted to work for them again to that maelstrom (Or femaelstrom? For someone who complains mightily, and probably not without justification, about the sexism in the LADA/LAPD, she comes across too much as a stereotypically hysterical, hormonal and overly emotional female).However she got it, Clark got that protection from someone who might have wanted to protect her image from herself. Without a Doubt is filled with invective against so many people besides the defense’s timeline witnesses who could have helped the prosecution, people the lead prosecutor in a high-profile criminal case should have known better than to alienate, even retroactively, like … the jury (“the Twelve Stone Faces” … and that more than once!), other key prosecution witnesses (she lectures not only Fung, but detectives Lange and Vannatter, on how she would have done their jobs better) and the judge (she thinks, and she may have been right, that Ito had a very low estimate of her skills as a prosecutor). Add to that the verbatim transcripts of tapes she made talking to herself in (apparently) the car on certain mornings on her way to work.Long before you finish Without a Doubt, or hell, before you even think to take it to the cashier and buy (as we did back then), you find yourself primarily hoping that you won’t have to go to this girl’s 13th birthday party. There are (or were, back in the day) at least a few reviews on Amazon where people basically said “I felt sorry for her until I read this book”.Not having a prosecution team meeting until the eve of surrebuttal. Yup, it took that long, until literally right before the last part of the trial where parties could present witnesses and introduce evidence, for someone to have the bright idea to sit all 20 or so prosecutors (not all from LA, either) down and see where everyone was and what ideas they had to share. Supposedly this was done in the hope that somehow they might get a mistrial (after Clark’s ploy to force it by bringing in York if Ito admitted the Fuhrman tapes, a move even some of the other prosecutors thought was crossing a line, failed) and what they would do differently in a second trial. The result of that was leaks saying that the prosecution was now beginning to think O.J. was “behind the murders”. Changing your case theory at this point in a trial is like changing your offensive game plan completely at the two-minute warning.Playing the video of Thanos Keraitis during surrebuttal: The prosecution had to deal with the missing blood from the testing that could not otherwise have been accounted for, not even by Collin Yamauchi’s little, uh, accident (No one bothered to ask just why the reference sample with the suspect’s blood was even allowed to be in the same room as two major pieces of forensic evidence against him). And at the time of the end of the trial, Keraitis, the police phlebotomist, was sick in the hospital and not well enough to come in and testify.So … what did the prosecution do? They shot a video of Keraitis being examined about this in his hospital bed in which he basically says, whoops, I was probably mistaken about the amount of blood I’d drawn from Simpson. Sorry about that …And then they showed this to the jury.And he of course could not conveniently be cross-examined. A few commentators pointed to this audacious dog-ate-my-homework gambit as a reason the jury’s sanity would have to be questioned if they hadn’t voted to acquit.Lying to the jury in her closing argument. Or not knowing her own case, which is just as bad. Clark, who decided to take the whole closing argument herself while the defense apportioned it among three lawyers, told the jury that Allan Park, the limo driver, had testified that he had not seen any lights on at Rockingham when he arrived that night, and that he saw a dark figure moving around.Well, guess what: The jurors had kept notes, and apparently some of them couldn’t find in their notes from his testimony a few months earlier where he’d said that. So, in a move that some commentators still pretend is headscratching, they asked to have Park’s testimony read back.I can imagine what went on in the jury room afterwards. “If she’s lying to us, can we believe any of them?” and then the not-guilty verdict that quickly drew the wrath of the media that had pinned its hopes on at least a week or two of deliberations, with ample opportunities for high-value commercial breaks during high-rated evening commentary shows, as a climax to several months of trial (but which more sensible, seasoned prosecutors said was the “get me out of here” verdict they had seen coming).Having said all that, I should at least temper this with a couple of things that Marcia Clark and the prosecution have often been faulted for that they should not be:Not bringing the Bronco chase up: According to Bosco, there was a tacit agreement between the two sides not to bring it up (Bob Blasier, who joined the defense team later, after this understanding had been reached, once began a line of questioning that seemed likely to lead there, but someone quickly found a way to force a sidebar that was really just everyone on both sides explaining this gentleman’s agreement to him). Both sides had something to lose from having it in evidence, the state more so than OJ.Had the Bronco chase been brought up, the jury would have been allowed to consider it as an attempted flight and thus, under California law, evidence of consciousness of guilt. So, yeah, the defense didn’t want that.But if the prosecution had insisted, the defense had plenty of evidence that the disguises and money found in the Bronco were exactly what they, Cowlings and O.J. said they were: the disguises were for when they visited places like Disneyland or Knotts Berry Farm with their families and didn’t want to be bothered by fans; the defense actually had pictures of them at those places wearing the disguises. The money had indeed been withdrawn from the bank so Cowlings could use it for the Simpson children’s immediate needs should O.J. have followed through with killing himself or been killed by the police (good estate planning advice, actually: Make sure your children or whoever have some way of accessing some amount of cash from your estate can used to pay funeral expenses and whatever else might be incurred in the immediate aftermath of your demise, because it takes a while for the legal paperwork putting the executor(s) in charge to go through and a lot of funeral homes don’t like to wait that long to get paid). And again they had a letter O.J. had written proving this.So, again, this would have hurt both sides.Not playing the tape of O.J.’s interview with Lange and Vanatter. Clark herself thought at the time, and has said again since, that the two detectives were incredibly easy on O.J., not asking followup questions that seem obvious, because they were too awed by being in the presence of this football legend. So yes, she had some reasons for not introducing it. But there were stronger ones.A lot of people have only read the transcript, but if they had introduced that at the trial the defense would have had every right to insist on introducing the actual tape as well. And the consensus among both sides was that it didn’t hurt O.J. as much as everyone thought it would, not when you listened to it. When you do, O.J. sounds deeply tired and fogged in, as you might expect of someone who’s just had to fly to Chicago and back overnight, and finding out his ex-wife and mother of his two younger children, with whom he had been trying to reconcile, has been killed in between the two flights. Defense investigator Pat McKenna says it really sounds like the two detectives are, in fact, trying to take advantage of this and manipulate him.But McKenna also identified to Bosco, in this context, what I think is the real reason the prosecution, probably at a level above Clark, didn’t want this tape or transcript to be part of what the jury was considering.It’s this seemingly innocuous exchange between O.J. and Vannatter about the security arrangements at Nicole’s condo on South Bundy:Vannatter: Was she very security conscious? Did she keep that house locked up?Simpson: Very.Vannatter: The intercom didn't work apparently, right?Simpson: I thought it worked.Vannatter: Oh, OK. Does the electronic buzzer work?Simpson: The electronic buzzer works to let people in.This exchange, played in court, could have acquitted O.J. without the glove and without Fuhrman.What’s behind is that, as designed, the gate was one of those that has an intercom where whoever’s at it can talk to whoever might open it and identify themselves, after which the person on the other end of the intercom can press a button that unlocks the gate and buzzes them in. Nothing fancy, we’ve all been through this kind of portal, and you yourself might have one.But … Nicole’s version of this security gate had been damaged in the Northridge earthquake the previous fall, and she hadn’t had fixed or replaced yet. Knocked off kilter, the intercom worked … but the lock didn’t. So whoever was inside had to come down and open it in person.This is why Nicole was in the front yard with Ron Goldman at the time of their deaths. Had the gate been working properly, she might have let him in and greeted him at the house door rather than the front gate, and we might not be having these conversations today.And … it’s clear from the above that O.J. doesn’t know this, that he hasn’t been in through the front gate since before the earthquake, since he thinks the buzzer still works as intended.Vannatter isn’t just asking, either. He’s playing a seasoned detective’s game to catch a suspect lying—as McKenna puts it, trying to “Mutt and Jeff” O.J. He gives Simpson a leading question based on a premise he, the detective, knows is false. Then, when that doesn’t result in an answer that makes it clear the suspect is lying, he switches to a closed question where he also knows the answer, and Simpson’s answer suggests he’s genuinely unaware the gate buzzer was broken. In other words, that he doesn’t have the level of familiarity with Nicole’s security arrangements that he would have had to.Yes, it’s possible that O.J. figured out exactly what was going on and adjusted. But you have to either be pretty on your game or a veteran of the non-police side of police interviews to be able to see what’s going on. I don’t think O.J. was the former, and he definitely isn’t the latter.(I also don’t think the prosecution wanted that later bit about the cars on the highway surrounding OJ late at night some time earlier in evidence, either. Nor the defense. There were doors in this trial that were unlocked that neither side wanted to open if they could avoid doing so …)Not taking Jill Shively seriously: If there are some of Marcia Clark’s fumbles that can only be squarely laid at her feet, like lying in her closing argument (something Nancy Grace also used to do in her prosecutorial days, more frequently), this was a wise move that, based on her book, she should get sole credit for.Shively, you might remember, was the woman who claimed she was driving in Lower Brentwood on the night of the murders and nearly got into a three-way accident with O.J. in the Bronco, and a third driver in a Nissan, at sometime after the prosecution claimed he committed them. If true, her account would have seriously jossed O.J.’s alibi, which largely has him at Rockingham the entire time, alone, between when he and Kato come home and when Park comes to pick him up. For that reason, Vannatter, who interviewed her, states in the book he wrote with Lange that he believes that she was telling the truth.Officially, the prosecution dropped her because of reports she was selling her story to the tabloid TV shows. That, like the grand jury, was a face-saver, more for Shively’s sake than the prosecution’s.Clark is very frank about this in Without a Doubt. Not long after Shively’s claims hit the news, she got a fax from actor Brian Patrick Clarke, mostly the pages of a small-claims judgement he had obtained against Shively for fraud after she (EDIT: corrected per comments) had secured a $6,000 loan from against the $250,000 she said she would soon be paid for a screenplay she’d written, as well as a part for him in it when it was produced; in fact not only was it not her screenplay but it was already in preproduction (My Life, starring Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman, if it matters).Clarke had already tipped off the defense, and that was that for Jill Shively as a witness at the O.J. trial. (The defense had even more that specifically impugned her credibility as to whether she had actually even been out that night: people called them saying that no one who knew her had ever seen her jogging, especially since she was apparently morbidly obese (by LA standards, anyway) at the time.)

I am from somewhere overseas. But before you, Quora users, would leave an answer on this question, then I would remind to you the definitions of the following words/names that are mentioned on the question’s title, hence, a glossary.===The Volkswagen Group “is a German multinational automotive manufacturing corporation headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany and indirectly majority owned by the Austrian Porsche and Piëch families. It designs, manufactures and distributes passenger and commercial vehicles, motorcycles, engines, and turbomachinery and offers related services including financing, leasing and fleet management.” - source: Volkswagen Group - WikipediaIn addition to that, here are the explanations of VAG’s subsidiaries:Audi AG “is a German automobile manufacturer that designs, engineers, produces, markets and distributes luxury vehicles. Audi is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group and has its roots at Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. Audi-branded vehicles are produced in nine production facilities worldwide.”“The company name is based on the Latin translation of the surname of the founder, August Horch. "Horch", meaning "listen" in German, becomes "audi" in Latin. The four rings of the Audi logo each represent one of four car companies that banded together to create Audi's predecessor company, Auto Union. Audi's slogan is Vorsprung durch Technik, meaning "Being Ahead through Technology". Audi, along with fellow German marques BMW and Mercedes-Benz, is among the best-selling luxury automobile brands in the world.“ - source: Audi - WikipediaŠkoda Auto, “commonly called Škoda or Skoda, is a Czech automobile manufacturer founded in 1895 as Laurin & Klement and headquartered in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic.”“In 1925 Laurin & Klement was acquired by the industrial conglomerate Škoda Works, which itself became state owned in 1948. After 1991 it has been gradually privatized to the German Volkswagen Group, in 1994 became its subsidiary and in 2000 a wholly owned subsidiary.““Skoda automobiles are sold in over 100 countries and in 2018, total global sales reached 1.25 million units, an increase of 4.4% from the previous year. The operating profit was €1.6 billion in 2017, an increase of 34.6% over the previous year. As of 2017, Škoda's profit margin was the second highest of all Volkswagen AG brands after Porsche.”“The perception of Škoda in Western Europe has completely changed since the takeover by VW, in stark comparison with the reputation of the cars throughout the 1980s described by some as "the laughing stock" of the automotive world. As technical development progressed and attractive new models were marketed, Škoda's image was initially slow to improve. In the UK, a major turnabout was achieved with the ironic "It is a Škoda, honest" campaign, which began in 2000 when the Fabia launched. In a 2003 advertisement on British television, a new employee on the production line is fitting Škoda badges on the car bonnets. When some attractive looking cars come along he stands back, not fitting the badge, since they look so good they "cannot be Škodas". This market campaign worked by confronting Škoda's image problem head-on – a tactic which marketing professionals regarded as high risk. By 2005 Škoda was selling over 30,000 cars a year in the UK, a market share of over 1%. For the first time in its UK history, a waiting list developed for deliveries from Škoda. UK owners have consistently ranked the brand at or near the top of customer satisfaction surveys since the late 1990s.” - source: Škoda Auto - WikipediaAs for the case of Honda:“Honda has been the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer since 1959, reaching a production of 400 million by the end of 2019, as well as the world's largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines measured by volume, producing more than 14 million internal combustion engines each year. Honda became the second-largest Japanese automobile manufacturer in 2001. Honda was the eighth largest automobile manufacturer in the world in 2015.““Honda was the first Japanese automobile manufacturer to release a dedicated luxury brand, Acura, in 1986. Aside from their core automobile and motorcycle businesses, Honda also manufactures garden equipment, marine engines, personal watercraft and power generators, and other products. Since 1986, Honda has been involved with artificial intelligence/robotics research and released their ASIMO robot in 2000. They have also ventured into aerospace with the establishment of GE Honda Aero Engines in 2004 and the Honda HA-420 HondaJet, which began production in 2012. Honda has two joint-ventures in China: Dongfeng Honda and Guangqi Honda.“ - source: Honda - WikipediaStellantis is the name of an alliance that was the outcome of a merger between mass-market Groupe PSA, aka Peugeot SA, which also includes Citroën, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, whereas the Alfa Romeo and Chrysler nameplates on other hand, are luxury marques.Toyota, which is the eternal nemesis of both Hyundai-Kia Motors and its future slave Nissan, is the biggest Asian [Japanese] car manufacturing company. Especially with the majority of its sales are being located in Southeast Asia, a region in which neither Hyundai-Kia, Nissan, nor as well as, Stellantis - aka Peugeot - performs well. But also, Toyota’s expertise in zero emission, hence hybrid, powertrains, reliability/quality control, thus dominances in the Southeast Asian and South African markets are those things that Stellantis and its said brands could gain benefit from, as Citroen was known deeply for its example of innovations such as the hydropneumatic suspension.As for the case of the Philippines, a certain country that neither anyone from the Western world, particularly from the rest of Europe plus the Nordic countries and [Brexit] United Kingdom:“An archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Situated in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of about 7,641 islands that are broadly categorized under three main geographical divisions from north to south: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The capital city of the Philippines is Manila and the most populous city is Quezon City, both within the single urban area of Metro Manila. Bounded by the South China Sea to the west, the Philippine Sea to the east, and the Celebes Sea to the southwest, the Philippines shares maritime borders with Taiwan to the north, Japan to the northeast, Palau to the east, Indonesia to the south, Malaysia and Brunei to the southwest, Vietnam to the west, and China to the northwest.““The Philippines' position as an island country on the Pacific Ring of Fire and close to the equator makes the country prone to earthquakes and typhoons. The country has a variety of natural resources and a globally significant level of biodiversity. The Philippines has an area of around 300,000 km2 (120,000 sq mi) with a population of around 109 million people. As of 2020, it is the 8th-most populated country in Asia and the 13th-most populated country in the world. Multiple ethnicities and cultures are found throughout the islands.““Negritos, some of the archipelago's earliest inhabitants, were followed by successive waves of Austronesian peoples. The arrival of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer leading a fleet for Spain, marked the beginning of Spanish colonization. In 1543, Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos named the archipelago Las Islas Filipinas in honor of Philip II of Spain. Spanish settlement, beginning in 1565, led to the Philippines becoming part of the Spanish Empire for more than 300 years. During this time, Catholicism became the dominant religion, and Manila became the western hub of trans-Pacific trade. In 1896, the Philippine Revolution began, which then became entwined with the 1898 Spanish–American War. Spain ceded the territory to the United States, while Filipino rebels declared the First Philippine Republic. The ensuing Philippine–American War ended with the United States establishing control over the territory, which they maintained until the Japanese invasion of the islands during World War II. Following liberation, the Philippines became independent in 1946. Since then, the unitary sovereign state has often had a tumultuous experience with democracy, which included the overthrow of a dictatorship by the People Power Revolution.““The Philippines is a founding member of the United Nations, World Trade Organization, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and the East Asia Summit. The Philippines is considered to be an emerging market and a newly industrialized country, which has an economy transitioning from being based on agriculture to being based more on services and manufacturing.““Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, during his expedition in 1542, named the islands of Leyte and Samar "Felipinas" after Philip II of Spain, then the Prince of Asturias. Eventually the name "Las Islas Filipinas" would be used to cover the archipelago's Spanish possessions. Before Spanish rule was established, other names such as Islas del Poniente (Islands of the West) and Magellan's name for the islands, San Lázaro, were also used by the Spanish to refer to islands in the region.““During the Philippine Revolution, the Malolos Congress proclaimed the establishment of the República Filipina or the Philippine Republic. From the period of the Spanish–American War (1898) and the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) until the Commonwealth period (1935–1946), American colonial authorities referred to the country as the Philippine Islands, a translation of the Spanish name. The full title of the Republic of the Philippines was included in the 1935 constitution as the name of the future independent state.“ - source: Philippines - Wikipedia“The economy of the Philippines is the world's 29th largest economy by nominal GDP according to the International Monetary Fund 2020 and the 13th largest economy in Asia. The Philippines is one of the emerging markets and the 3rd highest in Southeast Asia by GDP nominal after Thailand and Indonesia.““The Philippines is primarily considered a newly industrialized country, which has an economy in transition from one based on agriculture to one based more on services and manufacturing. As of 2021, GDP by purchasing power parity was estimated to be at $1.025 trillion.““Primary exports include semiconductors and electronic products, transport equipment, garments, copper products, petroleum products, coconut oil, and fruits. Major trading partners include Japan, China, the United States, Singapore, South Korea, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Germany, Taiwan and Thailand. The Philippines has been named as one of the Tiger Cub Economies together with Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand. It is currently one of Asia's fastest growing economies. However, major problems remain, mainly having to do with alleviating the wide income and growth disparities between the country's different regions and socioeconomic classes, reducing corruption, and investing in the infrastructure necessary to ensure future growth.““The Philippine economy is projected to be the 5th largest in Asia and 16th biggest in the world by 2050. While this opposes other reports from HSBC Holdings PLC, that by the year 2050, the Philippines will have been stated in 2050 maybe due to its yearly higher GDP growth rate of 6.5% (Second, after China). However, the economic statistics may still vary depending on the performance of the government every year, which are consistently plagued by corruption.“ - source: Economy of the Philippines - Wikipedia===But despite this question is about Honda favouring itself to merge with VAG, Volkswagen AG’s acronym, in response to Toyota’s preference of taking over Stellantis, which is posing itself as a challenger to VW in the European market, therefore I copied and pasted the details coming from the link that is attached on this question, as seen below:===“Honda Motor closed its Philippine assembly plant because it was no longer strategic to keep a factory that makes too few cars as other car manufacturers warned the government against any future policy that could be seen as a punishment for auto companies that decided to stay.““Honda wants to focus its resources on future trends, such as producing electric vehicles, which, along with a slowdown in the global automotive market, prompted Honda headquarters to shutter some factories to make better use of its resources, the spokesperson of Honda’s local unit said.““And so, its plant in Sta. Rosa Laguna — along with over 380 factory workers — had become casualties of a global corporate strategy that essentially involved cutting dead weight to focus on where to go next.““Other factories would close down, too, although at least they would have more time to adjust to the news. For example, Honda is also ending its manufacturing operations in Turkey and the United Kingdom, but will do so in 2021 yet.““Here in the Philippines, factory workers will officially have only until March 25, or about a month after the closure announcement was made last Saturday (Feb. 22). Louie Soriano, spokesperson of Honda Cars Philippines, Inc. (HCPI) admitted that the manufacturer’s announcement was “abrupt.”“““Honda needs to close down the Philippine factory because of its low production volume. It’s not because of an issue on politics, or an issue on government policy, or on labor union. It’s none of that,” he said in a phone interview on Monday (Feb. 24).“““That’s the direction of Honda Motor so it could have an efficient utilization of its resources,” he added.““If a low production volume is the main reason for the closure, company figures would suggest that the Philippine unit had no chance of surviving the cost cutting measure, especially when compared to Honda’s soon-to-be closed factory in the UK.““In the UK, Honda has a capacity to make 250,000 cars annually, although this only reached 160,000 vehicles in 2018, according to media reports. This is a far cry from what the Philippine plant could make in Laguna — 15,000 units per year — and the actual number of units it produced last year — 8,000 units.““While it’s clear that the production volume is low, it’s not clear at this point why it was low to begin with. Soriano deferred from commenting, saying it was all because of “market demand.”““Although he said that the closure had nothing to do with sales, it is difficult to ignore the fact that Honda has seen its volume sales in the Philippines drop for at least two years in a row now.““This could be traced to the Duterte administration’s move to slap higher excise on new vehicles in 2018 under the TRAIN law, or the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion Act. This, coupled with high inflation rates that kept people from buying new cars, pulled Honda and the rest of the industry back from selling as many cars as they should.““Honda’s sales dropped 26.7 percent in 2018 to 23,294 units, and then fell further by nearly 13 percent to 20,338 units in 2019, industry data showed.““The Chamber of Automotive Manufacturers of the Philippines, Inc. (Campi), the country’s largest auto industry group, said the closure of a company that has for long been a strong advocate of local manufacturing was “unfortunate.”“““It highlights the importance of continued government support to local production of vehicles and parts and components,” said Campi, which counts among its members big players like Toyota and Mitsubishi. Honda is also a member of the group.“““At this critical stage, Philippine government must seriously study any initiatives that will disincentivize domestic auto assembly operation as this will further endanger employment and existing investments, among others,” the group said.““Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez met with HCPI President Noriyuki Takakura on Monday to look for “alternative options.” Lopez, however, told reporters after the meeting that the Honda head office had already made up its mind to close the Philippine assembly plant.““Honda’s exit in March caps nearly 30 years of production in the Philippines, which churned out some of Honda’s most famous units, BR-V and City. Soriano said he is still not sure what to do with the factory after, although Lopez said that there are auto companies that are interested in taking over.““Nevertheless, its departure will leave the industry in an even more uncomfortable situation, as the Department of Trade and Industry considers further taxing imported vehicles through a safeguard duty. Lopez sees the possible safeguard duty as a form of protection for local assemblers, although local assemblers might not share the same opinion since a duty would make their imports more expensive.“““Of course, they expressed apprehension [on the possibility] of having a safeguard duty. That’s really more of an advantage for the local assembler if you have a safeguard duty because imports would be [further taxed], Lopez said after the meeting.“““Maybe the [Honda] headquarters can consider that in the future,” he added.““However, when asked if it was still possible for the Honda plant to return, Soriano said this was out of the local unit’s hands.“““I don’t know because this is the decision of Honda Motor. We don’t know,” he said.“ - source: Honda PH assembly plant closure: Too few cars - Inquirer Business===So, if Honda would relearn that kind of statement by merging itself with the Volkswagen Group in order to establish a beachhead/ foothold for Skoda in the Philippine market, well unless if you start confusing the Philippine flag as the banner of Czechia aka Czech Republic just like how you do with both Polish and Indonesian flags, then it would even help benefit VW’s Czech unit from access to Honda’s operations in both Philippines and around Southeast Asia such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and even Thailand.Especially, as a matter of fact, Skoda is also but already present in China and India, as the latter is one of the first countries in Asia to set up a beachhead [for Skoda] there.See also: List of Honda facilities - WikipediaBut also, for Honda’s case, merging [Honda] with Volkswagen might also lead to the termination of the CR-V manufacturer’s current tie-up with General Motors, which is no longer active in Europe since its operations there were already sold to Peugeot in 2017. But however, Honda’s deal with the latter [GM] is deeply relegated for North America, a market in which Skoda is neither present.So therefore, Honda’s merger with the European [hence German] car manufacturing giant [VW/VAG] would be profoundly restricted to some places in which, particularly, Skoda is neither present than Honda, [except for the USA and Canada] such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and as well as, South Africa.===See also: I think Ayala’s car distributor should bring Skoda to PH - VISOR PH- “Speaking of pricing, one automaker comes to mind: Skoda. This Volkswagen Group brand based in the Czech Republic has a reputation for producing solid and reliable cars based on its parent company’s platforms. The vehicles are technically Volkswagens, but what’s interesting is that Skoda can offer its products at a generally lower price point than its German cousins. That makes them quite popular in Europe. In addition, my Skoda sightings in Singapore, Taiwan and China suggest that the brand has a solid following in those countries.“ -- “And that got me thinking: Would it have been a wiser choice for Ayala to let Volkswagen keep its legacy product line and bring in Skoda instead? After all, SAIC Motor (where cars like the Santana are sourced from) also produces Skoda vehicles for the Chinese market. And in a lot of countries, Skoda vehicles are typically less expensive than their VW counterparts so the former has the potential to be an even better deal for budget-conscious customers.“ –- “Of course, there is a risk of bringing in a largely unknown brand to the Philippines. Historically, Skoda has been associated with austere family cars popular throughout Warsaw Pact countries like the former Czechoslovakia. But as the manufacturer is currently under the Volkswagen Group umbrella, it has transitioned from an assembler of cheap Communist cars to a marque known for its reliability and value for money.“ -- “And this is where Skoda can complement a Volkswagen lineup full of its legacy products. With Polo, Jetta and Tiguan sales catering to the premium market, a Skoda stable consisting of the Rapid, the Octavia and the Karoq could potentially target more budget-conscious customers. And as these three Czech vehicles are already being built in the People’s Republic of China, they should enjoy favorable import duties thanks to the ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreements.“ –- “The win-win situation here is that Volkswagen can keep selling upmarket products while Skoda can duke it out with mainstream brands in the country. The premium brand image of VW is retained, instead of importing cheaper cars just to compete with veteran Japanese and Korean rivals. Meanwhile, buyers will probably be more accepting of the Czech newcomer that just happens to source its less expensive product line from China.“ - source: I think Ayala’s car distributor should bring Skoda to PH - VISOR PH===Definitely if Honda would do that [merging with VW just to construct a base for Skoda in the Philippine market], then Acura, which is neither present in Europe and even Oceania like Australia and New Zealand, would rather go out of business as a result of Volkswagen’s hypothetical acquisition of the [said] CR-V maker. Thus, key yet significant Honda cars such as the [Honda] Fit aka [Honda] Jazz and [Honda] Civic, as with the exterior design of the latter model’s Mk1 variant being similar to the appearance of the first generation [Volkswagen] Golf, would have all of their mechanical parts and platforms being switched from the original, developed by the car manufacturing department of Honda, to the ones used in every VW/VAG brand such as Audi, Skoda, and as well as Spain’s SEAT.But however, as a result of merging with the Volkswagen Group, Honda’s automotive unit would rather withdraw from the European and British markets in regards of keeping VAG and its subsidiaries, all of them are European, to do their lead in the so-called “old continent”.===See also: Volkswagen Group MQB platform - Wikipedia and The Swindon factory closure: how Honda got Europe so wrong – Autocar, UK===Surprisingly, the Czechs had a handful of things they invented in the past apart from Skoda, for example was the small town of Jáchymov aka Sankt Joachimsthal or Joachimsthal in German, in which the word “dollar” was originated.===See also:Category:Czech inventions - WikipediaCategory:Czech words and phrases - WikipediaRobot, origin of the term 'robot' - Wikipedia===And also, one priority for expecting Honda to merge with VAG just to build a presence for Skoda in some deeply uncharted place like the Philippines and its respective region of Southeast Asia, especially now with Bugatti already sold to Rimac; encourage/wish Volkswagen to purchase the former Honda Cars Philippines manufacturing facility located in Laguna just to expand Skoda’s presence in the Philippine, and as well as, other Southeast Asian countries’ markets, e.g. Vietnam, Thailand. Or in a single case, VW/Skoda might share the same assembly line with Honda in both Thailand and Indonesia, in Karawang.Recently, in a similar fashion, Nissan just shut down one of its last assembly plants in the Philippines, perhaps this is one problem for the formerly-named Datsun to [secretly] merge and share platforms and forms of mechanical engineering with the Hyundai-Kia vehicle manufacturing group. Especially, at the same time when the latter might either take over Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Aston Martin, Malaysia’s Proton Holdings from [PR] China’s Geely Automobile Holdings, Bentley from VAG’s umbrella, or Harley-Davidson, even if the latter neither makes four-wheeled vehicles like Kawasaki Heavy Industries, a company which Nissan should rather take over.===See also: Nissan to close Laguna plant; DTI renews push for safeguards – The Manila Times===Now, for the hypothetical scenario of Stellantis merging with Toyota:So, if Toyota would initiate itself to purchase the merger in which it contains Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, and other marques, then Toyota would rather benefit itself from access to the utilisation of the platforms that Peugeot commissions thus uses it for its vehicles. As which is also shared by not only Citroen, but also in later times, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, and Chrysler.Also, that is a reason why Toyota should make use of its bloated revenues by taking over Stellantis, in which it includes Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, and as well as Alfa Romeo, just to gain benefit from the bodyshells coming from the blueprints of Citroen’s past and present cars, instead of spending it for developing newer generations of its existing models such as the [Toyota] C-HR and [Toyota] Camry, etc.But, Toyota would also learn such lessons from Sony’s 1989 acquisition of Columbia Pictures, as it is a concept reflecting the relationship of a Western company being owned by an East Asian company, see also: Genda Nicolai Yturzaeta Iwakawa's answer to If Toyota would sell its shares in Mazda, Subaru, and Suzuki in exchange for the Yaris maker to take over Stellantis, in which it has Peugeot, Citroen, and Fiat. Then, why shouldn't Toyota learn lessons from Sony's 1989 purchase of Columbia Pictures? - Quora.As with the western corporation is from the USA or Europe, hence Columbia Pictures and Chrysler are from stateside while Peugeot and the rest of Stellantis are from Europe. And as well as, the East Asian “concern” is from Japan or South Korea, with Toyota and Sony are coming from the Land of the Rising Sun.While the love affair between Columbia Pictures and Sony, which gave birth to Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1991, has been forever. A hypothetical scenario of Toyota outbidding the French government and China’s Dongfeng Motor Corporation as a new shareholder, and later, owner of Stellantis would emulate the lessons that Sony learned from its takeover of the US-based entertainment company in 1989.Therefore as a result of that, a Toyota-Stellantis partnership would be the automotive industry’s equivalent to the Sony-Columbia Pictures alliance, especially it would even help Toyota to put Lexus, Hino Motors, and even Daihatsu, as with the latter are no longer selling cars in Europe and Britain, into demise like Chrysler Europe in 1978.Thus, Toyota would revive Chrysler and replace its three subsidiaries with the American car company [Chrysler] as alternatives, with Chrysler taking the place of Lexus, and somewhat, Jeep would take Hino Motors’ place unless if Dodge and Ram are already reorganised into Jeep itself.For sure, the Jeep name would be a fit for light commercial vehicles that would end up being based on family cars of all sizes, but its presence in the British market is deeply poor.But, prior to that, Toyota would sell off the shares they own in Mazda, Subaru, and Suzuki to the latter themselves, and thus, Toyota would end up outbidding the government of France and Dongfeng of China as Stellantis’ owner/biggest investors. Mazda, Subaru, and Suzuki are neither possessing the same kind of fame compared to Peugeot, Citroen, and Fiat, especially with Suzuki no longer selling cars in the USA and Canada since 2012 and 2013.Surprisingly, Toyota’s US and Canadian operations trademarked and used the Solara name, as the “Toyota Camry Solara”, that was previously used in the saloon variant of the Simca 1307 aka Chrysler Alpine, dubbed as the “Talbot Solara”. Peugeot/Stellantis owns the rights of the Solara name exclusively to Europe/UK, since Groupe PSA took over and killed off Chrysler Europe in 1978.Similarily, the Humber Sceptre had its name being reused by Peugeot, in 1990, for SRi variations of the 205, 405 and 605. Whereas a year later, the “Sceptre” name was also reused by Toyota, but it was instead called as the “Toyota Scepter”, as “this was due to the Camry name being adopted by a smaller version of the same car in Japan”.Especially since Japan is neither get a use to learn British English, hence due to its [Japan’s] geographical proximity with the USA hence Hawaii, they would rather learn American English instead.Since “scepter” is from the Americans, then “sceptre” is from the Britons, Irish, Australians, and Kiwis, but also in addition, Japan and [even] South Korea are still considered deeply as strategic and trading allies/pawns of the United States of America, which is why it deeply examines that Toyota, Hyundai-Kia, and Nissan are deeply strong in the US market.Also, Toyota even uses, plus trademarks, the “Corsa” name that was used in hatchback variants of the [Toyota] Tercel from 1978 to 1999, but despite this method was exclusive to the Japanese domestic market (JDM), therefore Toyota was one of the first to register the “Corsa” nameplate before Opel in 1982.Furthermore, if Toyota have already taken over Stellantis, then Lancia and Maserati would just fold themselves, hence go bankrupt, together with Opel and Vauxhall Motors instead. But, this might even help Ferrari SpA to get integrated into Stellantis again, especially if the prancing horse label would benefit from access to Toyota’s expertise in hybrid technologies and making civilian cars inspired by off-road driving that was seen in the [Toyota] RAV4 in 1994.While DS Automobiles on other hand, would also put itself into demise, and thus, reorganise into Citroën in exchange for the [Citroën] C3 manufacturer to relive itself as a luxury marque whose cars are powered by engineering from Toyota, and not Peugeot, just like VW did to Skoda and SEAT…However, if Toyota would utilise half of its cars by swapping it with the platforms, which is aligned with the bodyshells, coming from the blueprints of Groupe PSA’s past and present vehicles, then instead, Toyota too would keep the mechanical parts, mainly powertrains, coming from its lineup’s models remained stuffed within the Stellantis/PSA Peugeot Citroen-derived platforms. Just like how SEAT did with the [SEAT] Ibiza Mk1, as the latter model was considered for having the blend of “Italian styling and German engineering”, which means for example, the [Toyota] Yaris would possess the combination of European designing and thus [East] Asian, hence Japanese, engineering.Especially, Toyota would rather adopt Citroen’s policy of keeping its cars front-engine, front-wheel-drive. As Citroen was one of those earliest companies that pioneered the need to develop and keep every four-wheeled vehicles FF, as this was first seen in the [Citroën] Traction Avant from 1937 to 1956.That means, for example, Toyota would delete the [Toyota] Supra - which is FR - at the same time they would also kill off Lexus by replacing it with Chrysler. Whose higher-spec cars, mainly in the 1980s to circa 2010s, such as the LeBaron, Dodge Daytona aka “Chrysler GS” in Europe, Dodge Stratus aka Chrysler Stratus in Europe, Eagle Vision aka Chrysler Vision in Europe, Chrysler 300M, and the Chrysler Pacifica crossover are all front-wheel drive by default.That means, Toyota would lose to the Hyundai Motor Group if they [Toyota] adopt Citroen’s policy, which was later adopted by Peugeot after its 1974 takeover, of keeping itself reliant on making cars that are only in FF layout.Also, in addition to that, Stellantis, would benefit itself from access to the Southeast Asian market, particulary in the Philippines, where as having mentioned earlier that Toyota is deeply strong there, as well as in the Middle East, South Africa, Oceania, and other places. While Chrysler is strong in Mexico, therefore it would be a beneficiary for either Toyota, Peugeot, or Citroen to do it.As for Mazda, Subaru, and Suzuki, only the latter two would just go bankrupt by merging and reorganising themselves into Nissan’s orbit, at the same time when they are [Nissan] already merged and sharing engineering with the Hyundai-Kia automotive group in secret.And also in addition to that, Mazda would just become a replacement for Infiniti as with the former now planning to go more upmarket, especially with the [Mazda] MX-5 manufacturer’s deeply tough market presence in Australia might be useful for Nissan to benefit from it. Since the [Nissan] Qashqai maker’s performance in the Australian market lags behind Hyundai-Kia combined and Mazda, as the latter was deeply known for supplying its engineering to Kia before it integrated into the [Hyundai] Tucson builder’s umbrella circa 1998...- Genda Nicolai Yturzaeta Iwakawa/awakawI ateazrutY ialociN adneGSee also, plus with images to reflect this question and its answer/remark I submitted:Genda Nicolai Yturzaeta Iwakawa's answer to Which is better, the 2021 Hyundai Elantra or the 2021 Honda Civic? - QuoraGenda Nicolai Yturzaeta Iwakawa's answer to Which one of these two is a better buy, Honda Amaze CVT and Tata Tiago AMT? - QuoraThe Swindon factory closure: how Honda got Europe so wrong - Autocar, UK - “Employing European designers has brought coherence to the Korean brands’ range – something they didn’t possess when Honda was outselling them 10 to one nearly 30 years ago. “Honda hasn’t appointed an overseas design boss,” says Harrow. “I think that shows a lack of value in design at the top level.”““Wrong place, wrong time”: the five reasons why Honda is shutting Swindon - Autocar, UKIndia is fastest growing market for Hyundai globally, Auto News, ET Auto - indiatimes.comAre the designs of Toyota's cars considered as bland and uglier than Stellantis' vehicles? Therefore, why don't the mediocre Prius maker take over the transatlantic merger by gaining benefit from the bodyshells of those coming from Citroen's models?Hence the link, what do car enthusiasts think of Hyundai's ongoing and uncertain deal with Apple? Do they think that it would harm other marques since they also use the iPad maker's products? Perhaps, why shouldn't Hyundai too take over Nissan alone?If the Hyundai Motor Group would acquire and treat Nissan alone like Lancia, which is popular in Italy. Then as a response, why shouldn't Toyota take over Stellantis/Peugeot until its cars would share mechanical parts with mediocre yet bland Toyotas?Genda Nicolai Yturzaeta Iwakawa's answer to Would you recommend a Kia Forte or a Toyota Corolla to a first-time car buyer?Lions to dragons: Chinese cars surge as no Holdens sold - Practical Motoring, Australia- “Although an indication of a quickly changing mindset in Australia (remember when Holden and Ford dominated the sales charts?) on Chinese cars since the days of early Chery models and the first-generation Great Wall Motors utes, this chart isn’t an exact indicator of brand loyalty, with vehicles from Thailand the second biggest selling COO behind Japan, though many of those vehicles such as Toyota Hilux and Isuzu D-Max are Japanese brands. Also keep in mind some German brand cars are built in other countries.” -- “At a brand level, the Chinese brands MG, GWM Haval, and LDV saw a tremendous increase month on month, MG up a whopping 160 per cent, GWM Haval 135 per cent and LDV 100 per cent. GWM Haval could see another big month with sales of the new Ute (GWM Ute) finding traction.” -Škoda Karoq, probably a basis for the mediocre Honda CR-V.Škoda Kamiq, a basis for the [Honda] HR-V.Škoda Fabia, a basis for the [Honda] Jazz aka [Honda] Fit.Peugeot 208, its platform, which is also shared with the [Peugeot] 2008 crossover, might be used as a basis for the next-generation Fiat Punto, and especially unless if Stellantis integrates into Toyota’s umbrella, the Yaris and its “Cross” variant…

There is really no 1 or 2 sentence, or a 1 or 2 paragraph answer to the question. There were only a few mandatory points that were depriving American forces of overwhelming victory and a now free and non-communist rule in Vietnam.When engaging, you must engage an enemy with overwhelming force immediately and finish the fight - completely.No cease-fire (time-out’s), only start to finish.Always have a mission clearly defined and a plan to exit when the mission is completed.Do not commit troops to battle unless you intend to totally crush the enemy into total surrender.Do not commit troops without the support and backing of congress and the American population.Provide only the best available weapons and training to our troops. Feed and equip them at the highest standard, with emphasis on tough, capable and patriotic troops AND leaders.Once committed to engage enemy combatants, allow the military professionals engage under command of military career professional leadership. Armchair micromanagement has zero place in combat.Today it is well known and documented that the North Vietnamese were at the verge of surrender when………our civilian command overthrows the authority of it’s field commanders. Pretend Generals try to run a war with no experience, knowledge or expertise in warfare. Warfighting is not a movie ! In Vietnam our civilian government leadership caved, more like collapsed, to the pressure of massive liberal protesters and anti-war factions. Pumped up by untruthful stories coming from within the media and the anti-war flower-power generation back home in the “world” (U.S.A.). Our politicians began to withdraw from responsibility, and demanded we be withdrawn prematurely from Vietnam for political reasons.Fact is, our own government and our citizens did not back us or support us. They even went “out of their way to NOT welcome us home.” The American population did not share the “resolve to win” that they demanded of their warfighters.Our enemy on the battlefield knew this and played out their hand all the way to the end of their last arm.John J. Little Eagle - Freeman………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………See the article in its original context from June 24, 1990, Section 6, Page 22 Buy Reprints……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Giap Remembers By Stanley Karnow June 24, 1990 states. In fact, according to the the Commander of the NVArmy - Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.About the ArchiveThis is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to [email protected].^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^WE MET AT THE FORMER FRENCH COLONIAL governor's palace in Hanoi, an ornate mansion set in a spacious garden ablaze with hibiscus and bougainvillea, where senior Vietnamese officials receive guests. A short man with smooth skin, white hair, narrow eyes and a spry gait, he wore a simple olive uniform, the four stars on its collar the only sign of his rank. Smiling broadly, he grasped me with soft, almost feminine hands and then, to my astonishment, bussed my cheeks in traditional French style.Despite his Asian traits, this elfin figure might have been a courtly old Frenchman. But here was Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese Communist commander, the peer of Grant, Lee, Rommel and MacArthur in the pantheon of military leaders.A bold strategist, skilled logician and tireless organizer, Giap fought for more than 30 years, building a handful of ragtag guerrillas into one of the world's most effective armies. He surmounted stupendous odds to crush the French, but his crowning achievement was to vanquish America's overwhelmingly superior forces in Vietnam - the only defeat the United States has sustained in its history.(Stanley Karnow continues) I covered the two wars - which in many respects were phases of the same war - the first indirectly from Paris and the second as a correspondent in Vietnam. My reporting and subsequent research for a book brought me into contact with senior soldiers from the opposing sides. Giap was unique, having been both a policy maker and a field officer. I had studied his career, and sought to see him on an earlier trip to Hanoi. But only on this recent return did he grant me an interview.The French once dubbed Giap the ''snow-covered volcano'' - a glacial exterior concealing a volatile temperament. Now approaching 80, he seems to have mellowed with age. But he still displays the intellectual vigor and fierce determination that propelled him to victory - and have made him a legend. Giap attributes his success to innate genius rather than to any formal training as a soldier. As he laughingly told me, ''I was a self-taught general.'' A day after our first encounter I drove to Giap's private residence, a handsome French colonial villa, its parlor lined with a polyglot assortment of volumes and decorated with busts and portraits of Marx, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh, the deified leader of modern Vietnam. His wife, a buxom, cheerful woman, served fruit as he played the paterfamilias, proudly introducing his eldest daughter, an eminent nuclear physicist, and cuddling his grandchildren in his lap. He spoke flawless French slightly seasoned by a tonal Vietnamese inflection. Commenting on my fluency in French, he remarked, ''I am glad to see that you are cosmopolitan'' - as if he felt that we shared a bond as products of France's grande mission civilisatrice. Like many Vietnamese nationalists of his generation, Giap had embraced French culture while struggling against French colonialism.But as he began to talk seriously, he exploded in a torrent of words. Endowed with a prodigious memory, he recalled the names of old comrades or detailed events dating back decades. He was often didactic, a vestige of his youth as a schoolteacher, and he lapsed into political bromides that evoked his revolutionary past. At times he sounded ironic - as he did when he cited Gen. William C. Westmoreland's ''considerable military knowledge,'' then proceeded to list what he viewed as the American commander's blunders in (Continued on Page 36) Vietnam. And, like generals everywhere, he glossed over his setbacks. He admitted that, yes, ''there were difficult moments when we wondered how we could go on.'' Yet, he thundered, ''We were never pessimistic. Never! Never! Never!''Giap's men did indeed show phenomenal tenacity during the war, confounding United States strategists who assumed that sheer might would crack their morale. Westmoreland, pointing to the grim ''body count'' of enemy dead, constantly claimed that the Communists were about to collapse. Following the war, still perplexed by his failure, Westmoreland said, ''Any American commander who took the same vast losses as Giap would have been sacked overnight.''But Giap was not an American among strange people in a faraway land. His troops and their civilian supporters were fighting on their own soil, convinced that their sacrifices would erode the patience of their foes and, over time, bring Vietnam under Communist control. He had used this strategy against France, and he was confident that it would work against the United States.''We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn't our aim,'' he told me. ''Our intention was to break the will of the American Government to continue the war. Westmoreland was wrong to expect that his superior firepower would grind us down. If we had focused on the balance of forces, we would have been defeated in two hours. We were waging a people's war - a la maniere vietnamienne (in the Vietnamese way). America's sophisticated arms, electronic devices and all the rest were to no avail in the end. In war there are the two factors - human beings and weapons. Ultimately, though, human begins (sic) beings are the decisive factor. Human beings! Human beings!'' How long was he prepared to fight? ''Another twenty years, even a hundred years, as long as it took to win, regardless of cost,'' Giap replied instantly. What, in fact, had been the cost? ''We still don't know,'' he said, refusing, despite my persistence, to hazard a guess. But one of his aides confided to me that at least a million of their troops perished, the majority of them in the American war. As for the civilian toll, he said, ''We haven't the faintest idea.''Listening to these horrendous statistics recalled to me the Americans who observed during the war that Asians have little regard for human life. But, judging from the carnage of two World Wars, the West is hardly a model of compassion. Moreover, Giap maintains, the Communists would have paid any price for victory because they were dedicated to a cause that reflects Vietnam's national heritage - a legacy that has also fueled its fierce martial spirit.''Throughout our history,'' he intoned, ''our profoundest ideology, the pervasive feeling of our people, has been patriotism.'' I knew what he meant. A battlefield for 4,000 years, Vietnam is awash in stories of real or mythical warriors who resisted foreign invaders, mainly Chinese. Its struggles forged a sense of national identity that is still alive in poetry and folk art, and in rural pagodas where children burn joss (incense) sticks before the statues of fabled heroes and heroines. The French had conquered Vietnam by the early 20th century, but their authority was recurrently challenged by uprisings, which they often quelled brutally. Giap was nurtured in this climate of rebellion. The elder of two sons in a family of five children, he was born in 1911 in the Quang Binh Province village of An Xa, just above the line that would divide Vietnam 43 years later. The region of rice fields and jungles, set against a horizon of hazy mountains, had only been recently ''pacified'' by the French, and the exploits of its local partisans were still fresh memories.At the village kindergarten Giap was taught elementary French, but at home his parents spoke only Vietnamese and, as he put it, ''they ingrained patriotism in me.'' His father, a scholarly peasant, manifested his nationalism by teaching written Vietnamese in Chinese ideographs. From him Giap learned to read his first book, a child's history of Vietnam: ''I discovered our forebears, our martyrs, our duty to expunge the disgrace of past humiliations.''His voice softened as he recalled the day he left home for primary school. ''My mama and I were separating for the first time, and we both wept.'' In 1924, he went to the old imperial capital of Hue to attend the prestigious Quoc Hoc academy, whose alumni included Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Din Diem, later the anti-Communist president of South Vietnam. There, barely 13, he began his political education. Students met secretly to discuss anti-colonial articles - particularly those by a mysterious expatriate, Nguyen Ai Quoc, ''Nguyen the Patriot,'' later known as Ho Chi Minh. But Giap was especially inspired by Phan Boi Chau, an early nationalist whom the French had put under house arrest in Hue. He imitated Chau's exhortations for me: ''The cock is crowing! Arise, arise and prepare for action!''Thus aroused, the youths protested openly against a French ban on nationalist activities. The protest fizzled, and Giap was expelled from school. ''We now wondered what to do next,'' he recalled. ''Nobody knew. We lacked direction.''He found his gospel after he was hired to assist a Vietnamese teacher who owned an illicit collection of Marx's works in French. ''I spent my nights reading them, and my eyes opened,'' he said. ''Marxism promised revolution, an end to oppression, the happiness of mankind. It echoed the appeals of Ho Chi Minh, who had written that downtrodden peoples should join the proletariat of all countries to gain their liberation. Nationalism made me a Marxist, as it did so many Vietnamese intellectuals and students.''Still he clung to the Confucian ethic of his father. ''Marxism also seemed to me to coincide with the ideals of our ancient society,'' he added, ''when the emperor and his subjects lived in harmony. It was a Utopian dream.''By 1930, the global depression had hit Vietnam, and peasant unrest spread through the country, spurring radicals to rebel against the French, who summarily executed hundreds in reprisal. Foreseeing further revolts, Ho hastily founded the Indochinese Communist Party.Now a professional agitator, Giap was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison, but a sympathetic French official released him earlier. He went to Hanoi, graduated from a French school, the Lycee Albert Sarraut, then obtained a law degree at the University of Hanoi, another French institution.To earn a living, he taught at a private school, where his courses included Vietnamese history - ''to imbue my students with patriotism,'' he told me. He also lectured on the French Revolution ''to propagate the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.'' When I asked him to name his French hero, he snapped, ''Robespierre!'' ''But he was the architect of the Terror,'' I remonstrated. ''Robespierre!'' he repeated. ''Robespierre fought to the end for the people.'' And Napoleon? ''Bonaparte, yes. He was a revolutionary. Napoleon, no. He betrayed the people.''In 1936, Socialists and Communists formed a Popular Front government in Paris, and tensions in Vietnam eased. Giap had by then joined the Communist Party, which could now legally publish newspapers in French and Vietnamese, and he wrote articles in both languages. He married Minh Khai, a Communist militant, and they had a daughter. The physicist I met at his home in Hanoi was the child grown up.Giap avidly read Ho's writings as they reached Vietnam. ''I tried to imagine this man,'' he said. ''I looked forward to meeting him some day.'' His chance came in early 1940.Ho, then in China, decided to reinforce his movement in Vietnam, and he summoned Giap and Pham Van Dong, the future Vietnamese Prime Minister. Left behind, Giap's wife was arrested. She died in prison following the execution of her sister, also a Communist, by a French firing squad. Giap was distraught when he learned of their deaths three years afterward. He subsequently married Dang Bich Ha, his present wife, the daughter of a professor.In Kunming, the Yunnan Province capital, Giap met Ho, a frail figure with a wispy beard, who then called himself Vuong. Giap was disappointed. ''Here was this legend,'' he told me, ''but he was just a man, like any other man.''Ho ordered him to Yenan, in north China, where the Chinese Communists conducted courses on guerrilla warfare. Balking, Giap said, ''I wield a pen, not a sword.'' But he went nevertheless, wearing an oversized Chinese army uniform. En route, he received a telegram from Ho, countermanding the order. France had fallen to the Germans, and the situation in Vietnam was about to change completely. The moment had come, Ho said, to return to Vietnam.Early in 1941, Ho set foot in his homeland for the first time in more than 30 years. He established his sanctuary in a cave near Pac Bo, a remote village nestled in an eerie landscape of limestone hills. There, joined by Giap and others, he founded the Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh, the Vietnam Independence League - Vietminh for short. From its name he borrowed his most famous alias, Ho Chi Minh - roughly Bringer of Light.''Political action should precede military action,'' Ho asserted. Giap and his comrades started by recruiting the poor, alienated hill tribes of the region. They trekked through the mountains, creating cells of five men and women, who in turn converted other villagers to the cause. The cells multiplied swiftly - testimony to Giap's organizational skill.Meanwhile, Giap began to form guerrilla bands to guard the political cadres. He assumed a nom de guerre, Van, but he had no military experience. Except for a dud Chinese shell, he had never handled a lethal device - not even a gun. His partisans possessed only knives and a few old flintlocks. Once they did acquire a grenade, but he could not figure out how to detonate it. He also tried in vain to polish his ragged ranks. Sounding like a drill sergeant as he told me the story, he said: ''We didn't even know how to march in French - un, deux, un, deux. So I translated the numbers into Vietnamese - mot, hai, mot, hai.''He recalls that time as harrowing. Hunted by French patrols, Giap's bands retreated into the jungle, where they suffered from diseases, and subsisted on bark and roots. Learning as he went along, Giap taught his soldiers to wade through streams or move during rainstorms to deter pursuit, to store supplies, to communicate secretly, and to ferret out informers. Despite his constant fear of failure, the movement grew.Still he remained an intellectual, writing theoretical articles for his followers. Once, after scanning them, Ho sniffed, ''No peasant will understand this stuff.''The Japanese had invaded Vietnam after entering World War II, and the Vietminh guerrillas resisted them as well as the French - thereby enhancing their nationalist image. By 1944 Ho was certain that America would win the war and back him. Not only had President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced French colonialism, but the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, was also then helping the Vietminh in exchange for information on Japanese troop deployments. Ho, calculating that a show of strength would boost his movement, ordered Giap to form larger ''armed propaganda teams'' and to attack isolated French garrisons.Giap assembled a team of 34 guerrillas, among them three women. Resembling ordinary peasants in their conic hats and indigo pajamas, they attacked two tiny French posts on Christmas Eve, 1944, killing their French officers and seizing their arsenals. The skirmishes are commemorated to this day as the birth of the Vietnamese army. Beaming as he recalled these episodes, Giap said: ''Recently I read an old French report on the engagements. It stated that our troops were brave and disciplined - and that their leader displayed a mastery of guerrilla tactics. Quel compliment !''The victory swelled Ho's ranks. In September 1945, following Japan's surrender, he declared the independence of Vietnam. Named commander of the Vietminh armed forces, Giap assumed the rank of general. Ho also appointed him Minister of Interior, a position Giap reportedly used to liquidate a number of non-Communist nationalist parties - and, some sources allege, even his Communist rivals. Unlike Ho, who wore an ascetic cotton tunic and rubber-tire sandals, Giap affected a white suit, striped tie and fedora, perhaps to advertise his Western tastes.Ho offered to remain affiliated with France, but the French rebuffed his compromise, and war broke out in 1946. Giap preserved his teams and built up popular sympathy. By late 1949, the Chinese Communists had conquered China and begun to send him heavy weapons, which enabled him to enlarge his guerrilla bands into battalions, regiments and ultimately divisions. Giap opened the path into Vietnam for Chinese arms shipments by destroying the French border posts in a series of lightning attacks.Stunned, France sent out its most distinguished general: Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Giap gallantly announced that the Vietminh now faced ''an adversary worthy of its steel.'' But de Lattre died of cancer amid plans for an ambitious French offensive. Both sides sparred for the next three years as Gen. Henri Navarre, now the French commander, forecast victory in a statement that would be his unofficial epitaph: ''We see it clearly - like light at the end of the tunnel.''By 1953 Ho was considering negotiations with France. But he knew he had to win on the battlefield to win at the conference table. The arena would be Dien Bien Phu, which was to equal Waterloo and Gettysburg among the great battles of history.''At first I had no idea where - or even whether - the battle would take place,'' he recalled. Then, a veteran recounting his war, he reconstructed the scene by moving the cups and saucers around the coffee table in front of us.Navarre, ordered to defend nearby Laos, chose the site by placing his best battalions at Dien Bien Phu, a distant valley not far from the Laotian border in northwest Vietnam - never imagining that Giap would fight there. He misjudged badly.Giap brought a huge force into the area. His troops marched for weeks, carrying supplies on bicycles and their backs through jungles and over mountains. But no task was tougher than deploying the cannon that China had furnished them. Relying on sheer muscle, they dragged the howitzers up the hills above the French positions. ''It was difficult, n'est-ce pas, very difficult,'' Giap recollected, adding that only truly ''motivated'' men could have performed such a feat.He planned to launch his attack on Jan. 25, 1954, and at first heeded his Chinese military advisers, who proposed ''human wave'' assaults of the kind their forces had staged against the Americans in Korea. But, after a sleepless night, he concluded that it would be suicidal to hurl his troops against the deeply entrenched French, with their tanks and aircraft. His tone rose dramatically as he told me: ''Suddenly I postponed the operation. My staff was confused, but no matter. I was in command, and I demanded absolute obedience - sans discussion, sans explication!''Giap rescheduled the attack for March, and directed his men to creep toward the French through a maze of tunnels as his cannon pounded them from the heights above the valley. The battle dragged on for nearly two months and, one by one, the French positions fell.At the time, President Dwight D. Eisenhower weighed and rejected the idea of United States air strikes. What if he had intervened? ''We would have had problems,'' Giap allowed, ''but the outcome would have been the same. The battlefield was too big for effective bombing.''The French surrendered on May 7, the day an international conference met in Geneva to seek an end to the war. The Vietminh failed to transform the battlefield victory into a full diplomatic victory. Under Soviet and Chinese pressure, its negotiators accepted a divided Vietnam pending a nationwide election to be held in 1956. Giap would only say that ''we could have gained more.'' But Pham Van Dong, then the chief Vietminh delegate, had earlier told me: ''We were betrayed.''With American approval, South Vietnam's President Diem reneged on the election and arrested thousands of southern Vietminh militants, executing many without trial. The Communist regime in Hanoi procrastinated. ''Perhaps we should have acted sooner,'' Giap said, ''but our people were tired after a long war, and they might not have responded to a call for yet another armed struggle. We would wait.''In 1957, however, Hanoi ordered its surviving southern activists to form armed teams, supplying them with weapons and cadres through the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail. Soon, again under Hanoi's direction, the teams started to attack Diem's officials. Posing as a homegrown insurgency, the Vietcong surfaced in 1960, in the guise of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. But it too was invented by Hanoi.I presumed that Giap must have been frustrated, after years of fighting the French, to be beginning another war against the Americans and their South Vietnamese clients. But, as he tells it, his zeal never waned as he resumed the same slow process of rebuilding the forces in the south.Initially stumped after President John F. Kennedy sent aid and advisers to Vietnam, the Communists quickly regained their momentum and were soon routing Diem's army. Their strength also increased as numbers of peasants, alienated by Diem's rigidity, joined their camp.Late in 1963, acting with American complicity, Diem's own generals staged a coup against him. His assassination dismayed the Hanoi regime. The new junta in Saigon promised reforms, prompting many Vietcong supporters to switch sides. Nor did it seem likely that President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had succeeded Kennedy, would withdraw from Vietnam. Giap, now seeing a protracted struggle ahead, concluded that he would eventually have to commit his own regular forces to the war. By the end of 1964, the first northern regiment was operating in the south.The large Communist units gravely threatened the Saigon regime, which was now tottering amid internecine rivalries. Early in 1965, alarmed by the situation, Johnson unleashed air attacks against North Vietnam and sent United States combat troops to Vietnam. Surprisingly, Giap displayed a measure of sympathy for Johnson's predicament. ''Of course he would have been wiser not to escalate the war,'' he mused. ''But throughout history, even the most intelligent leaders have not always been masters of their fate.''By late 1967, however, Giap also faced a hard choice. The half-million United States troops then in Vietnam were chewing up his forces, and his hopes of an early victory seemed dim. But, as he wrote at the time, the Americans were stretched ''as taut as a bowstring'' and could not defend the entire country. He also detected growing antiwar feeling in the United States and rising unrest in South Vietnam's urban areas. Thus he gambled on a campaign that would break the deadlock. Later known as the Tet offensive of 1968, it would be a coordinated assault against South Vietnam's cities.''For us, there is never a single strategy,'' Giap explained. ''Ours is always a synthesis, simultaneously military, political and diplomatic - which is why, quite clearly, the offensive had multiple objectives. We foresaw uprisings in the cities. But above all, we wanted to show the Americans that we were not exhausted, that we could attack their arsenals, communications, elite units, even their headquarters, the brains behind the war. And we wanted to project the war into the homes of America's families, because we knew that most of them had nothing against us. In short, we sought a decisive victory that would persuade America to renounce the war.''Giap prefaced the drive in late 1967 with a diversion, striking a string of American garrisons in the Vietnamese highlands. Johnson, who viewed Giap's siege of Khe Sanh as a replay of his showdown against the French, pledged Westmoreland to hold the base - saying, ''I don't want any damn Dinbinphoo.'' The Communist troops, bombed by B-52's, took ghastly losses. But Giap had lured the American forces away from the populated coast.On the night of Jan. 31, 1968, the Lunar New Year, some 70,000 Communist soldiers attacked South Vietnam's cities. A suicide squad stormed into the United States Embassy compound in Saigon, and American troops fought for weeks to rescue Hue. The televised scenes shocked the American public, which was already souring on the war. His ratings plummeting as antiwar sentiment spread, Johnson abandoned the race for re-election. Vietnam, coupled with civil rights protests, threw America into turmoil.Looking back, Giap maintains that Tet was a ''victory'' that showed ''our discipline, strength and ardor.'' But, he admits, it was not ''decisive.'' Another seven years of war lay ahead and, he concedes, they were ''difficult.'' Still, he added with typical bravado, ''no obstacle, nothing the Americans could do, would stop us in the long run.'' This was a reality, he emphasized, that Westmoreland failed to perceive. ''He was a cultivated soldier who had read many military texts,'' Giap said. ''Yet he committed an error following the Tet offensive, when he requested another 206,000 troops. He could have put in 300,000, even 400,000 more men. It would have made no difference.''But the aftermath of Tet was bleak for the Communists. According to one of Giap's aides, their casualties during the drive had been ''devastating.'' American bombing of the South Vietnamese countryside further crippled their forces as their peasant supporters fled to urban refugee camps. They were also ravaged by the Phoenix program, devised by the C.I.A. to destroy their rural sanctuaries. The Communist structure retreated to Cambodia, where it was again uprooted by President Richard M. Nixon's incursion in 1970.As Nixon withdrew United States troops, however, Giap had only to wait until he faced the inept Saigon army. The climax, he figured, would involve big units. Early in 1972, he staged a massive offensive intended to improve Hanoi's hand for the final negotiations. It failed as American aircraft crushed his divisions. But Nixon, eager for peace before the United States Presidential election in November, compromised on a cease-fire. Signed in January 1973, it would gradually erode. The Communists rolled into Saigon two years later.''I was delirious with joy,'' Giap said. ''I flew there immediately, and inspected the South Vietnamese army's headquarters, with its modern American equipment. It had all been useless. The human factor had been decisive!''A typical retired general, Giap now devotes much of his time to revisiting battlefields and addressing veterans. ''If I had not become a soldier,'' he reflects, ''I probably would have remained a teacher, maybe of philosophy or history. Someone recently asked me whether, when I first formed our army, I (n)ever imagined I would fight the Americans. question! Did the Americans, back then, ever imagine that they would one day fight us?''He gripped my hand as we parted, saying: ''Remember, I am a general who fought for peace. I wanted peace - but not peace at any price.'' With that he walked off briskly, leaving me to contemplate the cemeteries, the war monuments and the unhealed memories in France, America and Vietnam, and the terrible price their peoples paid.Vietnam: A History —————THE END^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Stanley Karnow is the author of ''Vietnam: A History.'' He recently won the Pulitzer Prize in history for ''In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines'' (Random House).A version of this article appears in print onJune 24, 1990, Section 6, Page 22 of the National edition with the headline: Giap Remembers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe