When the Ford Motor Company celebrated its 100th birthday last June, chairman Bill Ford declared, "No company had a greater impact on the lives of people around the world than Ford."
Considering that Bill’s great-grandfather, Henry Ford, who launched the company with little fanfare in 1903, did indeed change the world as we know it, the statement was no idle boast. Henry Ford created the mass-produced, affordable automobile and, not satisfied, helped construct the road network to run them on.
But in his anniversary talk, young Mr. Ford added that he hoped the company would have "an even greater impact on people’s lives in the 21st century," and that’s a bit more doubtful. At the start of the new century the role of Ford and the other American companies is shaky, under stiff challenge from Europe and, especially, Japan.
Micheline Maynard’s The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market (Currency/Doubleday, $24.95) contends that Detroit is lost in the wilderness, having failed miserably to respond to foreign competition.
The irony is that Maynard is writing about Detroit’s second failure in the modern era. Brock Yates wrote The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry in 1982, after the first onslaught from Japan and before Ford reinvented itself with the stunning 1986 Taurus — which for a brief, shining moment was the best-selling car in America (and deservedly so).
As Maynard (who reports for the New York Times) recounts, it was the SUV that took Detroit’s eye off the ball. Instead of constantly improving the Taurus/Sable and keeping them at the forefront of sedan design, as Honda and Toyota do with the Accord and Camry respectively, Ford became mesmerized by the huge profits to be made selling the Ford Explorer, and let the Taurus wither. Similarly, General Motors, the largest car company in the world, ceded the sedan market to the Japanese in pursuit of SUV profits, while offering the long-suffering public such ignoble efforts as the Chevrolet Cavalier.
The heart of the problem, Maynard reports, is people like Bob Lutz, the swashbuckling vice chairman for product development at General Motors. I once sat through a lengthy GM-produced promotional film about Lutz, the point of which seemed to be that he is macho enough to pilot his own plane. He is loved by the motoring press for his relentless championing of "more power," and was responsible for shepherding the 16-cylinder Cadillac Sixteen into existence at last year’s Detroit Auto Show. It was "part of an effort to recapture the great days when the luxury automaker used the advertising slogan: ‘Standard of the World.’"
But 16-cylinder Cadillacs are the last thing Detroit needs. Just such cars were the virtual undoing of many luxury marques during the Depression. Pierce-Arrow, Duesenberg, Bugatti, where are they today? Lutz is quoted in Maynard’s book as describing the Toyota Camry as "one of the ugliest cars ever to travel the nation’s roadways," and questioning the taste of import buyers. He doesn’t seem to understand why Americans actually like the plain-Jane Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas that are increasingly found in their driveways.
And Lutz also dismisses the Japanese hybrid cars as mere gimmicks. It’s not surprising that, with him as head of product development, GM has failed to build a partial-zero emission vehicle (PZEV) to sell in the states that follow California emissions laws, and recently pulled back on what had seemed a solid commitment to hybrids.
Maynard’s book is a good read, but she doesn’t admit much possibility that Detroit will reinvent itself once again. Instead, she offers a fanciful press release announcing Toyota’s evolution into the world’s largest auto company by 2010. If Detroit doesn’t wake up, it could become reality.
