Detroit City Is the Place to Be (20 page)

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu joins local dignitaries (including GM CEO Ed Whitacre, Governor Jennifer Granholm and Senator Carl Levin) to celebrate the first Chevrolet Volt battery coming off the assembly line at GM’s Brownstone Battery Plant.
[Jeffrey Sauger, courtesy of General Motors]

7

MOTOR CITY BREAKDOWN

A new word was needed to express the trance, the fearful concentration with which all men awaited the approaching Automobile Show.

—M
ATTHEW
J
OSEPHSON
,
Outlook
, 1929

A
FEW WEEKS BEFORE
the 2009 North American International Auto Show, the heads of the Big Three auto companies drove to Capitol Hill to make their case for a financial lifeline. It was their second appearance before Congress since the economic collapse, which had conspired with an ill-timed spike in gas prices to expose the carmakers’ overleveraged, wildly mismanaged business model as unsustainable, built on sand. Not so different, really, from what the bankers had gotten themselves into, except—and this was Detroit’s bad luck—the villains of Wall Street had yet to become household names, and their crimes would remain fantastically opaque. You didn’t have to be Paul Krugman, on the other hand, to viscerally comprehend the shortcomings of Chrysler and General Motors. And so, with our elected representatives secure in the knowledge that their constituents wanted blood, the CEOs found themselves served with a public flogging befitting tobacco lobbyists.

Ford was still doing okay; the argument from GM and Chrysler, on the other hand, went, “Look, we screwed up, but if you let us fail, an entire Midwestern ecosystem of parts suppliers will go down, too, and that can’t be helpful at a time when the U.S. economy is teetering on the brink of a full-scale depression, now can it?” Congress had just passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, though, bailing out the banks to the tune of $700 billion, so there wasn’t much appetite for further governmental largesse. Republicans from Southern “right to work” states, where the factories of foreign automakers happened to be located, were proving especially unmoved by Detroit’s sob story. But back in Michigan, the very willingness of our notoriously arrogant corporate titans to prostrate themselves on C-SPAN spoke volumes about the dire straits in which the industry—the heart of Detroit’s old way of life—found itself. At the Auto Show, the question on everybody’s mind was not how Chrysler and GM might be saved, but whether they could be saved at all.

*   *   *

I hadn’t been to an auto show since I was a teenager. My main memories centered on the bikini-clad booth models and getting to see the car from
Knight Rider
.
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But in keeping with the New Austerity, the 2009 show was decidedly toned down. Spending taxpayer money on gaudy displays would have been bad form, so the show’s planners promised a back-to-basics, “cars on carpets” approach. The trick for the automakers became figuring out how to simultaneously convey confidence and humility (not a typical trait associated with the Big Three), to acknowledge the troubles without making the industry’s biggest party of the year feel like a wake. To that end, the purpose of the Auto Show was not simply to introduce the latest model of Silverado; it was the opening salvo of a very public, extraordinarily high-stakes publicity campaign. The automakers were selling the idea of their own relevance, and they had to convince Washington, the media, and the American consumer that they could adapt, making themselves nimbler and greener and building cars people might want to buy. The usual futuristic concept-car prototypes were on display, but the main thing showcased was entirely speculative—the idea of a future with Detroit in it.

In this regard, the automakers faced a very particular problem: the average consumer despised them. There were the decades of substandard products; the pathological myopia of a business model based on gas-guzzling SUVs and eternally low fuel prices; the pioneering outsourcing of jobs begun in the eighties; the preposterously overpaid executives, with their maddening, sclerotic passivity in the face of their industry’s demise. And those were strictly macrolevel concerns—notice I haven’t mentioned the Pontiac Aztek. Mustering public sympathy for such self-inflicted wounds was, in the words of a Detroit advertising veteran, “one of the toughest tasks not in automotive history but in marketing history.”
2

*   *   *

Growing up in metropolitan Detroit, attending the auto show was basically mandatory. It made no difference if you liked cars or not—I didn’t—or if your family worked in some capacity for one of the automakers. We didn’t own foreign cars; no one in our neighborhood did. No matter how badly they screwed up, the Big Three continued to exercise a psychological hold on residents, due to their place of importance in the city’s history and a sense that, for all their faults, they had once made Detroit great and might do so again. For this reason, local support for the auto industry, which seemed only to intensify as the carmakers’ fortunes continued to plunge, was more than just home-team loyalty. It was existential. When I moved away and bought a used Corolla, my dad, in his thick accent, noted mockingly, “They must be good cars—all the
smart people
buy them.”

The first Detroit auto show was staged in 1899 by William E. Metzger, a former bicycle salesman who had become the city’s premier (well, only) automobile dealer. According to the
Detroit News
, he displayed four cars that year—two powered by electricity and two by steam—along with trophies from African big-game hunts and fishing tackle and other sporting equipment that might broaden the show’s appeal. The cars were placed on rollers connected to crude speedometers, in order to demonstrate to skeptical customers how fast they could run.

By the late 1890s, magazines such as
The Horseless Age
had begun chronicling the expanding new market of motorcar enthusiasts, a growing but decidedly niche concern comprised of mechanically minded hobbyists who’d built upon the bicycle boom of the earlier part of the decade. Some weekend tinkerers, others more business-minded entrepreneurs, this far-flung brotherhood included Karl Benz in Germany, Armand Peugeot in France, the brothers Charles and Frank Duryea in Massachusetts, and Ransom Olds in Lansing, Michigan. The latter, obtaining backing from a millionaire owner of a copper mine, in 1899 shifted his operation to Detroit, where the Olds Motor Works became the first factory to mass-produce automobiles in the United States.

As Robert Conot points out, the northeast, with its established bicycle works, could have just as easily nurtured its own Motor City, but for the internal combustion engine winning out as the preferred mode of powering the new vehicles. The electric car batteries of the early twentieth century had proven too heavy and in need of constant recharging, while steam-powered cars would never be practical in the drought-prone western states. Gasoline engines, on the other hand, played to the strengths of Detroit’s already considerable industrial base. The city had long been the carriage, ship-engine, and railroad-car capital of the United States, making for a deep talent pool to draw upon. The Detroit River, meanwhile, provided easy access to the natural resources (iron ore, copper, lumber, abundant in northern Michigan and surrounding states) necessary for automobile construction, and also facilitated the distribution of the finished cars.

Finally, the success of Olds Motor Works, and shortly thereafter Ford, began to create its own center of gravity, with an eventually irresistible pull, attracting like-minded talent in the manner of Hollywood or Silicon Valley, Nashville or Wall Street. The hard-drinking Dodge Brothers,
3
who eventually opened their own factory, started out building transmissions for Ransom Olds. An obsessive machinist named Henry Leland, also in Olds’s employ and already nearing sixty at the dawn of the twentieth century, went from building Oldsmobile engines to founding Cadillac Motors. The rakishly mustachioed French racer Louis Chevrolet made his way to Detroit (via New York) to start his own car company. Much later, Walter Chrysler, the gearhead son of a train engineer, came from small-town Kansas to be the works manager at Buick. When today’s Detroit boosters talk of creating “entrepreneurial hubs,” their dream scenario would look something like this wildly energetic period of the city’s history, when the proximity of such skill and ambition and visionary moxie proved so profitably combustible.

By 2009, the show, having been staged everywhere from Beller’s Beer Garden to the state fairgrounds to the Billy Sunday Tabernacle tent, had settled at Cobo Hall, the downtown convention center, where, inside, the expected rituals were still taking place. If you’ve never been to an auto show, these rituals mainly involve adults climbing in and out of vehicles they will not be allowed to drive, which always seems deeply unsatisfying, not unlike a visit to a strip club. Inside a car you cannot drive, there is not much to do. Most people give the steering wheel a firm, ten-and-two grip and wiggle their spines against the unfamiliar seats; occasionally, they try the radio. Outside the vehicles, hard-core motorheads, almost all men, photograph the new models from various angles, occasionally popping a hood to snap a close-up of an engine. A new Mustang turned on its side attracts a throng of guys who stare at the underbody in awe, as if they are peeking up a skirt. You are not allowed to sit inside the higher-end vehicles, like the Bentleys and Aston Martins. Sometimes the scent of new car is so powerful I wonder if they’ve figured out a way to enhance it artificially, like they do with the smell at Cinnabon.

Perhaps to signal a level of seriousness at the 2009 show, the booth girls were almost uniformly brunette and they all wore the same basic business attire (tight black pants, tops and blazers, stiletto-heeled black boots), a look I thought of as “Naughty Vice President of Marketing.” The crowds were relatively sparse, so that the bright lights and forced cheer of the booth attendants felt creepy and desperate. In terms of square footage, the Big Three still dominated the main floor, but their displays had the least frills, with Chrysler making an especially depressing showing. In the past, Chrysler had been known for its over-the-top stunts during the show’s press preview: hiring cowboys to herd ten dozen heads of cattle down the streets of Detroit to promote the new Dodge Ram, or driving a Jeep off a stage and through a plateglass window. But now, Chrysler didn’t even introduce any new models ready for market, and their cars were modestly arranged on a thin gray carpet that bunched in places. Older models like the PT Cruiser were given wide berth by attendees, as if someone had spotted a dead body inside.

The foreign manufacturers, not chastened by crisis, allowed themselves a bit more flash. Volkswagen’s display was multileveled, white and gleaming, with an Apple store brightness that made your eyes hurt. Honda’s signage featured a humanoid robot that I assumed was some sort of jokey mascot until one of the representatives explained that last year it had conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army, one of the only concerns still hiring in Detroit, had constructed a climbing wall in the food court, where camo-clad recruiters paced the floor.

In a sign of the times, so many automakers had dropped out of the 2009 show—Nissan and Porsche among them—that BYD, a Chinese car company traditionally stuck in a basement annex, was able to move up to the main floor. BYD entered the Chinese car market in 2003 and planned to begin selling in North America in 2011.
4
The company started out making rechargeable cell phone batteries and had put out extravagant claims for its electric cars—their batteries supposedly run for 250 miles and can be recharged to half power in ten minutes—about which U.S. analysts sounded both skeptical and nervous.

The biggest change at the show, everyone agreed, was the admission, however belated, of the limits of the internal combustion engine. It was impossible to overstate how huge a deal this had been for Detroit. I could remember a childhood trip to AutoWorld, the ill-fated automotive-history-themed “fun” park meant to save Flint, Michigan (and famously mocked in
Roger & Me
), the centerpiece of which had been a three-story V-6 engine displayed in a rotunda like a giant statue of Buddha in a Bangkok temple. If someone had been asked to build a scale representation of the importance of the engine in Detroit history, this one would have been just about right.

But by 2009, all the major car companies were stressing their eco-warrior bona fides, setting aside prime real estate for their hybrids and concept electrics. An inordinate number of these vehicles were unsubtly painted some chlorophyll shade of green. The new Cooper Mini was housed inside a giant fake ice sculpture, because nothing says the opposite of global warming like a giant fake ice sculpture. Animated ads in the Lincoln display, meanwhile, showed the cars growing out of a leafy vine, as if future trips to an auto dealership would be more like picking organic produce at a farmers market. Toyota went a step further, passing out little Prius-shaped flyers that actually had wildflower seeds embedded in the paper, so you could figuratively plant a Prius in your Earth Day victory garden. Toyota also passed out red paper swag bags bearing the message “Recycle This Bag.” (Ford’s plastic, flag-bedecked bags, by contrast, recommended shoppers “Buy American.”)

In the basement, an entire artificial forest had been constructed, and people waited on line to be driven around a track in one of a fleet of hybrid vehicles. It felt like the National Public Radio version of Six Flags. I half expected Terry Gross to be driving my 2010 Ford Fusion hybrid, but instead I got a chirpy Ford salesperson. We slowly drove off, soon shaded by the plastic trees and creeping past a little waterfall. All of this was surely meant to be soothing, though something about the poky speed and utter silence of the car began to feel sinister, like intimations of a future where our robot cars won’t let us drive too fast or tailgate or listen to loud hip-hop with lots of bass.