When Motown Lost Its Mojo

A confession: if it’s got motorized wheels, like any small boy, I probably loved it at one time or another. Steam locomotives, tractor trailers, motorcycles; sporty V-8s, show cars, glorified golf carts, forklifts; each has its job. I like North American style. I’ve also owned cars from Australia, Germany, England, Korea and Japan, and though I’ve had my share of quality control issues with Detroit cars, I’ve never understood some Americans’ almost masochistic eagerness to declare that everything we make is junk.

“The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry” is a smug 1980s book about the alleged stupidity of Detroit, one of the major national themes of the day. Since “Decline and Fall” was written by Brock Yates, a respected automotive writer, it isn’t reflexively anti-car. Yates argues that U.S. automakers did a pretty good job until 1960 or so, when he feels that greed, laziness, and a lack of foresight began to poison the industry's competitiveness. Detroit badly needed to overcome the distractions of fuel price crises, ever-tighter pollution regulations, rapacious lawyers, poisonous labor contracts, and metro Detroit’s poor race relations. Hard to argue there.

At heart, Yates can be stereotyped as one of these scarf and goggle classic sports car buffs, someone who loves smallness for its own sake, hates automatic transmissions, and thinks the Italians, Germans, and Japanese are motor gods. He’s too performance-oriented to fit into the Consumer Reports crowd, too indifferent to family needs to understand why large vehicles have hung on for so long. His long, scornful description of the car industry is needlessly snide, but filled with interesting facts about the kinds of people who get involved with the auto business.

The book begins with one of Detroit’s key counteroffensives against the Japanese, the parallel 1980-1981 introductions of the Ford Escort/Mercury Lynx twins, and General Motors’ similarly sized “J-cars”. Yates could have told the story of Ford’s world-beating product launch, but that would have undermined his sarcastic anti-executive suite screed, so instead he sticks with GM’s more troubled launch.

Much of the interest of this book is learning what a product introduction really entails. I can picture how a single, hand-made prototype of a car gets made, and I even have a book about the process— “Design and Destiny: The Making of the Tucker Automobile.” I can picture how a large car plant operates when everything has been worked out, and the line is running at full blast. I’m interested in what happens in between, the unknown stage where a new car design is being tested in sheet metal but is not yet in mass production.

The very essence of a car’s appeal is its smooth, seemingly inevitable design; how is that achieved on a pilot project scale? In GM’s case, they have small assembly lines for special projects like this, kept active on odd jobs like custom limousine work. They made 125 J-cars to be used in tests of manufacturing procedures and quality, comparative marketing research, government crash and economy tests, advertising photography, get-acquainted seminars with dealers, and finally PR and press reviews.

The first handmade prototype car is used to make molds that are in turn used to make temporary dies; the first metal parts are stamped out manually and filed to fit. Then “jigs”, basically large, specialized C-clamps, hold the body parts together as they are welded. The prototype bodies are painted and equipped with axles, tires, wiring harnesses and other parts. Engines, assembled and tested elsewhere, have their own development path and reach the bodies for final hand assembly.

Yates says, constantly, that the arrogant meatheads that are allegedly in charge of the Big Three have ignored and belittled smaller cars since the beginning of time, despite the helpful existence of a superior race of overlooked American intellectuals who were quick to discern the better quality and efficiency of import cars. The fact is that Detroit and the rest of America saw eye to eye about car sizes in the fifties and sixties; people thought they had plenty of choices. Detroit itself publicized the virtues of small cars in million-dollar ads for the Big Three’s own dealer imports. Yes, there is no question that dealers would always rather sell more expensive cars, but there was nothing stopping you from buying less expensive ones.

As the book was being written, a new wave of downsized, front wheel drive American cars should have cheered Yates up: he admits that the Omni/Horizon twins and the GM 1979 X-Cars were quite successful, the then-ballyhooed Chrysler K-Cars were powered by a novel and high-quality engine, and Ford’s first aerodynamically styled cars were making an impact. But he can’t bring himself to admit, even in 1983, that for all of Detroit’s mistakes, its critics didn’t understand the market.

Another assertion of the book is exaggerated but has a touch of truth: that Detroit just doesn’t appreciate the importance of designed-in durability and precision assembly, and the foreigners—to Brock Yates, just about any and all foreigners—do. There’s no question that average quality declined, although there’s some question of when.

Yates doesn’t avoid blaming the unions, who he admits are more of a drain on quality in America than elsewhere, where unions frequently demand more money, but seldom demand softer work. He also says that foreign-built subassemblies are better, such as power steering pumps, disc brake calipers, suspension parts, and dashboard instruments. He’s probably right, although a lot of that is disguised class snobbery: there’s a reason why, say, the base model AMC Gremlin didn’t sport a Borg-Warner tachometer or a Bosch electrical regulator, and it wasn’t lack of taste or interest among AMC’s engineers in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

On the other side of the import market, the Europeans, who pioneered America’s foreign car business, were by then no longer competing much in the lower end of the market. The novelty days were over. It holds true today: despite small niches like Smart car and Mini Cooper, and occasional hopeful attempts to re-enter the U.S. mass market like Fiat’s, only Volkswagen represents Europe at the lower end.

Volkswagen engines were undersized even in Yates’s day; driver acceptance of weak, noisy, but reliable performance made the Volks Beetle phenomenon possible. The only real safety feature of the Volks was the fact that on good roads, it was too slow to get itself into trouble. What Yates and others really liked about the 50s-60s VW was its non-conformist personal statement, led by its much-admired contrarian ad campaign, self-consciously meant to be a hip, condescending thumb in Detroit’s eye.

It was interesting to compare Yates’ dream improvements of 1983 with the products available one and two generations later. Scorn for Detroit is nothing new. Preston Tucker, Henry Kaiser, George Crosley, all outsiders, all of them willing to be quoted as saying that American cars are too slow, too costly, too heavy and hard to park. They say Detroit is absurdly stupid not to see the advantages of—fill in the blanks—rear engine drive? Plastic bodies? An independent engine at each wheel? Accident-proof 200-mile-an-hour land yachts made of soybeans, costing $200? Why are the hidebound, unimaginative blimps who run car companies allowed to continue to injure and rob the auto-buying public year after year? You get the idea.

And yet somehow, when each of these scornful dudes is finally in a position to do something about it, they compromise; they scrap the blueprints for the atomic electric power module, the fenders made of crushed hemp, or the rear propeller, and settle for a six-passenger sedan. It’s human nature, and it’s usually better engineering as well to admit when you’re licked. Safe design usually turns out to be a conventional design. There are reasons why most cars have four wheels, are made of metal, have inflated tires, and don’t have glass bubble tops. None of those reasons is immutable, but they can’t be ignored with impunity.