I've thought a lot about the inevitable General Motors bankruptcy in the last week or so. I thought I’d provide a sample of what I've been thinking:
I'm pretty sure that the GM bankruptcy, as unfortunate as it is, is not the result of meddling by pointy-headed busybodies, bureaucrats, greenies or anyone else, as claimed by that pinhead P.J. O’Rourke in a column in the Wall Street Journal Monday. What it is, is the result of idiot execs at the company who haven't, since the late '60s, made a decent decision. It’s the result of consumers rightly voting with their wallets. And it’s also because society has changed.
Just cast your mind back to the point when innovation and quality seemed to stop at the Big3 – it was along about the mid-‘60s, about the same time for all three. No more Chrysler pushbutton transmissions or Hemis (until the latest “Hemi,” which in spite of its marketing pitch doesn’t have hemispherical heads), no more Rocket 88s, no more roll-down rear windows ala Mercury, no more fuelie Chevies. The manufacturers all came to believe that they were in business not to make cars, but to make money. They completely abandoned the notion that if they made great cars, they'd make money automatically. BMW works that way. So does Toyota, so does Honda.
Instead, the Big Three stuck with solid rear axles, avoided disc brakes and radial tires, overhead camshafts, variable cam timing (and I could go on), for as long as they could, adopted the cheapest possible paint finishes and the crappiest interiors, and generally adjusted their margins so that they were as profitable as possible. That's what lead to the huge contracts to the unions - those guys weren’t about to not cash in on the avalanche of cash that the Big 3 was bathing in as a result of saving money on the crap they built. In doing all this, the domestic automobile industry abdicated the market that made it rich to the Asian and European companies.
There were harbingers of what was possible. Consider the brilliant 1967 BMW 1602 – disc brakes, overhead cam, great performance and fuel economy, thoughtful space utilization with a huge trunk and room for four people. Detroit basically ignored cars like this. Instead, it gave us cars that used the same basic technology employed in the 1954 Chevrolet.
Also, instead of embracing emissions laws, Detroit fought them. Embracing the need for cleaner exhaust would have required innovation, which would have required investment – and even rarer in Detroit, forward thinking. Saab and Volvo were, in '77, I think, the first to use the Lambda-Sond emissions system, with its three-way catalytic converter. Used in conjunction with an electronic fuel-injection system developed by Bosch, it provided instant horsepower, good emissions, good fuel economy, good drivability. The Big Three ignored that. Instead, GM continued to use archaic carburetors – oh, and it gave us the disastrous Olds diesel.
In the meantime, the rise of the computer and the cell fone, the rise of computer games, the rise of entertainment everywhere diverted our attention from that which had held it for so long – cool cars. Squabbling among racing series didn’t help. Most people just lost interest.
I did my part to keep that from happening. During my time at both Autoweek and scrappy little Road Test magazine, I made sure that we called a spade a spade, singing the praises of great hardwear whereever we found it and blasting the crappy stuff. Other magazines were basically somnolent, with the exception of Car and Driver. CandD also spoke out the sorry condition of the domestic industry. But apart from that, nobody much seemed to care about what happening.
You and I saved our asses off to have cars when we were kids; couldn't imagine life without one, even if it was a crappy old primered '48 Chevy (and don't I wish I owned it today, as embarrassed as I was of it then). Today the kids could care less. Mom and Dad give them a car on high-school graduation or before. They can't imagine life without a free car. Gas and insurance, too.
So is it any wonder that the American public is happy with Asian-built appliances? No, it isn't. They're safe, trouble-free, last forever, present brilliant value for money and generally get pretty good economy.
In writing this crap, O'Rourke reveals himself as just another knothead who spouts off just to get a reaction. Which, I guess, this is.
-JFT
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