Last week I was on a plane from Detroit returning home after attending the all-important introduction of Ford's 2009 F-150, arguably the company's most crucial launch since the Taurus in the fall of 1985. As I was editing some photographs shot at the event, the man in the seat next to me asked me what I was doing. After I explained that I am an automotive journalist, he said he was an orthopedic surgeon living in Birmingham, a Detroit suburb. So, after we discussed my recently separated shoulder, the conversation turned to cars. He asked me some questions about what to buy. He currently owns an older Mercedes E55 and a Lexus RX330. I suggested a Cadillac CTS with the 306-horsepower, direct-injection V6. He asked why.

I went on to tell him that, in the course of a year I drive and evaluate more than 50 new cars either at press launch events or during week-long editorial loans. When considering luxury sedans costing less than $50,000, the new CTS was among those that impressed me most: offering a combination of performance, luxury, and value that is, quite frankly, unmatched in the current marketplace. He was perplexed.

As our discussion moved forward, we both stood up in the aisle to stretch. Looking around the packed Northwest A320 from our row 12 vantage point, I noted that there are 148 passengers on this plane and that it was quite likely that one in four of them had never ever set foot in a domestic showroom--that ever since the first OPEC Oil Embargo in 1973, many Americans no longer even considered buying an American car, and that my seat mate represented part of a generation of car buyers seemingly lost to the Detroit Three.

In the aftermath of the first oil shock in 1973/74, off-shore manufacturers were encouraged to build plants here, which actually increased the penetration of foreign nameplates. These new plants were located in non-union, right-to-work states, populated by younger, lower paid workers receiving fewer benefits. Local, regional, and state governments encouraged the construction of such plants, offering the kinds of incentives never given the Detroit Three.

Over the years the disparity between domestic and off-shore brands was increased with the introduction of imports from South Korea, where real wages, the cost to manufacturers and to supply benefits, such as health care, is often a fraction of what it is here or is subsidized by their respective governments. I'm often amazed how the quality of the interior materials in the least expensive South Korean subcompact compares with that found on domestic competitors. Did the American designers and engineers intentionally design and specify terrible interiors? No, they were in essence forced to, given the fact that they had to take cost out somewhere, and one of the places where this can be easily accomplished is in the interior. Unfortunately, poor quality shows each and every time you put the key in the ignition over the next 72 months while you pay it off. When you pay your workers substantially less than their US counterparts, you can incorporate lots of high quality soft-touch materials into your interior system, resulting in a more pleasing product.

Then there's the issue of free trade. How can it be fair that Japan and Korea have always closed their markets to our cars? Quality? Hardly, as all recent audits and surveys show the gap has essentially closed. Free trade is free only if it is fair and our trade policies with respect to this issue have been totally skewed; our market is open to all comers, their markets are not. The playing field is in no way balanced. One would think with the value of the dollar, until just recently, that somewhere we could have made a go of selling our cars in other markets.

Before 1990 there were more than a half dozen full-scale domestic manufacturing plants on the West Coast. Today, with the exception of the GM-Toyota joint venture in Freemont outside of San Francisco, there are none. At one time, Ford built more than 100,000 Mustangs annually in San Jose and GM built an equal number of full-size Chevys in Van Nuys; today they build none. The effect of this swing in consumer preferences has been devastating to our manufacturing base. If just 30% of those who currently buy import-only went back to buying domestic, the positive effects on our economy would far surpass any economic stimulus package Washington can muster. With our current economic travails, stemming the further loss of domestic manufacturing jobs should be a national priority just as it is in other nations.

So, what can the Big Three do to overcome what is now an inaccurate public perception of their products? Chrysler, Ford, and GM must extend an open invitation directly to this lost generation of car buyers, those who have not set foot in a domestic showroom in more than 30 years. If these buyers come in and compare domestic cars to the competition objectively, they will see that many stack up very well against the direct competition. J.D. Powers and almost every other measurement metric proves that many of the domestic offerings have closed the quality gap and are now on par with their imported competition.

Right now, Ford and Toyota are in a dead heat, quality-wise, as measured by a recent survey of problems after 90 days of ownership conducted by the RDA Group of Bloomfield, Michigan. The ads would need to read almost like a public service announcement, something to the effect "Come see and drive our quality." Saturn tried this approach with the introduction of the Aura in the Spring of 2007. Each dealer had on hand the direct import competitors, the benchmark Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, for a side-by-side comparison and sales rose by almost 25%.

(Apparently, there were plans to offer a similar program for the launch of the all-new 2008 Chevy Malibu in the fall of 2007, but the program was quietly shelved with no official comment from GM or Chevrolet. The Malibu, as it turns out, is a world-class product and has met with critical acclaim so it surprised me that GM wasn't willing to demonstrate that they had completely closed the gap with the two class leaders, Camry and Accord.)

Trade figures and ownership surveys are all just numbers. Any discussion should not forget that there are real people involved here, friends perhaps, or neighbors to many of us, and all fellow Americans. As rumors of a GM-Chrysler or Chrysler-Renault-Nissan tie-up persist, I sit here reading the comments to a Detroit Free Press article published today on Chrysler's impending breakup, and I'm getting sick to my stomach. I have hundreds of friends working in the auto industry and feel their pain. I don't want to see any of them lose their jobs, however inevitable it might seem. These are good people, from line workers to senior executives who individually did nothing to put Chrysler, or GM or Ford for that matter, in their current predicament.

All three companies are building some world-class, competitive products, yet one in four Americans will not even consider visiting a domestic brand showroom. An article in yesterday's USA Today bemoaned the fact that this year several thousand dealerships will close due in part to the current economic climate. While this is one way to reduce the dealership head count that has plagued the Detroit Three for years, this is not quite the way it was expected to come down, forced by the inability of buyers to get credit and dealers to finance a reasonable on-site inventory.

The result, when the dust settles, will be fewer dealerships overall. Those that remain will likely not be the mega-dealers with hundreds of cars in stock, but scaled-down versions with more limited inventories. Perhaps then that lost generation of American car buyers will return before it's too late.

Back on September 3, one of my favorite automotive pundits, autoextremist.com's Peter DeLorenzo stated that "Detroit has lost the 'image' war, and now it's time to move on." While I respect his opinion, I don't quite accept it. Yes, Detroit is saddled with a terrible quality legacy, its foundation dating back more than 20 years, one that will be hard to overcome.

But think about it: more than 30 years ago, the Japanese were saddled with a reputation for cheap, shoddy products, cars and consumer electronics especially, that many thought would never measure up to its US competitors. How wrong that turned out to be!

First it was consumer electronics. The Japanese designed, built, and sold products that were not just the equal of their US counterparts; they were better, and more often than not, cost less.

Next was automobiles; and they were given a huge boost by being properly positioned for the first two oil price shocks, especially the first one when the Detroit Three were caught almost completely flat-footed.

As GM has now found out, it's not enough, at least in the case of the Chevy Malibu and Cadillac CTS, to build cars that are as good as their current Japanese (and German) competitors; they have to be better, at the top of their class. In this ultra-competitive environment, this is a very tall order.

GM has placed a lot of hope in their plug-in electric car technology, hoping, in one fell swoop with the upcoming Chevy Volt, to wrestle the mantle of hybrid/electric car leadership away from Toyota. It won't come easy as you can be certain that Toyota won't give up without a fight; the next generation Prius will raise the technological bar even higher.

GM, Ford, and Chrysler--in whatever form they ultimately survive--must recognize this. If they do, and if they can be first to achieve the "next big automotive thing," be it hybrid, pure electric, hydrogen, or something still on the designers' drawing boards, then there remains hope. Otherwise I fear that we'll see our automotive industry follow our consumer electronics industry and disappear from the scene taking with it what remains of our once mighty industrial base.

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Ankenbrand |10-5-2008 Ther reasons for this dilemma should not be news to anyone from Europe or American who paid arrention over the past 30 or so years. WHY this dilemma and whoes fault is it? 1. The government which heavyly promoted the making bof large cars since they bropught in more money into the economy. 2. Car makers for similar reasons, they made much more mney on larger cars. 3. Th American consumer who "demanmded" large cars and would rarely by a "small car" thus just adding to the dlemma we are in now. 4. All three of the above during and after the mid seventies so called "Oil crisis" which was manufactured by Opec. At that time it shopuld have been clear to everyone that our dependence on foreign oil can not lead to anything good in the long run. Both Government and the Automotive industry wer more interested in keeping teh economy strong and making more money disregarding a eventual catasthrophe, teh one we are in now. In a way it serves the copuntry, the car industry and those consumers who insist even today to drive gas guzzling cars. For those I hope the gas goes up and up so they can keep tnheir cars in teh garage because they can't afford the gas and ceratinly nobody will buy them now. Vanity, ignorance, greed and plain stupidity are the factorsv that got us here and now every one is crying tehblues. Jüregn Ankenbrand ReplyQuote 0 0

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