Unmade in Detroit

...Unmade in Detroit The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry By Brock Yates Empire 291 pp $13 95 Reviewed by Jamie Kitman When the vaunted J-car "import fighter" was released m the spring of 1981, the brass at General Motors had no idea they were unleashing the worst dud in automotive history Developed over half a decade at a cost of $5 billion and brought to market with an atypically huge advertising budget, the new compact was an instant loser It missed its first quarter sales goal by 85 per cent and quickly earned the reputation tor high cost, spotty reliability and low dynamic capability that plagues it to this day GM, unaccustomed to such swift, resounding failure, was struck dumb According to Brock Yates who has spent most of his career writing about automobiles for enthusiasts' magazines like Car and Driver, GM's pratfall should have come as no surprise Only men as hopelessly out of touch as those occupying the corporation's Warren, Michigan boardroom could have failed to predict the debacle Because he sees the J-car miscues as "symbolic of the problems endemic to the entire American automobile industry," they serve as Yates' starting point And his caustic profile soon begins to make sense out of a business that—unlike steel or the other supine heavyweights—has actually mobilized its wealth in an attempt to recover lost ground, only to find that the winning touch is gone The industry's failings (such as its share of the world market dwindling from almost 80 per cent in 1951 to less than 30 per cent today) have been the subject of so many forgettable studies lately that one approached Yates' volume with an apprehension of boredom Happily, it compares especially well with two recently trumpeted offerings B Bruce-Biggs' The War Against the Automobile, an unsubtle blast of conservative think-tank boosterism (this warns that "We must not let" Detroit "be destroyed by the machinations of the new plutocrats and demagogues,") and Donald MacDonald's well-meaning yet incoherent Detroit 1985 (this closes by saying, "Somewhere in all this, there may be sanity, but I fail to see it") Of the three, Yates is the least sanguine By turns sociological and historical, anecdotal and statistical, he depicts a set of corporations ailing in spite of their wealth The American giants' current fleet of technological charity cases and marketing no-shows, he says, owes its existence to the biases of their top officers—what he calls "The Detroit Mind " Passed down through generations, the average car executive's blindness and bad taste involve more than a preference for opera windows over 5 speed transaxles The Detroit Mind is why the entire point of the small car revolution has been missed The "auto moguls deluded themselves that subcompacts were being sold to crackpots and skinflints [S]mall cars were regarded as substandard products that would—when the world returned to its accustomed orbit—be quickly supplanted by larger, more profitable, more normal automobiles " In happier days, the industry communicated its faith that small cars were bad by building bad ones Yates quotes a senior marketing expert on the eve of the ill-remembered Chevrolet Vega's debut "I've got to believe the car is a conscious second-rate effort that's intended to turn as many people off as it does on If the Vega is a major success, it'll threaten the big cars and that can't happen " The Vega and its Ford counterpart, the Pinto, as horrible as anyone could have hoped, never jeopardized Detroit's larger favorites, but events of the last decade did Nevertheless, Yates illustrates, in a hundred ways the industry continues to slumber Setting him apart from most of the motoring press is his refusal to blame the industry's infirmities on organized labor and the movements for auto safety and clear air Where a recent Car and Driver diatribe heralds the death of "Naderism" under Reagan, Yates acknowledges that government fuel economy standards "forced" the production of lighter, more fuel efficient automobiles, and that the Clean Air Act has "essentially eliminated automotive emissions as a factor in air pollution He chastises GM, Ford and Chrysler for wasting resources on "legal foot-dragging and whining that the standards could not be met, which further eroded public confidence and added to the industry's image as a pack of obstructionist profiteers " The auto safety lobby comes under deserved fire as well for its narrow view of vehicle safety, its brushing aside the European concern for "evasive capability"—first class suspension and brakes Similarly, Yates does not accept the corporation's line on productivity and the benefits of Japanese factory practices High wages are not the entire story "Management ranks are filled with men like [GM Chairman Roger] Smith who speak of reforms through automation and robotics, and rhapsodize about the advanced technology of their Japanese rivals, when in fact the physical capabilities of most Japanese auto makers are not radically superior to their own If the Japanese have an advantage in manufacturing equipment, it is in their superior body-stamping presses—which are made in the United States Fascinated by visionaries such as Daimler-Benz engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut or self-educated Soichiro Honda, Yates concludes "there is nothing that ails the American industry that cannot be rectified by the presence of a few lions, preferably hungry ones, in Detroit " At the same time, he himself pessimistically reminds us that the Uhlen-hauts and the Hondas "would never have survived in Detroit " So the prospects for lions look dim Of course, no one expects GM to fold up and die It is still the world's biggest car maker, and although the market for American automobiles remains depressed, it continues to turn a profit quarter after quarter To appreciate GM's abundance you need only reflect that the J-car fiasco was followed within the year by the introduction of the even less successful A-car And the company is at present recalling a record number of vehicles (a chilling fact given the Reagan Administration's high trigger—and low regard—for regulatory intervention) GM's strength can perhaps best be glimpsed in its emerging small car strategy Consider the recent agreement to build 200,000 Toyotas a year in Fremont, California, the plan to import hundreds of thousands of additional subcompacts from Isuzu, and the acquisition of a stake in micro-car builder Suzuki Together these maneuvers constitute a de facto admission that the company's small cars are inferior and a decision to forever concede small-car construction and design know-how to the Japanese This abdication is consistent with Yates' premise The men with Detroit Minds, who never liked and never built a good small car, can still make money...