Drive (33 page)

Designer and car builder Dan Webb summed up the panel's attitude when he pointed to the models next to the stage and said, “I would much rather drive any one of these three cars across the
country than a '68 anything.” That prompted a big laugh from the people eating the rubber chicken, but few of them will be chuckling when they see the sticker prices on these new, improved vehicles. In 1964, the base Mustang sold for $2,368—or $15,506 in 2007 dollars. Today, the base model sells for about $20,000 and rises sharply with options. Ford's Pat Schiavone, the principal designer on the 1994 Mustang, was hopeful that more affordable models would appear—but then, he seemed to be optimistic about everything. “I don't want to be dipping into the oil reserves. I want something green; I don't want any emissions at all. And I think with the new technologies that are coming faster and faster, anything can happen,” he said. “But what I do know is that people will still want to drive fast; they will still want muscle cars.”

MacKenzie picked up on the cheerfulness in his closing remarks. “There's a new kind of horsepower war going on,” he proclaimed unabashedly. “The cars themselves are more sophisticated, safer, faster, cleaner, but the core thing remains: more engine, less car, excitement when you get in and press that gas pedal, theatre and excitement when you bring it home and show your neighbours. I think it is 1966 all over again, and this time the glory years are going to last a whole lot longer.”

DAN GRUNWALD AND HIS WIFE,
Martha, sat at my table during the luncheon. When he was sixteen, his father gave him the brokendown family car, a 1959 Morris Minor. With some tinkering and three hundred dollars, he had his first automobile—and a lifelong passion. A few years later, his father told Martha that Grunwald would grow out of it, but that never happened. Today, along with a Jeep Wrangler, a Cadillac CTS and his wife's PT Cruiser, the jeweller from Geneva, Illinois, has a 1971 El Camino, a 1949 Chevy pickup, a 1967 Corvette and a 1966 Nova. “It's like a disease. It bites you, goes into remission for a little while, but always comes back and metastasizes itself into a different form somehow,” said Grunwald, who has meaty hands and wore a red-checkered,
button-down-collar shirt with a pen and reading glasses in the pocket. “Then we find ourselves re-living our glory days and buying and selling old cars.”

A year ago, the Corvette club member sold a 1970 Vette as well as a 1964 Pontiac LeMans Convertible. Now, his current project is restoring the Nova and he spends eight to ten hours a week on it. “I work on jewellery all day, on little itty-bitty stuff under a microscope,” he explained, “so if I can go home and take a big hammer and start pounding on things, it's great therapy for me.” In addition, he moonlights as a freelance writer for
Sports Car Market
magazine and some local papers, a sideline he stumbled into several years ago after making a trip to the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction in Scottsdale, Arizona.

For car guys, the January auction is one of the highlights of the year. A quarter of a million spectators show up in person and millions more watch on Speed Channel. The cars on the block are anything but old clunkers. In 2007, the thirty-sixth year, bidders paid nearly $112 million for 1,271 vehicles. Muscle cars that originally sold for a few thousand dollars went for a few hundred thousand dollars. One—an 800-horsepower 1966 Shelby Cobra 427 that was billed as “Carroll Shelby's Personal Supersnake”— sold for five million dollars, plus the 10 percent buyer's premium that Barrett-Jackson takes. Grunwald doesn't think the inflated prices will last and warns against buying one as an investment rather than a hobby. “Don't bet the college fund on it,” he warned. “Eventually the market is going to falter and you don't want to be left without a seat when the music stops. The smart guys and the huge collectors are always out before then.”

But that's a rarefied world. While the love affair is stronger than ever for collectors, restorers and other hobbyists, most people don't care about cars the way they used to, even if they're still prepared to go into debt for them. A fancy new muscle car may get the neighbours out for a gander, but most new wheels won't. “The telltale sign is that when the guy down the street gets
a new car, nobody cares,” Grunwald said, adding that it was different when he was a kid. “I don't care if you got a new Buick or an Oldsmobile or even a Ford Falcon, everybody on the block wanted to look at your car. Now everybody can afford to buy one and it's not very exciting.”

THOSE NEIGHBOURS
who aren't excited by new cars aren't the people who come to SEMA. The next day, I dropped by a Ford press conference in an area up a few stairs from the rest of the convention centre floor. A crush of people surrounded half a dozen 2007 Shelby GT500 Mustangs. Standing in the middle was the vehicle's namesake, the legend himself, eighty-three-year-old Carroll Shelby, dressed in a black shirt, black jacket and dignified broad brimmed black hat. After accumulating many victories and setting plenty of records, he retired from racing in 1960. He turned to designing, creating the AC Cobra, a sports car that featured a Ford V8 engine in a lightweight British aluminum body, and then the Ford GT40 as well as the Mustang-based Shelby GT350 and Shelby GT500. The deal between Shelby and Ford ended in 1970; later, Iacocca, then at Chrysler, hired Shelby, who came up with the Dodge Viper.

A few years ago, Shelby and Ford patched up their differences and J Mays, the company's group vice-president of design and chief creative officer, introduced the Shelby GR-1 concept car at the 2005 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Before joining Ford in 1997, Mays was instrumental in designing the successful new Beetle for Volkswagen, but he also relaunched the Thunderbird, which generated more publicity than sales, and Ford no longer makes it. The GR-1, a two-seat sports car, also created buzz: “A perfect body with smooth, shimmering aluminum skin,” according to Mays, “the new Ford Shelby GR-1 concept is a rolling sculpture whose beautiful, flowing lines belie the raw, beastly V10 wedged under the hood.” While there's no guarantee the Ford GR-1 will ever go into
production, the new Shelby Mustang GT500 has been available since the summer of 2006.

“There's Carroll Shelby,” someone squealed. Others pointed cameras and cell phones at their hero, and a man with a media pass around his neck snuck up to Shelby, introduced himself and asked for an autograph. A burly guy with a Ford badge seemed quite unhappy and moved in to protect the celebrity, who signed the autograph and let the man retreat before he was roughed up by the hired heavy. To be sure, part of Shelby's aura is his reputation as a racer, but his career ended long before that fan was born. Since then, Shelby has made an even bigger name for himself as a designer, even though it's hard to imagine anyone pushing through a crowd to get an autograph from many other Big Three designers.

With typically true aim,
The Simpsons
satirized American car design in a 1991 episode called “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” in which Homer discovers he has a half-brother named Herbert Powell who owns a successful auto company. Herb hires Homer as consultant, pays him two hundred thousand dollars a year and lets him design a car. The result, in an obvious reference to Ford's Edsel, is “The Homer,” a completely over-the-top collection of features including a massive cup holder, tail fins, a bubble dome, shag carpeting, a horn that plays “La Cucaracha”—and a sticker price of eighty-two thousand dollars. The Simpson patriarch is thrilled with his design: “All my life, I have searched for a car that feels a certain way. Powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a Nerf ball.” Soon, a crane replaces the Powell Motors sign with one that reads “Kumatsu Motors.”

In the real world, the trouble GM, Ford and Chrysler now find themselves in is due to years of uninspiring design, not one colossal error (even the Edsel didn't bankrupt Ford, which bounced back with hits such as the Falcon and Mustang). While the Big Three may have lost home field advantage and are still trying to sell some vehicles a lot of people don't like,
they also create some appealing cars and trucks. The one piece of advice I heard again and again: take the power away from the bean counters and marketers and give it back to the car guys.

That may be too much to hope for, but back when I was in Detroit, at the beginning of my journey, Wayne Cherry, GM's retired vice-president, told me designers would decide the fate of the automakers and would be among the highest-paid people in the industry. “Design is becoming so important to companies, so much the differentiator, so much the emotional connection with the customer,” he said, “that designers will have different pay scales.” And with more movement between companies, as well as competition from the film, entertainment and other industries, designers will receive signing bonuses, just like athletes. No single person creates a car, but once lead designers are paid and fought over like athletes and movie stars, fame is sure to follow. And Gilles's celebrity status, though not quite in the Shelby stratosphere, suggests that Cherry's notion is more than wishful thinking.

A NATIVE OF INDIANAPOLIS,
Cherry made his first trip to Gasoline Alley at the Indy 500 as a nine-year-old. Later, he worked at Oldsmobile and Chevrolet dealerships, raced a 1955 Chevy, studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and, in 1962, joined GM, where he was on the design teams behind the Oldsmobile Toronado and the Camaro. In 1965, he crossed the pond to work for GM subsidiaries, first at Vauxhall in England and then at Opel in Germany. He returned to the United States in 1991 and became design chief a year after that. Under his leadership, the company created a record number of concept cars—one hundred of them between 1999 and 2004— including the Cadillac 16, a stunner with a V16 engine that never went into production. Cherry, who was a leader in adopting computer-aided design technology, was also responsible for the
Hummer H2, the SUV with a look based on military Humvees; the Chevrolet SSR (Super Sport Roadster), a retro-looking pickup with a retractable hardtop; and the Pontiac Solstice, a two-door convertible roadster. He retired in 2004, but not before putting the booster cables to the Cadillac brand and proving that GM could still make a sexy, big car that sells.

Today, his own rides include a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari, but his daily driver is the first Chevrolet SSR to come off the line. When I met him at GM's Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, he was sixty-nine but looked and seemed younger. A tall guy with long legs, dark, thinning hair and grey sideburns, Cherry was full of enthusiasm; he talked with his hands and bounced around in his chair. My first question was: is it hard for designers to see their ideas actually make it to the road given that they have to deal with all sorts of outside forces, including marketing and finance people, government regulations and even environmentalists and safety advocates? He talked for seventeen minutes, touching on topics such as design in the 1950s and the importance of brands, before I pointed out that he hadn't really answered my question. “Oh, yeah, what was it?” he asked, laughing. Our one-hour meeting stretched to two.

Cherry, who now works with graduate students at the MIT Media Lab who are developing a city car of the future, was around when GM sold half of the cars in the country. He's seen the highs and he knows the lows, for both the company and design. “In the early days, design was king,” he explained. “It was style over substance and science and everything else. Cinerama got bigger headlines than the polio vaccine. It was about visual things. It was about style.” The designers may have gone too far with all the fins, chrome and flash, but they toned it down a bit in the 1960s, and produced a great variety of styles and sizes, which may be why many people consider it the most tasteful decade for automobiles. Back then, cars were American and nobody thought that would ever change.

While even people who weren't aficionados used to be able to tell an American car from a Japanese one in the blink of an eye, now I hear plenty of grumbling that all automobiles look the same. But Cherry pointed toward the exhibit hall of the Heritage Center and said that, in retrospect, cars from the 1930s and 1940s looked pretty much the same too. Later, though, he admitted that, “Years ago you could always tell a French car, a German car, an English car, an American car. I hope there's room for that today, but at the same time there will be cars that will be sold all over the world.” Even if national styles are a thing of the past, the emphasis has to stay on design in the global market. Today, all automakers can turn out reliable, safe cars with lots of gadgetry and features, so what separates one car from another is the design and brand reputation: “The way to communicate the equity in a brand, the consistency in a brand and the value in a brand, is visually, through the design.”

The front of a car—including the grille, the headlights, the shape of the hood and the look and placement of the emblem—is typically the most distinctive. And automakers who let their designers fiddle too much with that DNA do so at their peril. When he was a kid, Cherry played a game with himself that a lot of kids did—trying to see how soon he could identify a vehicle coming toward him. “That's brand identity,” said Cherry, who talks a lot about brand and brand equity, terms normally associated with marketing, but then he believes good design is about art, engineering and business. So a designer has to be an innovator despite being stuck between the engineers and the marketing department—a job that is not always easy. In Europe, strong brand identity evolves slowly over many years. The Mercedes is a good example of this unhurried evolution; the old Volkswagen Beetle, which stayed basically the same for decades, may be an even better example. The look of North American cars, on the other hand, usually changes much more rapidly. “It is a different market here, and Americans are looking for something new and
different,” said Cherry, who noted that when asked to recommend a restaurant, Americans will suggest a place that just opened while a European will recommend one that's been around for ages. All that change makes it hard to maintain brand identity, though not all American auto executives cared about that. As a designer who worked for Chrysler in the 1950s told Chrysler Museum manager Barry Dressel: “Nobody ever told me, ‘Make it look like a Chrysler.' They said, ‘Make it look drop-dead gorgeous, so people want to buy it.'”