Drive (7 page)

Unlike the Henry Ford Museum, which displays cars from many manufacturers and is a popular, if expensive, tourist spot, the GM Heritage Center, in Sterling Heights, is dedicated to GM products and isn't open to the public, though private events such as business meetings, training sessions and fundraising dinners take place there almost daily. More than 150 vehicles—including concept, rare and historic cars—were on display in the
eighty-thousand-square-foot exhibit hall when I visited. Open since 2004, the centre boasts a collection of more than 800 automobiles, but only about 275 regularly go on display; the staff rotates about 25 in and out every week. Although everything was in immaculate shape, many of the exhibits hadn't been saved off the line—I saw a 1940 Buick sedan that had more than eighty thousand miles on the odometer—because only relatively recently did the company realize that the first and last cars off the line would be more valuable saved than sold.

Finally, the smallest of the lot is the Walter P. Chrysler Museum in Auburn Hills. It opened in 1999 and stakes out middle ground between the other two, attracting about sixty thousand visitors a year. All polished red granite and black glass, the building sits behind a large sculpture called
Motus Historia
at the end of an impressive avenue-style driveway on a ten-acre site at the edge of the Chrysler campus. Green lawns surround the huge parking lots. After completion of the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot building, the company had a long “laundry list” of what it wanted to exhibit, but with no experience in the field, it lured Barry Dressel from his job at the national museum in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He was a good fit as manager: the son of a man who'd opened a driving school in Washington, D.C., in 1921, he started restoring a Model A Ford when he was fifteen, so he knew cars, and in the 1980s, he was the head of the Detroit Historical Museums, so he knew the area.

Dressel wore a brownish tweed jacket, brown pants, an olive shirt and a gold tie. A few months shy of his sixtieth birthday, he was a bit aloof and professorial, with a slightly patrician air about him. After we chatted in his small office for a while, he took me on a tour of the museum. We ended up in the basement, where the muscle cars are, and Dressel, who drives a Chrysler Pacifica and a Dodge Stratus, admitted that he wasn't really a fan of these classics. In fact, I got the impression that he considered this part of his job slumming. But he enjoys giving lectures on the social
impact of the car to groups of schoolchildren and other visitors to his museum. In an effort to make the place less of an “automobile ghetto” and attract a broader audience, he has plans to create several digital audiovisual tours using an iPod-like device that would allow visitors to select the information that most interests them, whether it be technical specifications or social history or car sounds or vintage ads or even—for those not particularly interested in automobiles—details about fashion and design in the 1930s. “Here in the Big Hubcap, some people call themselves car guys, but what they really are is hardware guys,” he said. “We discovered that the only way we can surprise people who know more about the cars than we do is to talk about the social context.”

The museum displays about sixty-five automobiles out of its collection of more than three hundred. Unlike the GM Heritage Center, which arranges most of its cars in rows in one large room, the Chrysler Museum creates a sense of movement with exhibits arranged at different angles and on a rotating tower with space for three vehicles in the atrium. We started at a display about Walter Chrysler and then moved on to his first prototype and came to a cream-coloured 1934 Airflow CU Sedan. “They kind of stumbled into it, but what they ended up doing was coming up with a new paradigm for how automobiles are built,” he explained. “The real significance was the fact that the cabin was moved forward and the engine was moved forward on the axles. It gave you a more roomy cabin and a closed, integrated trunk, an even weight distribution and a better ride. And that really makes it the prototype of a modern automobile.”

By the time we got to models from the 1980s, Dressel admitted, “Everybody walks by one of the most significant cars on the floor.” We were standing in front of the first Plymouth Voyager minivan—light brown with wood panelling—to roll off the line, in 1984. “Unquestionably a revolution,” my tour guide assured me. Beside it was a 1981 Plymouth Reliant, the first K-car off the line. The Reliant and the Dodge Aries featured front-wheel drive, and
while they weren't much to look at, they were inexpensive and economical—and, best of all, from the beleaguered company's point of view, they sold well. “You can't get anybody to look at the K-car, and yet K-cars dominated Chrysler in the 1980s, and as all the executives used to say, ‘We wouldn't be standing here if it wasn't for that car.'”

THE MINIVAN
and the K-car were much-needed hits after the U.S. government bailed out the company with a $1.5 billion loan in 1979. During the 1990s, Chrysler built some successful cars— including the Jeep line—but it remained ripe for takeover when a wave of international consolidation crashed over the industry. During a decade or so of corporate coupling, Ford bought Aston Martin (which it later sold), Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo and a controlling share of Mazda, while GM snapped up Saab, Daewoo and chunks of Suzuki and, for a time, Fiat. In 1998, Daimler-Benz, best known for its Mercedes line of luxury cars, joined forces with Chrysler to create DaimlerChrysler. Officially a merger, it soon became clear that the German company was the boss. While the relationship had its blissful moments—the Chrysler 300, for example—nine years later the American “partner” was up for sale again. The winning bidder was Cerberus Capital Management, a New York–based private equity firm.

Life hasn't been too rosy for the other two domestic automakers either. While both had popular vehicles in their stables—especially their SUVs and pickups—they also had too many cars that just weren't that appealing. GM, for example, sells over fifty different models. After suffering some huge losses, both companies announced plant closures, massive layoffs and a determination to focus on designing and building better, more exciting cars. In the United States, Toyota roared past Ford in 2007, knocking it out of second place on its home turf for the first time in seventy-six years. Around the world, Toyota sold 9.37 million cars last year, just 3,000 fewer than GM did.

Much is made of the fact that up to $1,500 of the cost of a new American car goes to pay for health care for current and retired employees of GM (or as some people call it, Generous Motors), Ford and Chrysler. Although it's easy to slam the Big Three as reckless and stupid for getting stuck with these “legacy costs,” those benefits were the reason the companies were once held up as model employers. Besides, the domestic automakers' problems can really be traced to two long-standing blind spots: good small cars and quality.

For decades, Americans didn't fret about fuel economy or crave better suspension systems. After all, gas was cheap and most of the roads were straight and smooth (even before the government started building the interstates in the late 1950s, the country had a good road system). So the carmakers had little incentive to advance automobile technology except to make vehicles more powerful or to add flashy styling and gadgets. Meanwhile, European manufacturers were saying, “Can we make the car smaller, more fuel-efficient? Can we make it ride better with a more sophisticated suspension? Maybe we should try fuel injection and turbo charging.” Most of the advances in American cars after the oil crisis in the 1970s had appeared in European cars years earlier.

The more dangerous threat, though, would come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Toyota, which had begun making cars in the 1930s, first started exporting its Crown sedan to the United States in 1957. And within a few years, Datsun (now known as Nissan) and Honda were doing the same, though few paid much attention—until oil prices took off at the same time government demanded emission controls and both government and the insurance industry insisted on safety improvements. As the Big Three scrambled to produce smaller, safer and more fuelefficient cars, Japanese automakers pounced, taking the opportunity to establish a presence in the North American market. The 1980s were a dreary decade for Detroit, as the domestic companies
produced a series of mostly uninspiring cars. But the high gas prices didn't last and by the 1990s, Americans wanted bigger machines than ever.

GROWING UP
in a large family—two parents, five kids and a wirehaired fox terrier—I spent a lot of time riding in station wagons. We had several, mostly Fords, over the years and I remember them fondly, but a lot of people my age don't have the same warm and fuzzy memories. In 1984, when Chrysler, then under the leadership of Lee Iacocca, introduced the Plymouth Voyager and the Dodge Caravan, the timing couldn't have been better. Baby boomers were starting to have a baby boom of their own and, being a generation that always wanted to be different from their parents, the last thing these yuppies wanted to do was pack their kids and their proliferating possessions into a dowdy and old-fashioned station wagon. It was not simply a question of style and impotent rebellion, though. The additional interior room and improved fuel efficiency that front-wheel-drive minivans offered over rear-wheel-drive station wagons meant these vehicles actually made a lot of sense.

Other automakers soon created their own versions, and the competition led to many improvements such as more (and more flexible) seating and even entertainment systems for the kids in the back. For carpooling soccer moms, the minivan was a completely practical solution, but not a fun one. Many women who stayed at home with the kids had to suffer the family vehicle while the husband drove solo to work in a more exciting set of wheels. So consumers eventually turned on minivans too. By early 2007, Chrysler was the only American automaker still producing them, as SUVs and crossovers dominated the market. “The rapid growth in SUVs actually would have been slower if it were not for the minivan,” said David MacDonald of Environics. “The minivan became the station wagon of the seventies, and it was actually the women who wanted out of the minivan just as
they wanted out of the station wagon.” Ford dealer Mike Shanahan has heard plenty of his customers say never again to minivans. “They are wonderful when people have little kids and they're going to hockey,” he said. “But some people are so tired of driving them they don't ever want to drive another minivan. They don't want to see another one.” Instead, they hanker for a sportutility vehicle.

While our identification with our cars may not be as strong as it was in the past, the success of the SUV is an example of how the industry still manages to create demand out of our expectations and fantasies. SUVs are rugged-looking all-wheel-drive vehicles that have particular appeal to men. But women with children also like them because they offer a big, safe-looking and stylish way to move the family around. Despite the presence of the word “utility” in the name of these light trucks, few of their drivers ever go off-road, and many could get by with a two-door compact; indeed, according to
High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV
, by Keith Bradsher, the sport ute has “a cushy suspension and other features that may even compromise some of its appeal to serious off-road drivers.”

The roots of the SUV can be found in the Chevrolet Suburban, which first came out in 1935, and the Jeeps that Willys-Overland started making for the military during the Second World War. The 1963 Jeep Wagoneer didn't sell well but led to vehicles such as the Ford Bronco and the Chevrolet Blazer, big two-door truck-cars that tended to be driven by people who lived in rural areas or actually used them for work. In the mid-1980s, Chrysler's successful introduction of the four-door Jeep Cherokee—which MacDonald considers one of the milestone cars of automotive history—helped people see the SUV differently. And following the release of the Ford Explorer in 1990, these vehicles became a North American obsession. Today, SUV sales outnumber those of sedans, and even Porsche, the high-end sports car manufacturer, makes them.

But if the minivan became boring, the SUV became increasingly controversial. As early as 1999, an episode of
The Simpsons
, called “Marge Simpson in: ‘Screaming Yellow Honkers,'” took a run at the behemoths. Homer buys a Canyonero that is, as the jingle promises, “twelve yards long and two lanes wide, sixty-five tons of American pride.” Unfortunately, he soon discovers that he bought the model that is “strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”—it even has a lipstick holder instead of a cigarette lighter. So he hotwires Marge's station wagon and takes off in it, leaving his wife with the Canyonero. Initially reluctant, she's sucked in by the SUV's evil charms and soon develops road rage.

Less satirically, Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars, an environmental group dedicated to decreasing the country's reliance on foreign oil co-founded by columnist Arianna Huffington, created a hard-hitting 2003 commercial that intercut among different people saying they did things such as help blow up a nightclub, finance a terrorist training camp and teach children in other countries to hate America. Then, as “What is your SUV doing to our national security? Detroit, America needs hybrid cars now” appears on the screen, a man says, “I don't even know how many miles it gets to the gallon.”

Perhaps the most trenchant attack on these machines can be found in Bradsher's
High and Mighty
. In a 2004 article on the dangers of SUVs,
New Yorker
writer Malcolm Gladwell called it “perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's
Unsafe at Any Speed
.” Bradsher's argument is that SUVs are a looming safety, oil-dependency and environmental hazard for North America.

Although most drivers use them as big cars, SUVs are light trucks as far as regulators are concerned, because they are built on pickup truck underbodies. That distinction means little to most people—except that light trucks don't have to meet the safety, fuel-efficiency and emissions standards that cars must. Worse, the size, the height and the four-wheel-drive capability of these well-insulated
cocoons give drivers a false sense of safety, a misconception that car companies and their ad agencies have been only too happy to encourage. The truth is that SUVs don't handle as well as cars, so avoiding collisions is more difficult, and they often take longer to stop, especially in slippery conditions; while four-wheel drive improves tracking, it is overrated as a safety feature and makes no difference when braking; the vehicle's weight and the stiffness of the truck chassis mean SUVs do poorly in crash tests; and the high centre of gravity makes them more prone to rollovers. “Sport utility vehicle occupants are at least as likely as car occupants to die in a crash,” writes Bradsher, “and SUVs are much more likely than cars to kill the other driver in a vehicle-to-vehicle collision.” Despite all these dangers, the sport ute practically taunts its driver to be over-confident.