Drive (9 page)

As for the customers, he just marvels at them. More than 500 people have come for a tour after buying an engine built here, most taking the opportunity to get their trim cover autographed and have their picture taken with their builder. And 560 showed up to a July 2006 open house. Schag saves the plant's fan mail and boasts, “I have a shop full of rock stars.” Barry Dennis, for one. In his early fifties, he has a greying goatee and shoulder-length hair and wore a white Harley-Davidson T-shirt with “American Dream” in big letters on it. He was about what I'd expect from a Harley rider, though thinner. As someone who has been up to his arms in grease since he was a kid, he loves to tinker with engines even when he's not at work, but he's also been instrumental in the plant's charity fundraising campaigns. Initially surprised by all the attention from the customers—one even took Dennis and his wife out for lunch—he confessed, “It's an odd feeling because I'm just doing
my job.” He and half a dozen other employees regularly monitor a popular and long-standing thread called “Who built your LS7?” at
forums.corvetteforum.com
. Some of the thread's content is the silly chatter such sites are famous for—after one poster wrote, “Greg Jones builds the FASTEST ones …” someone else responded, “Nope, Greg is an apprentice under Chuck [Witmer]. I think your engine was the first that Greg built … Good Luck!!”— but everyone at the plant gets a kick out of it. And some serious questions do crop up: Dennis has stayed in contact with a Virginia man who is putting one of his engines in a 1967 Stingray.

At this point, it's not logistically feasible to allow buyers to watch the building of their own engines; nor can customers ask for an engine from a specific builder. But Schag figured that when they started getting repeat customers they might have to look at that. Though Dennis wouldn't mind if customers wanted to help build their own engines, he usually builds two to two and a half engines a day on his own. “When I put my name on this, it's my engine,” he said, putting his hand on the one he was working on. “They get to use it, but it's mine. That's the way I feel about it.” He has been with GM since 1977, and his other friends at the company are envious of his current job. His plan was to retire at fifty-five, but when I spoke to him, he wasn't so sure. “I'm liking it here,” he admitted. “I might stay longer.”

As a boutique operation, the Performance Build Center is unlike its bigger counterparts, but I wondered if the rest of the company could learn some lessons from it. “Absolutely. Absolutely,” said Schag, adding that one of the plant's missions is to develop different products, different processes and different social systems. “We take great care into what ain't broke we're not going to fix. But we've added the people and the simplicity. The way we build engines here is very, very simple. And that is some of the gospel that we can give back to the corporation.”

After we toured the plant floor, Schag found a fan letter that a Corvette owner in Houston had written to engine builder Linda
Hooker. He read it to me and then, holding his arms wide as if for a hug, said, “It's like Barney in the car business.”

If only thriving in the global auto industry were that easy.

DETROIT IS JUSTIFIABLY PROUD
of its architectural gems, including many art deco buildings. So it made sense for the city to try to turn its fortunes around with the Renaissance Center. Dreamt up by Henry Ford II as an ambitious response to the riots and the decline of the city, it opened in 1977. But the gleaming modernist towers, largely financed by the Ford Motor Company, failed to reverse the city's downward spiral as the financial district shrivelled and downtown neighbourhoods decayed.

In the early 1990s, One Detroit Center (now called the Comerica Tower at Detroit Center) opened a few blocks from the Renaissance Center. Designed by the great American postmodern architect Philip Johnson, the building features neogothic spires. And in 2003, after a five-hundred-million-dollar renovation, General Motors moved its headquarters into the RenCen. Meanwhile, in response to the success of the casinos across the river in Windsor, Ontario, three casinos have popped up in Detroit's Greektown, but most of the restaurants and bars in the area have an unappetizing touristy quality. More promising, though, is the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy's attempt to reclaim the waterfront; the centrepiece of the project is a 4.7-mile path called the RiverWalk.

So the city optimistically struggles to revive itself, but great buildings and attractive waterfronts alone can't make a city vibrant and healthy. That takes residents. And Detroit's efforts are hurt by the dismal public transit system. In 1937, the city began replacing its streetcars with buses, and by 1956 the last one went out of service. Today, with the exception of the People Mover, a 2.9-mile light rail loop through downtown that opened in 1987, Detroit relies on buses to move non-drivers in a country without much fondness for buses. An extensive mass transit system
isn't feasible with a shrinking population and just eightythousand downtown workers, but the Detroit Department of Transportation does want to build some light rail lines or at least bus expressways.

Twenty-five miles northwest, just off Interstate 96, in the overwhelmingly white suburb of Novi where I was staying, innercity problems such as public transit, poverty and urban revitalization seemed a long, long way away. But the role of the car in shaping the way we live did not. One night, I went to
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
, the comedy about a NASCAR driver. It opens with this text:

America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed.

—Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936

The First Lady never said anything like that, of course, but it does set the tone for what follows. Let's just say that as Will Ferrell movies go, it was no
Old School
. So the most memorable moment of my evening was my five-minute walk from the mall to my hotel. As I strolled along, I realized that though there were sidewalks, I was the only pedestrian I'd seen on my way there or back.

4
Interstate 69

Amateur Driver on a Crowded Road

I LEFT THE DETROIT AREA
at noon on Friday without any tears. I wanted to make it to St. Louis by Saturday night, so with two days to get there I decided to go slightly out of my way and spend a night in Indianapolis. I hadn't gone far before I ran into the first of several construction zones. Signs warning of huge fines and jail terms for killing or injuring a worker appeared, and cars slowed, then slowed again as two lanes scrunched into one. Roadwork is necessary, and usually overdue, though that doesn't make the delays any less annoying for drivers. But I figured I was on a working holiday, and though I was excited to get to my destination and certainly didn't want to dawdle, I relaxed, cranked the tunes and resolved to accept whatever the highway threw at me.

As I crawled along, it occurred to me that in the typical car commercial traffic is just a rumour. Along with this illusory freedom, many ads include fleeting small-print disclaimers along the lines of “Professional driver on a closed road. Do not attempt,” as the shiny new car bombs along the empty road or performs flashy stunts. These commercials disturb Cam Woolley, a sergeant with the Ontario Provincial Police's Highway Safety Division: “From my perspective, I can't think of too many where I wouldn't arrest the guy.”

All the street racing and aggressive driving he sees have convinced him that “Zoom Zoom”—the Mazda slogan—really should be “Doom Doom.” Indeed, a study of 250 commercials from 1998 to 2002 concluded that up to 45 percent showed at least one unsafe sequence, including speeding, aggressive driving or inattentive driving. Woolley spends much of his working life
talking to reporters, but his thoughts on the bad example set by such ads rarely make it to air or into print, presumably because media outlets fear losing advertising dollars. After all, carmakers spend more than $11 billion annually pitching their products in the United States, and more than twice that around the world. Auto clients represent about 15 percent of the American advertising industry's revenues. (Domestic manufacturers spend more than $650 on advertising for each of the 16.5 million new vehicles they sell at home each year.) Though the companies use all forms of media, television has been the most powerful tool for decades, and commercials for cars are more expensive to make than for any other product, according to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, which put the average production cost of a thirty-second national automobile spot in 2002 at $578,500. Shooting moving vehicles can be difficult, which adds to the cost, as do exotic locations and special effects. But those costs are small compared to the amount of money it takes to purchase the air time.

People don't buy cars on impulse—in fact, we may spend several months or even years choosing our next make and model—so companies use a variety of messages in different media to take the purchaser all the way from brand awareness to dealer selection. Most television commercials appeal to our emotions, while many print ads work at least partly on logic. But by investing heavily in TV and radio time, as well as in newspapers and magazines and on billboards, automakers haven't just sold a lot of vehicles—they've managed to create and maintain some of the best-known brands in the world. Economic conditions and industry trends mean the message is sometimes more practical than passionate, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the automakers have always preferred to play to our feelings. “Car advertising speaks to car culture and societal culture,” argued David MacDonald of Environics. “It is all about emotion.” While performance isn't the point of every
brand, commercials (aided and abetted by movies, television and video games) have convinced us that cars should be big, powerful and, especially, fast—and stoked our obsession with our wheels.

EARLY CAR BUILDERS
devoted much of their marketing budgets to promoting public races from one city to another, and the ads they did run tended to be sober, straight-up pitches. Some companies even suggested they were too honourable to indulge in hyperbole or shameless appeals to sentiment. Quality and reliability were early themes in ads, as companies portrayed themselves as working hard to provide excellent cars for Americans. After the success of the Model T pushed down the cost of cars, price became another common selling point.

Text-heavy ads continued to dominate in the 1920s and 1930s. One 1927 example—“The new Ford Car: An announcement of unusual importance to every automobile owner”—included no picture of a car, opting instead for a signed letter from Henry Ford touting the features of the new Model A. That didn't mean that what a car looked like wasn't important in the Roaring Twenties; it was. (Indeed, Ford finally discontinued his Model T because the look of the old car had fallen so far behind the competition.) At the same time, performance and technological developments were emerging as compelling attributes, even if they were only covered in the small print, and advertisers had already begun appealing to—and helping to generate—consumers' fantasies of freedom, power and status.

The companies didn't wait long to start urging Americans to buy two cars. In 1929, GM's “Marooned!” ad laid a guilt trip on any husband who would leave his wife stranded at home without wheels. And few examples were as blatant as a 1950 ad for the Ford Sedan and Ford Convertible that proclaimed: “Think of it! There's not one Ford but two in the garages of over 250,000 American families! Why? Because they have found that nothing else matches
two-car convenience. What's more, they've found that owning two Fords costs little more than one high-priced car!”

Women were early targets. Many who'd found the prospect of handling horses daunting had eagerly taken to the independence bicycles afforded them; so, according to
Advertising to the American Woman 1900–1999
, by Daniel Delis Hill, some auto executives reasoned that “women would be even more receptive to the freedom and mobility offered by a car.” A 1905 ad boasted that the Oldsmobile “has endeared itself to the feminine heart” and boasted of its ability to “make every woman its friend.” Ads often showed women driving alone, stressed ease of use and reliability or explained how a car made shopping more convenient. Later, a few of the sharper marketers realized that in many families, women determined how the money would be spent—and were the ones pushing for a second vehicle.

Typically, the women looked well dressed and sophisticated, but a 1923 ad for the Playboy, a sports car made by the Jordan Motor Car Co., featured “a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl” who “loves the cross of the wild and the tame” and “can tell what a sassy pony, that's a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome.” According to “A look at the 10 best auto-ad campaigns ever,” a 1997 article in
The New York Times
, “That targeting was emblematic of a '20s trend in which consumerism was promoted as a way for women to defy convention.”

The Jordan example notwithstanding, most ads before the Second World War appealed to the public's rational side. When they plugged styling and performance, they tended to focus on the innovation, technology and craftsmanship that had gone into the car rather than abstract characteristics such as masculinity, sex appeal or status. But that began to change after the war. As more people bought cars, just owning one was no longer the status symbol it had been, and Americans increasingly identified
themselves by what they drove. Advertising both fostered this covetousness and took advantage of it. On the surface, 1950s-era commercials promoted the American dream, family values and conformity, but behind that pleasant veneer of the happy suburban life, some serious class jockeying was going on. “Cadillacs and Imperials were cars for managers; Buicks and Packards were for intellectuals like doctors, lawyers and college professors; Pontiacs were for school teachers; and Nashes were for housewives,” according to
Cruise O Matic: Automobile Advertising of the 1950s
, by Yasutoshi Ikuta. “People started to upgrade their cars as their social status rose.” Even mid-market manufacturers eagerly pushed that button. The photo in a Dodge ad showed a man and a woman standing in a doorway, craning their necks and apparently admiring something, while the copy read: “My, the neighbors sure like our new '52 Dodge!” A 1956 Chevrolet print ad proclaimed, “More people named Jones own Chevrolets than any other car!” and then asked, “Are you keeping up with the Joneses?”