The Rise and Fall of Detroit

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L'articolo del prestigioso settimanale non poteva concludere peggio: "Il futuro NON appartiene a Detroit." Sigh.



The Rise and Fall of Detroit



In this week’s issue, Peter J. Boyer takes a look at the struggles of General Motors. (Subscription required.) The American auto industry has been facing existential critiques since the 1973 energy crisis, but now it looks like the worst—bankruptcy—is finally going to happen.



“There’s a saying—once you’ve seen a scary movie three times, it’s not so scary anymore,” a G.M. vice-president told Boyer. “This movie that we’re living through right now is a different kind of scary movie.”



The arc of Detroit, described in stories from the magazine’s archive, reads like a tragedy in three acts. Act I is Silicon Valley in black and white: failed start-ups, relentless focus on beating the competition, and scrappy innovation. Act II is as clear as Technicolor: three postwar corporate behemoths, inextricably tied to America’s economic health and exceptionalist self-image. And, since 1973, we’ve endured the sluggish coda, a grinding tale of dependence, bloat, and indecision.



In the May 18, 1946, issue, Brendan Gill caught up with Charles Brady King, “the man who designed and built the first car to be driven through the streets of Detroit and who drove in the first automobile race ever held in this country.” (Subscription required.)



King, who retired early from the auto industry with forty patents under his belt, recalled his first attempts at car-making. He failed to design a decent car in time for an 1894 race in Paris, and later developed an experimental engine in Henry Ford’s kitchen sink; Mrs. Ford fretted that the fumes would kill baby Edsel. “People forget,” King said, “that Europe was way ahead of America in the invention of motor vehicles. Daimler, Benz, and other European inventors had first-glass gasoline-driven automobiles—a French word, by the way—before we had any at all.”



Then came the years after the Second World War, where Detroit, not Washington, took the lead in expanding the social safety net, especially after President Harry Truman failed to pass universal health care; in 2006, Malcolm Gladwell explained the origins of G.M.’s ultimately unsustainable pension plan, which became the model for the rest of corporate America. The economic boom and a new highway system had created an an unprecedented market for cars. The Big Three produced ground-breaking technology, and no longer needed to look abroad for inspiration or cash.



Hubris ensued. In the November 26 and December 3, 1960, issues of the magazine, John Brooks reconstructed the failure of the Ford Edsel. When it d?buted in 1957, nearly three million people visited showrooms to check it out. Ford expected to sell at least 200,000 cars in the first year; they sold about half that and discontinued the line within two years. It was the corporate blunder of a generation, and the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars.



But, as Brooks observed, it barely made a dent. “The obvious point of the Edsel’s story is the defeat of a giant motor company, but the giant did not come apart, or even get seriously hurt in the fall. Neither did the majority of the people who went down with him.”



Although small cars had begun to catch on in Europe, there was little reason to doubt America’s automotive primacy. As one of the Edsel’s developers scoffed to Brooks, “This small-car thing won’t last forever. I can’t see American drivers being satisfied for long with manual gear-shifting and limited performance. The pendulum will swing back.”



The pendulum became unhinged after the oil shock of 1973. Since then, articles on Detroit’s dismal prospects have been tempered by the official line: a hard-headed optimism that insists on acknowledging the new economic reality. In a 1980 article, written on the heels of the first Chrysler bailout, Joseph Kraft captured the shift. “The auto industry is not in close touch with the city or with the people who live there,” Kraft wrote. “The industry talks to the industry.” The G.M. president Elliott Estes said the next five years would be the most innovative in his company’s history and Henry Ford II declared to Kraft, “The future belongs to more fuel-efficient cars—smaller and less powerful.”



These statements were followed by a decade where the rise of Japanese auto manufacturers helped spark fears of a trade war. Then, in the nineteen-nineties, the Big Three found a temporary respite buried in a loophole, and bet the house on gas-guzzling S.U.V.s. As Elizabeth Kolbert reported in 2003, while G.M. touted the pipe dream of a hydrogen car, an E.P.A. report concluded that “of the world’s seven major automakers, only Ford had a worse over-all fuel-economy record.”



Ford II was right—it looks like the future does belong to small and efficient cars. But it doesn’t belong to Detroit.