The End of Detroit Read Free

programmers in Texas and high school students in Nevada. If the current sales trends continue, cars and trucks from foreign-based companies could easily, some say inevitably, account for 50 percent of all American sales by the year 2010.
    How could this have happened? The automobile industry, after all, has been the biggest economic engine this country has ever known, save for the war effort during World War II (as plenty of people will remind you, this was led by Detroit, which transformed itself overnight into the Arsenal of Democracy). Thanks in part to Henry Ford’s philosophy that factories should be built near where consumers bought products, automobile plants were established in all corners of the country, from Framingham, outside Boston, to Los Angeles, from Minneapolis to Atlanta. The center of production, and of the automotive universe, of course, was Detroit, where afternoon skies were clouded by a gray haze from the automobile, steel, glass and parts plants that churned out a seemingly endless supply. Well into the 1990s, GM produced 70 percent of all the parts that it used on its cars. In 1979, when Chrysler teetered perilously close to bankruptcy, the nation gasped at the idea that one of America’s industrial giants might shut its doors. While there were cynics who argued that Chrysler should be allowed to go out of business, the victim of its own mismanagement, its supporters rallied to convince Congress to pass $1.5 billion in loan guarantees, giving the company time to find its way back.
    Today, thanks to the failures of firms such as Enron, WorldCom and United Airlines, a call for help from the automobile industry might well go unheeded or, at the very least, face a much more difficult time being addressed. Indeed, there is a strong chance that by the end of this decade, at least one of Detroit’s Big Three will not continue in the same form that it is in now. Already a German company owns Chrysler, and the difficult economy that has come about in the aftermath of the 1990s bubble is making it all the harder for Detroit to cling to market share. The dissolution of a Detroit automaker would be a tragedy for its employees and vendors. But, given the vast array of vehicles that they can choose from now, consumers might not even miss one of the Big Three companies should it disappear. The shift did not happen overnight. It has taken place slowly but steadily over the past 20 years. Either Detroit wasn’t paying attention, or if it did notice, the center of the automotive universe plodded on blindly in a state of denial.
    The ultimate irony of Detroit’s demise is that it has been defeated by companies that do the job that Detroit once did with unquestioned expertise: turn out vehicles that consumers want to buy and vehicles that capture their imaginations. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes and BMW have never made industrial size their ultimate priority. They made vehicles their ultimate priority. They poured all their resources—human, financial, engineering, manufacturing, marketing and sales—into achieving their goal. They have not tried to be all things to all people, as GM strived to be with “a car for every purse and purpose,” a philosophy from which it has not strayed since the phrase was crafted by Alfred P. Sloan in the 1920s. They have not focused on one category in their lineup to the detriment of all others, as Ford did during the 1990s with its slavish devotion to sport utility vehicles. With their efficient development methods, their focus on manufacturing, and most important, experienced engineers in critical management jobs, the foreign companies never forgot that they were in business to develop top-quality cars and trucks that appealed to customers, as opposed to rental-car models and government fleets.
    The overriding goal of General Motors and Ford has never been to simply be good, but to be big and to grow as strategically as possible. Selling one vehicle at a time to one customer at a