Drive (6 page)

IF THAT WAS TRUE IN CANADA,
then I was excited to find out what it was like on the other side of the border. When I finally rolled to the head of the line, the guards were in the midst of a midday shift change. A tall, thin older man was just finishing up, and a younger
woman with dark hair was taking over. The man started the questions, and when I explained that I was driving to Los Angeles to research car culture, the woman asked why I needed to do it in the United States.

“When it comes to cars,” I responded, “America's the place, isn't it?”

“No,” said the man, as he walked away from the booth. “It's Japan.”

Now, it's no secret that the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—are facing some hard times even as several of their foreign rivals go from strength to strength, but I didn't expect to hear something so treasonous, so soon, from someone who works so close to Motor City. And yet it didn't take long before I began to wonder if he wasn't on to something. I knew I would see cars from around the world in big cities, especially LA, but I expected there'd be little but American cars in Michigan and the heartland. As I drove through the suburban sprawl around Detroit, it became clear my expectation of a steely allegiance to American cars in Michigan was positively naive. I saw a lot more Cadillacs than I see in Toronto, but I also saw many Toyotas, Hondas, BMWs and other non-American cars—rides that not too long ago many people considered un-American. That was my first surprise.

3
Detroit

Motor City Sadness

SHORTLY AFTER 5 P.M.
on the first day of my road trip, I drove from Sterling Heights to Novi, Michigan, along roads and highways that were in surprisingly bad shape. Back home, I would do just about anything to avoid being in my car—especially on a highway—at the peak of rush hour. So I was thrilled to be able to bomb along at or above the speed limit, which much to my delight was seventy miles per hour—a speed I'm not legally allowed to travel anywhere in Ontario, where the top speed limit is one hundred kilometres per hour (about sixty-two miles per hour). But while the light traffic may be a pleasure for drivers, it says a lot about the health of the Detroit area. As director of transportation systems for Toronto, Les Kelman has a tough job, but he's glad he does: “Never wish congestion away,” he warned me, “because if you want to see a city without congestion, you'll find a city with high unemployment rates, high vacancy rates and an incredibly depressed economy. Congestion is a sign of success.”

Detroit was once one of the most successful cities in the United States. In 1950, when cars were American and no one thought that would ever change, close to 1.85 million people lived there. Even in 1970, after the population had slipped to just over 1.5 million, Motown was the fifth-largest city in the country and an essential engine of the national economy. When I was in Detroit in 2000, on a road trip to Tiger Stadium before it closed, a cab driver pointed to an abandoned train station and said that when he first arrived in the city as a ten-year-old, the place was so crowded that his mother made him hold her hand. But the downtown diaspora started long before foreign automakers became a serious threat to
the Big Three. As in many other American cities, new suburban freeways made nearby communities more attractive while the construction of inner-city freeways made the core less appealing. Worse, although the city boasted the highest rate of home ownership among blacks in the country, many of the communities destroyed to make room for the expressways and so-called urban renewal projects were African-American ones. The historic Black Bottom neighbourhood, just east of downtown, for example, gave way to Interstate 75 (also known as the Chrysler Freeway) and Lafayette Park, a seventy-eight-acre project featuring apartment buildings designed by renowned architect Mies van der Rohe. This development exacerbated simmering racial tensions that eventually exploded into violence during the infamous Twelfth Street Riot in 1967. (Though Gordon Lightfoot wrote the song “Black Day in July” about it, the riot actually lasted several days.)

White flight from the city accelerated in the following years and, during the 1970s, it accounted for much of the more than 20 percent decline in the population. Today, Detroit is a rust-belt donut city with a population of just over 886,000 at the centre of a metropolitan area that's home to almost 4.5 million people. Unemployment is high in the suburbs, and higher in the city. And racial politics—invariably fraught at the best of times—complicate the relations between the city and its suburbs because more than 80 percent of Detroit is black while the surrounding municipalities are mostly white. On our 2000 trip, my friends and I looked out the car window in amazement as we drove through poverty and urban decay we had never imagined could exist in North America and then crossed into predominantly white Grosse Pointe, where we saw imposing mansions and massive manicured lawns that made the ritzy sections of Toronto seem modest.

That sequestered wealth is a lavish reminder of what Motor City once was. But while Detroit may no longer be a great metropolis, it was the obvious first stop on my journey for both geographic
reasons—it's just four hours from Toronto—and historical ones. If I wanted to understand our relationship with the automobile, I needed to learn about the lucrative past, rocky present and uncertain future of the industry that built the American dream machine.

THE PAST ACTUALLY BEGINS
in Germany, where Karl Benz built a “motor carriage” with a gas-powered internal combustion engine and three wheels in 1885. Within six years, he started selling a fourwheel version. Brothers Charles and Frank Duryea may not actually have been the first automakers in the United States, but the bicycle builders from Springfield, Massachusetts, usually get the credit because they generated so much media attention when they tested a gas-powered car—with a one-cylinder, four-horsepower engine—in 1893. They'd sold thirteen of their “motor wagons” by 1896 when they formed the Duryea Motor Wagon Company to market their inexpensive limousines commercially. A year later, Ransom Olds started the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in Lansing, Michigan, but sold it in 1899, staying on as an executive with the business, which moved to Detroit and became the Olds Motor Works. By 1904, when the founder left, it was selling five thousand curved-dash Oldsmobiles a year. Even then, four years before Henry Ford introduced the Model T, almost half of the cars made in the country came from the Detroit area. In
A Nation on Wheels: The Automobile Culture in America Since 1945
, Mark S. Foster argues that was no accident. First, the region had resources: “Excellent hardwood forests had made the upper Midwest a natural location for production of wagons and carriages,” he writes, “and the same materials were used, initially, in automobile bodies.” Second, the area was home to a great number of ambitious entrepreneurs. Third, the presence of many manufacturers—including those of bicycles and carts—meant an abundance of skilled workers. In addition, the roads in the Midwest were even worse than those in the East and “gas-powered
vehicles were far superior to electrics and steamers in less-than ideal conditions.”

The Model T ensured that Detroit would be Motor City. Henry Ford, who test-drove his first automobile prototype in 1896, saw the potential for an inexpensive car that millions of people, rather than a few thousand, could afford; he wasn't the only businessman with that idea, he was just the most successful at reaching his goal. He created the Ford Motor Company in 1903, introduced the Model T in 1908 and started building the cars on a moving assembly line in 1913. Tin Lizzies weren't stylish, but they were functional, rugged and reasonably reliable—and their height meant they could handle almost any bad road at a time when almost all roads were bad. Most of all, they were affordable, initially selling for $850 in 1908 when most others cars went for more than $2,000. As he increased production, Ford's costs fell, and by the mid-1920s he was able to lower the price to as little as $300 (less than $3,600 in today's dollars). Meanwhile, Ford's decision to double the wages he paid to $5 a day, while cutting the workday by two hours, helped to create a middle class with enough money and leisure time that a car seemed like a necessity. More than fifteen million Model Ts rolled off the line before a decline in sales forced the company to stop production in 1927. While Ford stuck with his car longer than he should have, the success of the Model T led to an industry shakeout. From the early days of the industry, more than 1,500 companies had made cars, but by 1929, when the stock market crashed, only 15 remained in business.

For all his innovation in manufacturing, Ford didn't have much interest in advancing the technology that went into his automobiles; instead, he was almost monomaniacal about creating a car for everyone and pushing the price down. So the design of the Model T stayed basically the same for nineteen years, and by the early 1920s, people joked that the Tin Lizzie was like a bathtub: everybody had one but nobody wanted to be seen in one. That's why Ford needed his competitors as much as they needed him.

One of those competitors was General Motors. William Durant, who already controlled Buick, wanted to create an automobile-manufacturing conglomerate. In 1908, he formed General Motors in Flint, Michigan, and later that year bought the Olds Motor Works. The next year, GM purchased Cadillac and the Oakland Motor Car Company, which later became known as Pontiac. In 1911, after leaving GM, Durant helped to start Chevrolet, which became part of the conglomerate in 1917. Even as the Model T kept selling well, GM was quickly becoming a serious rival to Ford. It formed the General Motors Acceptance Corporation in 1919, to offer financing, and by the mid-1920s was coming up with new marketing ideas. “Top-level executives determined that many buyers wanted something more than basic, reliable transportation,” according to Foster. “Perhaps they could be sold on comfort, styling, and aesthetically pleasing choices of colors for both exteriors and interior fabrics.” The company also started making regular design changes to emphasize that last year's model was, well, last year's model. But GM wasn't a technological innovator either: in fact, the company only wanted to lead in technology when that was the best way to make money for its shareholders.

Chrysler, the youngest of the Big Three, had a different approach. Essentially an engineering company, it played Apple to GM's Microsoft—at least when it came to launching new technology. In 1925, a year after introducing a well-received eponymous car, Walter Chrysler, who had worked in the railroad industry, formed the automaker out of the wreckage of the Maxwell Motor Company. In 1928, he bought the Dodge Brothers Motor Vehicle Company and launched Plymouth as an inexpensive brand and DeSoto as a mid-market brand. Chrysler was convinced that the way to success was to build more advanced automobiles at a competitive price, and the company developed cars, notably the Plymouth, that were practical, comfortable and affordable.

In the 1940s, following the Depression and the Second World War, the economy boomed and Americans started lining up to buy cars. Even with expanded production capacity after switching from making automobiles to manufacturing for the war effort, the carmakers had trouble meeting the demand. But once they did, they needed to find a way to keep people buying cars. The result was a horsepower race: between 1940 and 1955, the horsepower of the average American automobile doubled and V8 engines grew from 40 percent of the market in 1950 to 80 percent in 1957. In addition, companies began to segment the market and got serious about making their previous models obsolete by introducing regular styling changes. That boosted demand—and the investment needed to keep up with the competition. Packard, which had built its first car in 1899 and had a rock-solid reputation for great luxury automobiles, merged with Studebaker in 1954. That same year, Nash, which had been one of the most consistently profitable of the small makers, merged with Hudson, which had been the country's largest carmaker in 1929, to create American Motors. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. auto industry included just the Big Three plus American Motors and Kaiser Jeep. But then American Motors bought Kaiser Jeep in 1970 and Chrysler bought AMC in 1987.

Only three are left, and they're struggling. The healthiest of the trio is probably GM, but that's not saying much, and over the years its market share has withered from about 50 percent to 25 percent. The people who work there eagerly point out that most companies would drool over a quarter of the market in such a huge industry. That's true if GM stays at that level; it's not true if the company is like the guy going past the sixth floor after jumping out of a twelfth-floor window.

EACH OF THE BIG THREE
automakers now has a museum of one kind or another in suburban Detroit. The oldest is the Henry Ford in Dearborn. Established in 1929 by the man himself, it features a broad range of exhibits, from technology to architecture to
decorative arts, and is part of a complex that includes an IMAX theatre and a factory tour and bills itself as “America's greatest history attraction.” The impressive car collection includes several presidential vehicles, including the 1902 horse-drawn Brougham carriage that Theodore Roosevelt rode in, the Lincoln “Bubble Top” that transported Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Lincoln Continental that John F. Kennedy was riding in when he was shot. The last in this line of limos is the one that served three Republicans and one Democrat: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. All subsequent presidential cars have been or will be destroyed in Secret Service experiments. I also saw the bus Rosa Parks was on in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to give up her seat to a white man; a yellow 1923 Stutz Bearcat, usually considered America's first sports car; and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. In addition, the museum has several exhibits that look at the social and cultural history of the car, including automobile advertising, food stands and drive-ins and the role of the car in movies. And I got a kick out of seeing a 1934 hand-written letter from outlaw Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) to Henry Ford that read: “While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned and even if my business hasen't been strickly legal it don't hurt enything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.” A few months later, police gunned down the notorious pair in an ambush that left their stolen 1934 V8 Ford riddled with bullets.