The Big Three US automakers are posting lower than average sales today. General Motors is down 26 pecent, Ford 7 percent and Daimler-Chrysler is off 13 percent. There is a simple reason for this: Customers are voting with their wallets.
I’m going to put some myths to rest here: There really is no “American” auto industry anymore. I can remember going on a tour of the River Rouge steel plant in Detroit in 1967. Henry had a fleet of Seaway bulk-carrier ships that brought the iron ore and coking coal to the Rouge plant to make the steel to make the Fords that people drove. Henry owned the whole production chain from top to bottom. Very little was farmed out.
My little Nissan Sentra is made of a powertrain that came from Japan, seats from Louisville, KY, wiring harness from Mississauga, CD player and radio from Taiwan, steel stampings from Korea, tires from Singapore, then assembled by Mexicans and painted with colour and primer from Dusseldorf, Germany or Bloomington, Delaware. It was sold by Canadians and is owned by, well, Nissan Canada Finance and I are going halvsies on it for the time being.
The same could be said of your car, unless it is a Maybach or a Porsche. Even Rolls-Royce farms out certain components. Honda makes Accords and Civics in Brampton, Ontario. Toyota makes the Camry here too. Corollas and the Matrix are built in Freemont, California in an old GM plant. VW has a big plant in Westmoreland, PA. Nissan has one in Smyrna, TN. Ford owns Volvo, which is where a lot of parts for the Ford 500 and the Fusion came from, not Dearborn. Ford is also kissin’ cousins with Mazda. GM owns Saab, Opel, Vauxhall, Holden and a chunk of Daewoo. Daimler-Chrysler is a division of Mercedes Benz and has also been know to play kissy-face-feely-bum with Mitsubishi. Nissan and Renault do each other’s laundry. There’s more incest in the industry than on any Saturday night in Smith’s Falls Ontario.
The Big Three’s problems are the products: They suck. Honda makes cars of essential goodness. Same with Toyota and Nissan. I’ve rented any number GM products in the past four years. Uniformly, they rattled, shook and felt cheap, even the upscale Buick and Oldsmobile models. Ford? I loved my 5.0 liter 1987 Mustang, despite its personality disorders. The rest of the Ford family since, has been tacky, poorly made, poorly engineered and sold by pathological liars.
Daimler-Chrysler’s offerings at least feel better than bargain-basement, but looking at the engineering, I see short lives ahead for engines, drive trains and electrical systems. BMW is wonderous. Even VW has a bank-vault feel to it. I was impressed by the Hyundai Tiburon, except I didn’t fit in the car.
Root problem? Accountants building cars. GM is perhaps the most notorious of the lot when it comes to having the adding machine brigade tell the engineers what they can or cannot have in the vehicle. Not that I’m against accountants, but engineers and stylists are the ones who design and fabricate cars. Assemblers do as good a job as they are allowed to do. There are always tradeoffs, but a good design and good engineering will give you a good car just about every time.
An example: For years the Big Three built police cruisers and taxi cabs. The Plymouth Regal, the Chevy Caprice, the Ford Crown Victoria Interceptor come to mind. Each car was a heavy-duty version of the civilian big sedan. Each company went to their respective parts bins and pulled out the heavy duty alternator, batteries, suspension pieces, steering gear, brakes and big engines that would bolt into the standard sedan.
For taxi duty, they put in a basic vinyl interior and left the big engines out, but kept all the heavy-duty suspension parts. The engineers knew that police cars and cabs lead a life of hard, sweaty duty, then get put away wet. If you could buy a used police car, you knew you were getting the best parts the manufacturer could make.
Today, none of the Big Three make police or taxi duty cars. You can’t order them: They don’t make them. The heavy-duty parts don’t exist. Accountants rationalized them out of existence with complex formulas that tied lifespan to cost to replacement cycles and presto! No more police or taxi duty parts.
The occasional freak sliped by: The Mercury Marauder is one from a few years ago. Available only in black, it was a Crown Vic with a huge (5.8 liter/351 cubic inch) engine and one-off suspension parts that would have been right at home on a State Police cruiser. The Marauder lasted two model years.
Now cops use the ubiquitous Ford Taurus grocery getter for one reason: They’re cheap. I’ve seen Chrysler Intrepids as cabs, but when you ask the cabbie, the answer is the same: Two, maybe three years, then scrap it. The car is worn out from top to bottom, even the door hinges are shot. A few under-medicated cabbies have tried the Camry and Accord as cabs. Too expensive to fix, but they do last.
Now small trucks and SUV’s? The Big Three have you covered five ways to tea time. GM produces literally thousands of variations on the GM Suburban chassis, which started life as a full-size pickup truck. Towing kits, which mean heavy duty parts, abound. Luxed up (Escalades are a GMC Suburban with bling) or stripped down (the Savanah 12 passenger shuttle van) they all have the same heritage of a pickup truck. Ford is no better and Daimler-Chrysler is the same.
Yet Toyota, Honda and Nissan can build cars that last and work well. I think it is because in the initial design phase the engineers said “It has to this strong to last long enough for us to sell it with a straight face.” The accountants said “Your call. Do it. We’ll find a way to get the price down.”
Nissan I know well and their V-6 engine that started life in the Maxima in the 80’s is also in the Pathfinder, Xterra, Frontier, 350Z, Maxima, V-6 Altima and Nissan Pilot in various states of performance. The 2.4 liter four cylinder can be had in just about every Nissan as the racy 2.0 liter Sentra R, the Altima and all the small pickup trucks.
Even some of the go-fast 300ZX technology is in my little Sentra: The Variable Valve Timing is right off the 300ZX Turbo, scaled down to fit a small four cylinder. The engineers worked wisely, reusing parts and technology while the accountants stayed out of the way.
The same Big Three Bean Counter Madness is showing up in new technology vehicles. You can’t buy a Ford Hybrid unless you want a hulking SUV. Almost ten years ago, GM, which had a pure electric passenger car, the EV-1, decided that being green was bad for the oil business. They scrapped thousands of EV-1s in Arizona, pulling the car off the market due to lack of demand because they didn’t advertise the car for sale.
Honda and Toyota stuck to their hybrid guns. You go on a waiting list to get one. Which means the market is there and the engineering is solid enough that two of largest car companies in the world feel they can sell them with a straight face. Why can’t the Big Three, the Might American Auto Industry, figure it out. Accountants won’t let them.
RoadDave 