I’ve written before about the American auto industry’s serious mistakes in the production and marketing of their cars, but only in a grumpy “You should already know what I’m talking about” kind of way.
But there are still a lot of people out there who think that Escalades and Mustangs are, like, totally cool, man. And worse yet, they think it’s a good idea for Detroit to keep focusing on the wasteful “cars as status symbols” strategy that has had their profits (and that sector of our economy) going straight down the drain.
In my home state of Indiana alone, hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost thanks to massive factory closings — not because jobs are being shipped to Mexico, but because there are no more jobs when it comes to making bigger and bigger vehicles (read: the only kind of vehicles Detroit makes). Now, with gas prices and environmental concern rising, their sales have flatlined. Maybe that will finally light a fire under their ass.
For a quick primer on how it all happened, check out this Business Week article. It’s light on substance and data, but correct about the chronology of failure among American auto companies over the past 15 years.
Here’s a snippet:
The biggest of these, obvious to anyone who has tried to fill up his sport-utility vehicle or pickup truck lately, is that General Motors (GM), Ford (F), Chrysler and, to lesser extents, companies such as Mercedes-Benz (DAI), Porsche (PSHG), and BMW (BMWG) continued to make fuel-inefficient cars for the U.S. market long after concerns about America’s dependence on oil, foreign or otherwise, became known. Like cigarette smokers, they continued puffing away, ignoring the mountain of evidence detailing the dangers.
[...]
As Detroit concentrated on trucks and SUVs, it effectively ceded the market for more fuel-efficient, though less profitable, sedans and coupes to companies such as Toyota (TM) and Honda (HMC). Now that light-truck sales have fallen off the cliff, Detroit is struggling to catch up, if it ever can. So, in an industry that has given the world such paradigms of disaster as the Edsel and the Pinto, the near-sightedness of the decision to ignore fuel-efficiency ranks at the top.
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Okay. Losing car companies money, costing jobs, bad for the environment, all true. Whatever.
But can you honestly believe that a Mustang is not “like, totally cool, man?” Because, despite all those other facts, a Mustang is nonetheless totally cool.