The End of Detroit by Micheline Maynard Read Free Book Online

makers, like Mercedes and Bentley and Rolls-Royce, get away with dominating the market for ultraluxury cars costing $150,000 and more.
    Lutz fairly burst with cockiness and machismo as he showed off the Sixteen to the flocks of visiting executives and journalists. They crowded around the car, with its 16-cylinder, 1,000-horsepower engine and long, low-slung body, as he lounged, beaming, against the car body amid the popping of flashbulbs. Lutz had particular reason to preen, for his face that week stared out from the pages of
Newsweek
. GM’s Detroit bureau chief, Keith Naughton, had been allowed to follow the development of the Sixteen during the past year. GM insiders whispered that Lutz would have landed on the cover of the magazine if not for a pesky political crisis in North Korea that bumped him in favor of the dictator Kim Jung Il.
    The mere fact that GM would try to compete in such a hallowed segment of the market sparked waves of enthusiasm for its bravado. But the Sixteen wasn’t the only such eye-catching car from Detroit. Ford had rolled out its own wave of vehicles, attempting to camouflage the fact that it had just been through one of the worst years in its history. Only a few years earlier, Ford had been in the spotlight at this show with a new version of the venerable Thunderbird. Now it was trying to leverage nostalgia once again. Its Mustang concept car, painted in dark teal, was modeled after the gutsy high-powered Mustangs of the 1970s, with their loud engines and getaway power. In fact, this concept version looked so much like the classic cars that passersby had to look twice to discern that it was a new model.
    Its long hood and racing body seemed to reach back to a more glorious time, when the
vroom-vroom-VROOM
of engines and the squeal of tires could be heard on wide boulevards across the country late into summer nights. This Mustang drew such scrutiny among journalists that the company had to occasionally cordon off the car so that maintenance men in jumpsuits could wipe the fingerprints off its glistening sheet metal. The buzz about the Mustang overshadowed a more important vehicle—in fact, a far more important vehicle—that Ford also was unveiling at this show. The year 2003 ushered in the latest version of Ford’s F-series pickup, which has been the best-selling vehicle in the country, car or truck, for the past 25 years. Yet this latest generation had come to life under a cloud. Just a few months before, Chrysler had introduced a restyled Dodge Ram pickup to a stronger reception than Ford had expected. Meanwhile, GM was pouring on rebates in advance of a face-lift on the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, hoping that the incredible deals would lure customers away from Ford’s trucks.
    Feeling the competition bear down on its most critical vehicle, and knowing that it could not risk a defeat, Ford spent billions to revamp the F-series, so much that its costs soared more than $1,000 a vehicle above the investment it had made on the previous version. In another, more free-spending era, Ford might have been able to impress both Wall Street and its buyers with the attention it was giving the new F-series. But the cost increases came at a time when most auto companies were boasting that they were able to cut their product spending on each succeeding generation, thanks to computer-aided design and manufacturing techniques that were speeding up the development process. Ford looked wasteful for having gone in the opposite direction, especially when it had lost $6 billion over the past two years. So Ford instead chose to put its spotlight on the Mustang, and in light of the attention that the Sixteen was getting, the decision gave it a chance to say, “Look, we have something exciting, too.”
    But neither the Sixteen nor the Mustang could compete in sound and sheer gutsiness with what Chrysler roared out for the show’s approval: the Dodge Tomahawk. It was not really a car at all, but a motorcycle