The End of Detroit by Micheline Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

with 500 horsepower and a 10-cylinder engine. It was ridden onto the floor by Wolfgang Bernhard, Chrysler’s chief operating officer, who had accompanied Chrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche to Detroit from Germany a little over two years before in a desperate attempt to stop the hemorrhaging that had nearly laid the auto company flat. Bernhard sported a black leather jacket and a huge grin as he rode what was essentially the Dodge Viper’s engine on wheels. Crowds instantly materialized, and within hours the Chrysler entry had become the talk of the show.
    Even Lutz eventually strolled by with an entourage to look at the knife-precise contours and get a feel for its hard rubber seat. Chrysler had not planned to put the Tomahawk in production at all—it was simply a concept vehicle. But given the reaction, the company announced that it might build a few for $250,000 apiece. “Grown men fall to their knees and weep. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bernhard told the trade publication
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. It was one of those moments that the American automobile manufacturers would like to freeze in time. For, just a few steps away inside Cobo Center, there was ample proof of the reality that GM, Ford and Chrysler faced outside the convention hall, where they had to compete for buyers with foreign competition.
    In the first days of the show, GM had been showing off its wares like a grand pasha waving his jeweled hand over the fruits of his kingdom. But its largesse could not dispel a question lingering in the minds of everyone attending the show: What will the Nissan pickup look like? The question was justified. Only four years before, Nissan had been flat on its back, in danger of going out of business, nearly sunk by more than $30 billion in debt. Its recovery, under the leadership of Carlos Ghosn, had been swift and seemingly miraculous. By shutting plants, slicing costs and overhauling Nissan’s product development operations, Ghosn had wiped out billions of dollars of automotive debt and brought Nissan back to profitability in only three years. Now he was embarked on another ambitious challenge: to expand Nissan’s vehicle lineup, boost its U.S. sales by about 30 percent to 1 million a year, and vault Nissan into position alongside Toyota and Honda in the top tier of Japanese companies.
    The big pickup was the centerpiece of the strategy. Toyota had beat Nissan to the full-sized pickup truck market a few years earlier with the Tundra. But it was still big news that a Japanese company was attempting to take on the Detroit companies in the last remaining market that they still dominated. Bigger than the Tundra and as big as the largest Detroit trucks, the Nissan pickup was going to be produced at Nissan’s new $1.5 billion factory in Canton, Mississippi, its second in the United States. Nissan planned to build a big sport utility later on, called the Pathfinder Armada, from the same chassis that it used to build the pickup, as well as a sister SUV for its Infiniti luxury division. Thus, if the pickup failed to live up to expectations, an enormous amount could be lost, not only for Nissan but for the imports’ own reputation.
    Nissan’s game plan at the Cobo Convention Center called for the pickup to come barreling down a steep ramp amid exploding fireworks and screech to a fast stop at the bottom. If the special effects failed, the engine stalled or the brakes didn’t work, the truck could easily take out an army of reporters. But everything went gloriously better than even Nissan could have dreamed. Right on schedule, the pickup, which Nissan had named Titan, revved its engine and zoomed down the ramp, hitting its mark perfectly. Big, and burnt orange, it had the unmistakable aura of a hit. Ghosn jumped up from a seat in the audience to illustrate the truck’s features, which sent the crowd buzzing. Its exterior design was gutsy, angled and massive. And Nissan had stuffed a powerful V-8 engine under its hood, which