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

guaranteed that it was able to offer enough performance and towing ability to please almost any pickup user.
    But there were two other features that surprised the audience and showed that Nissan was thinking beyond its competition. Over the past few years, trucks with extended cabs had become the standard among truck buyers. The extended cab gave them an extra row of seats, for passengers or gear. But most extended cabs were configured so that the driver and passenger doors had to be opened all the way out to allow the smaller door to the cab, called the escape door, to be opened. Nissan, however, had installed a special hinge on its escape door that allowed it to be completely opened and laid almost flat against the side of the truck. The escape door could be opened regardless of whether the front doors were open, allowing more convenient access for passengers or cargo. And it closed completely flush with the front doors, allowing for a seamless side to the truck.
    Nissan also was planning to offer another customer-friendly feature: a specially coated truck bed. Generally, auto companies’ trucks came with unfinished or scantly painted beds, on the assumption that owners would buy a plastic liner. These liners were one of the easiest ways for dealers and aftermarket shops to make extra money on truck owners, since just about every pickup owner would buy one. But Nissan had developed a technology in which a pebbly graphite coating was sprayed on, offering an easy-to-clean surface without the need for a truck bed. Though company officials expected that some owners would buy a bed anyway, the coating was durable enough that they didn’t need to. The features showed the thought that Nissan had put into its truck on behalf of consumers, while its size and stance were equally impressive, especially given that the only pickups the company had ever manufacturered were small models primarily popular with California surfers. “We will compete with nothing less than our best,” Ghosn declared.
    The Nissan pickup became every bit as much of a must-see at the auto show as the Cadillac Sixteen or the Chrysler Tomahawk. The next morning, Ghosn and the truck stared out from the front pages of both the
Detroit News
and
Detroit Free Press
, a two-for-two accomplishment that was akin, in the Motor City, to landing on the covers of both
Time
and
Newsweek
. And while grown men didn’t weep at the sight of it, it did put a look of anxiety on the face of J. Davis Illingworth, a veteran Toyota executive who had run its Lexus division and who had led the company’s efforts to discern what younger buyers wanted on future vehicles. “It’s impressive,” Illingworth acknowledged, adding that Toyota would have to take Nissan’s pickup into account as it redesigned the Tundra.
    Perhaps the best compliment that the truck received was paid by engineers from one of the Detroit auto companies early the next morning. They had headed right for the Nissan pickup, and were caught by security guards with wrenches in their hands and the headlights from the truck lying on the floor as they attempted to dismantle the front end of the truck to figure out how Nissan had put it together.
    Clearly, the message that the Detroit companies were getting from outside the doors of Cobo Center could not be ignored as 2003 began. The American economy was in the doldrums and the stock market was losing more ground. Threat of a war with Iraq hung over the world. Tensions between North and South Korea had reached a dangerous level. Oil prices had climbed due to a lengthening strike in Venezuela. Most important, sales figures for the year just ended revealed that the Big Three companies had again lost market share to foreign manufacturers during 2002, leaving GM, Ford and Chrysler with only 61.7 percent of car and light truck sales, their smallest share in history and down 10 percentage points in just five years. Only GM, among the three, had managed to eke out a gain,