December 26, 2006--Mr. Tron's Revenge

When my high school French teacher, Mr. Tron returned from a summer in France, in addition to sporting a new moustache and wider ties, he brought back with him a new Renault 4 CV.

He drove it to Brooklyn Tech one morning and all the smart-alecky students hanging around outside smoking made so much fun of his "toy car" that even extra-macho Emile Tron parked it quickly and slunk into the building to escape our taunts.

But we were not through with him or it--during the day a bunch of us snuck out and lifted the car off the street, it was that small and light, and put it on the sidewalk, thinking it would be great fun to watch him at the end of the day when he discovered it there. We also thought that by doing so we were asserting the eternal superiority of all things AMERICAN! Especially American cars.

We laughed and laughed. But at the real end of the day, today, he, wherever he is, and Renault and other foreign car manufacturers are having the proverbial last laugh.

You see, according to the NY Times, Toyota this coming year will supplant GM as the world's largest producer of cars. GM had that distinction for the past 75 years, since 1931. But no more. It's over. (Article linked below.)

We all know what happened—out of contempt for the “other,” for what was “foreign,” the Big Three auto manufacturers ignored the first signs of this invasion, thinking we would shrug it off and defeat it just as we had beaten the Axis powers during the Second World War. They assumed that real Americans who could buy gasoline for 35 cents a gallon and who wanted enough horsepower to accelerate from zero to 60 in nine seconds would never give up their steel and chrome muscle cars and be caught dead, or mocked, driving around in one of those under-powered Jap or Kraut or Frog cars—Volkswagens, Toyotas, Hondas, Renaults.

And besides, except for the handmade Rolls Royces and Ferraris, American cars for quite some time were much better made.

But during the 1960s, a full 40 years ago, all of these balances began to shift—the quality of American cars, measured by something called “fit-and-finish,” began to decline; with gas prices rising as a result of the emergence of OPEC, foreign cars used much less fuel; and they began to power up without sacrificing either safety or acceleration. And thus, on pie-chart graphs that compared market share among all manufacturers, imported cars slowly began to grab a larger and larger slice of the domestic market.

What did Detroit do? Basically nothing. Stuck in arrogance or self-denial they continued to make bigger and bigger cars, now best exemplified by gas-guzzling SUVs. And what did Toyota and Honda and Nissan and Fiat and Morris and Peugeot and Volvo and Mercedes and BMW do? They continued to improve the engineering of their products so that now in the rankings on fuel economy almost all the most efficient cars are made by foreign companies. And when it comes to the results of crash tests, just recently all ten top rated cars were imports.

If I look at my own consumer behavior, since 1963 I owned a Karmann Ghia, an MG-B, an Opel, a Citroen, a Mazda, a Toyota, and for a splurge a Mercedes. All great cars that ran forever.

Oh, I forgot, for a short time I owned a Chevy Vega. I was interested in it because, as a subcompact that was largely built by robots—also to keep pace with the Japanese--it was the product of GM’s attempt to stem the Japanese invasion. I was trying to be a good citizen. But there was only one problem—in automotive annals it became a legend of poor quality: early models overheated due to poor cooling channel design. The engine typically burned oil not due to cylinder wear (which was the rumor) but instead due to poorly designed valve stem seals.

Now I do not own a car but rent them frequently. In the USA, mainly from Hertz and AVIS that “feature” Ford and GM and Chrysler products. In Europe I get a chance to drive German and Japanese cars. So I get to see what most of these manufacturers are up to.

I do not have good things to report. If you’ve read his far, I do not want to add to your post-holiday depression; but suffice it to say, from my direct experience, I’m not at all surprised that Toyota is about to become number one. For a simple reason--they deserve to be; they earned it.

On the other hand, Mr. Tron got his revenge. In spite of 40 years of fair warnings, we continued to ignore reality and thus there is not excuse for why this once proudest part of our economy is so humbled.

All sorts of metaphors are to be found lurking in this sad story--more fair warnings.