For the intelligent among us, the whining and hand wringing by auto executives from Motor City is, at the very least, quite annoying. Based on their alarmingly shallow performances with each passing Congressional hearing, it seems entirely possible that our children one day will know Detroit as Moron City, or Notown.
The Shrinking Three’s chief execs seem small, don’t they? They don’t act like leaders. They’ve presided over their once iconic companies like a bunch of morons. Never mind that Detroit is not much of a city because of their missteps. Michigan is fast becoming, economically, a marginal state. Thank God it has a western coastline on Lake Michigan to attract tourism. And Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.
Can you imagine how painful it must be for these little auto men to go before equally small people on Capitol Hill in Washington to ask for other people’s money, to be rescued? Were they any good at confrontation, at tough sledding, at crisis management, they’d never find themselves in the position of talking about cash burn rates and imminent collapse. And begging, hat in hand, for billions, with a “B”.
Had they started confronting and taming corrosive labor unions decades ago, Americans today might find Toyotas and BMWs little more than a passing curiosity, just as we did say, in the 1970s, when the odd Alfa Romeo or Renault was spotted amid a sea of Cadillac Sedan de Villes or Lincoln Continentals or Oldsmobile 88s. (C’mon, was there anything sexier on the road around 1970 than a Buick Riviera coupe?)
But it did not happen. Here are the words of a journalist who spent the past three decades chronicling, perhaps unknowingly, the demise of an American industrial giant.
“In many ways,” writes Fortune’s Alex Taylor III, “the story of General Motors since the 1960s is a tale of accelerating irrelevance. Customer preferences changed, competition tightened, technology made big leaps, and GM was always driving a lap behind.”
I do not begrudge the chief executives of Chrysler, Ford and GM the comfort of traveling aboard a Gulfstream corporate jet. I just wish they’d learned, long ago, how to fly by the seat of their pants and keep U.S. automaking viable.
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