The Demise of Detroit

A co-worker and I were recently talking about this, and he thought I should post it here. People often talk about what's wrong with the "big 3" or as they are now known the "Detroit 3", and how their poor quality and boring products are to blame for their downfall. Obviously making bad products will lead to problems, but what was the root cause of those products?

The United States tends to be a very individualistic society, and for years the American carmakers flourished by making beautiful and interesting cars. Look at classics like the 57 Chevy. This wasn't exotic, or rare, but an average "every-man's" car, yet it still had styling that we look back to today. But what Detroit didn't realize is that there were millions of car-buyers who didn't care about style or performance, all they wanted was an appliance of sorts to get them to work, or the grocery store or wherever. The cheaper and more reliably you could do this the better. Sure enough, along came the post-war Japanese car industry, with the new low-cost fuel efficient econo-box.

Detroit then realized that their market share was at stake and scrambled to bring out cookie-cutter cars, using common platforms and "brand engineering". But American automotive engineers tend to be "car guys" and engineering a bland appliance is much less interesting than creating a rolling piece of art, so the products were never very good. I imagine the same psychology affected the assembly workers as well, performance improves when you're building a product you can be proud of.

In the last few years we've seen a resurgence of good American design, but one has to think it's too little too late. Chrysler now is entering bankruptcy, all signs point to GM going the same direction. I expect the post-bankrupt versions of both these companies will be vastly different than what we're used to. For better, or worse.