On Saturday, Brian Douglass opened up over at Pajamas Media: [1]
A little over a year ago, Honda’s luxury Acura brand was criticized for not offering a powerful V8 engine in its flagship sedan. After all, the pundits opined, luxury buyers insist on eight or more cylinders when they’re spending more than $50,000 for a premium chariot. The fact that Acura’s 3.7-liter V6 generated 300 horsepower, a specification that used to be perfectly reasonable for eight-cylinder motors, seemed not to matter. The image was everything.
At the North American International Auto Show [2] in Detroit this week, I pondered this supposed entrance to the luxury club with some amusement while I witnessed Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Cadillac, Lincoln, Chrysler, and the Fisker Karma all spin around their turntables with four-cylinder engines. If the name Fisker draws a blank, it’s a new start-up that’s building $80,000-and-up, plug-in, extended-range electric luxury cars. Electric luxury was also the theme for the other brands except Lincoln, which will test acceptance of rather petite luxury with turbocharged 1.6-liter power — the luxury equivalent of a pocket pooch.
Mmmpppfffhhh.
I submit to you that what we’re seeing here, is the restriction if not the end of American choice. I further submit to you that image is still everything, despite the change in direction. It’s just a matter now of who is in charge in Washington.
Yes, Washington.
Most of you weren’t alive, back when this happened last time. I was. We’ve done this before, where American car manufacturers were forced to downsize dramatically so as to meet the supposed oil crisis, which was in fact a foreign policy crisis brought on by Jimmy Carter, along with the last big rise of the enviro-whack-job, which prevented us from taking avantage of the oil and gas we have available to us here in the US. Yes, we’re still feeling the pain from that misbegotten era.
You may not know this, but under Carter’s when the CAFE standards started. That’s what a bunch of liberals.. Carter at their head… got together and decided that they knew more about making cars than Detroit did, and proceeded down the road of micromanagement of Detroit. The left figured they knew more about physics than the car companies and their scientists did, too. They figured all this business about so many miles for so many gallons could be changed by simply passing a law. Of course, such things can’t happen that way, so Detroit went the only direction they could at the time; they went small. It essentially killed off Detroit over a period of years.
[4]You may recall that those vehicles did not operate all that well. The Vega for example. Or, if you prefer, the Pinto. The Chevette. The Fiesta. The Gremlin.
That forced downsizing, in combination the with United Auto Workers overreaching, caused a very serious difficulties in keeping the businesses afloat that once kept the entire nation humming. It helped to kill off both American industry, and American drivers, with it.
It caused driver death rates to skyrocket, as smaller, lighter vehicles tried to make their way among their heavier and more solidly built brothers.
And in terms of killing off American industry, it was the Gremlin that did in American Motors. A valiant effort, the Gremlin, but too much change, too fast both from a design standpoint and the sales. GM and Ford were in a better position financially to deal with the strain placed on them by the federal government. Chrysler, meanwhile, needed a bailout by the time the Carter Administration was pushed out of office by an electorate sick of the incompetance and micromanagement.
All of this carnage, a direct result of Federal micromanagement. It was suggested that the time, and correctly I think, that there were a good number of people who were demanding these changes , who really wanted to see the American auto manufacturing business collapse entirely. And America, with it. They damn near succeeded, too. The reaction to that, thankfully, was a sound defeat at the polls for Carter, and the beginning of the Reagan era.
If the noise is that I’m hearing a lot of the Detroit auto show from all sources including Brian Douglas, here, are of any indication, we’re about to go through that same scenario all over again. The reason is simple enough; Its fashionable. It’s currently all the rage to be ‘green’, just like it was the rage in the 70’s to be a great disco dancer.
I would suggest, that if you doubt what I’m saying you should look very closely at the traffic patterns on I-495 and I-695. There are traffic cams that the various constabularies run for their own amusement, at taxpayer expense. One of the advantages of that as you can tie in from anywhere in the country and see what’s going on in your favorite intersection across the country, around the world. On the better cameras you can even see what people are driving. It’s interesting, in the case of the freeways around Washington, to observe the econo- boxes mixing it up with stretch limos the size of tractor trailers. The liberal pols driving the limos, and the rest driving the stuff the pols tell them to drive.
If there is anything that has been taught us in the time between Jimmy Carter laying the blame for his failures at the feet of the American people, and today, it’s that the kind of cars that we’re seeing being pushed in Detroit just now, the kind of cars currently so popular among the elitist left in Washington DC, are precisely the kind of cars that will not sell once they hit the showroom floor. Oh, I suppose you’ll probably get a number of people who will sign on to such beasts, like they did the previous fashionable vehciles, the Volvo 242, the Saab 9.5, and so on… Or more recently the Prius… you know, the kind of vehicles that you drive because you’re so much better than everybody else. And they’ve got the bumper stickers holding them together to prove it, still hawking Howard Dean’s failed presidential campaign, “Love Your Mother” and other such nonsense. “After all, I’m saving the planet” is clearly the ‘tude being pushed. But as the makers of those particular machines are finding out, you can’t make enough money on them keep the company afloat. Even Toyota just recently admitted they’re losing money on the Prius. [5] (Yes, I know, they deny it publicly… wouldn’t you?)
What we saw in Detroit this last weekend, is a strangled a gasp for air from an industry that has been over regulated for the last five decades at least. You see, they know how to create what Washington wants. So do the Japanese, and the Koreans, and for that matter the Germans and Italians. It’s getting people to actually buy the things, that eludes them. As an example, even at the height of the recent gas price spikes, the biggest sellers were light trucks… something with a solid frame. Of these the Ford F-150 did best… The kind of vehicle that doesn’t come with a shoehorn as standard equipment, and can actually haul something once in a while… like a trailer, for example. Ever try to put a lawnmower in a Prius without futzing up the interior? Ever been in an accident, in say, a Civic?
Then again, that’s not the concern of the elitist left , including the ones currently in power in Washington, now, is it? They’re not worried if companies fail because they’re forced to sell vehicles nobody will buy. It’s not their jobs, or their lives, on the line.
If there’s a bright spot in this, it’s that should the pattern hold, (and I suspect it will, assuming we actually survive the next four years as a nation), we’re due for another Reaganesque conservative surge in four years.