By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Here's my auto-biography: Volkswagon, Volvo, Fiat, Toyota, Subaru, Jeep, Honda.
Yup! With one exception, whenever I've needed a new car, I've checked out the American array and then gone foreign.
1. The VW bug was cheap to buy and cheap to run, perfect for a couple fresh out of graduate school. Meanwhile, Detroit was specializing in tail fins and other non-functional absurdities.
2. The Volvo was made to be safe for kids and it probably saved my life, once. The American car industry, meanwhile, was resisting safety standards. That was the era of Unsafe at Any Speed, back when Raph Nader was a hero, not a spoiler.
3. The Fiat was cheap and roomy, when divorce made me poor again. The American competition lacked knee room and trunk space. Tweetie---since it was canary yellow, my kids came up with this name---was sold, after an adventurous life, in Medan, Indonesia.
4. A Singapore Toyota dealer delivered a nifty little Corolla to Colombo, Sri Lanka, precisely on schedule and at no cost to me. It was a very popular model, so I sold it easily for what it cost and could have got much more. As usual---sigh!---I was a good girl and didn't try to evade the rule that said foreign service officers can't profit on auto resales.
5. The four-wheel drive Subaru station wagon was nicely priced and it was also a perfect safari car in East Africa. It loved mud and ran so quietly the lions and herds of impala hardly noticed it. It got badly banged up in crazy Lagos traffic, so I sold it (and its memories) there. A German diplomat I knew in Nigeria was surprised that his American counterparts weren't forced to drive American models. It was embarrassing, but I had to confess that, even then, American auto makers were letting thoughtful drivers down. Hence, my Japanese car.
6. The Honda Civic Hybrid I bought two years ago, for obvious reasons. The mileage is terrific. It's like driving for free.
The only American car I ever bought, my Jeep Cherokee, was a stripped down, stick shift model I acquired so I could drive from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Timbuktu. Unfortunately there were too many wars in the way. After two years its mileage was only 13,000. So I took to Pakistan, where it languished because conditions there were already extremely unsafe. So I took it to Kolkata, India, where it didn't rack up miles because the roads were so bad I couldn't drive far in a day. So it came with me to Santa Fe, where it got smashed up by a stop sign-running idiot.
Obviously, I'm not the only American with a car-buying bio like this. As long as I can remember Detroit has begged for special treatment and has been coddled by a short-sighted Congress, even as foreign car makers were opening plants in the U.S. and, year by year, decade by decade, drawing away customers.
Detroit resisted safety standards. Detroit resisted pollution controls. Detroit (along with the oil industry) is still resisting an entirely practicable major upping of fuel-saving mileage standards. Detroit even let production quality slip dangerously, until it realized, finally, that customers had noticed and were buying other makes. So there are at least four reasons why so many of us have almost never bought American cars: economy, safety, pollution control, energy efficiency. The American car industry, it seems, is always behind the curve, always looking for special treatment, always whining.
And yet the Chairman of GM had the nerve to tell Congress a couple of days ago that Detroit is just fine, thank you. It's only the economy that sucks. So, guys, how about twenty-five mil to tide us over the hump of slumping consumer demand?
Briefly, I too felt that the bail out was necessary, mostly to protect workers, suppliers, dealers, etc. But increasingly I believe that subsidizing present management is short sighted in the extreme. Detroit has failed consistently to deliver cars in tune with the times. Current management is simply promising more of the same.
The best way to help workers and the U.S. car industry: devise a down payment on universal health care for workers who keep and workers who lose their jobs in any restructuring. There's a model that can be copied quickly and safely: duplicate the government's health plan for all government workers. Also, provide decent unemployment benefits, with real retraining provisions, for workers who'll be needing it. If there's twenty-five million to hand out to failed management, there's money for workers betrayed by an industry that has employed them to produce uncompetitive models based on Detroit's consistently contemptuous attitude toward the public and toward the public welfare.
As for auto suppliers, they may lose sales to a slimmed down U.S. industry, but the nimble may be able to retool in order to supply the foreign car manufacturers who'll need back up to fill the gap until Detroit (hopefully) catches up. Better yet, maybe they can retool to supply a revved up public transport system.
So, Senators, Representative, learn the obvious lesson. Stop coddling Detroit. It doesn't work. It never has.
Some have argued, re that seductive bail out idea, that Detroit has, however belatedly, come up with a few good models. Good! These will be the regenerative seeds for a post-bankruptcy U.S. car industry.