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Crash Course

Page 5

by Paul Ingrassia


  The Corvair’s engineering architecture, like the Beetle’s, featured an air-cooled engine mounted where the trunk usually was, in the rear of the car sitting above the drive wheels. Thus, like the Beetle, the Corvair had no need for antifreeze or engine coolant, and there was no driveshaft to connect a front-mounted engine with the rear-drive wheels. These and other engineering features produced considerable weight savings and made the 88-horsepower, six-cylinder engine seem more powerful than it was. But the Corvair was bigger than the Beetle—a “six-passenger compact car … designed specifically to American standards of comfort,” as Chevrolet’s advertising put it.

  From the start the Corvair stirred controversy among some car critics, who claimed that the rear-weight load on a car of its length made the Corvair prone to spin out around curves. Worse, from GM’s perspective, the Corvair was being outgunned in the market by the conventional, conservative Falcon. Ford sold more than 400,000 Falcons the first year, nearly twice the level of Corvair sales, but Cole remained undeterred. In 1961 he expanded the Corvair from a single model into an entire family of air-cooled, rear-engine vehicles. Besides the coupes and sedans, the Corvair lineup included a station wagon, three commercial light trucks, and a camper-van called the Greenbrier that could hold up to nine passengers and be outfitted for weekends in the woods—just like the Volkswagen Micro-bus. Chevrolet was the top-selling car marque in the world, and Ed Cole was determined to make the Corvair not just a single model but a brand within a brand. The decision would come to haunt him and General Motors.

  Considering that the 1960s brought sexual revolution to America, fueled by the birth-control pill and unprecedented numbers of eager college kids, it’s an oddity that the most blatant sexual imagery disappeared from cars. Dagmars and gonads disappeared, and the remnants of tail fins began receding in size in 1960 until they finally (and thankfully) disappeared in 1964.

  The Mustang, with its youthful flair, was the defining car of the new decade. Inspired by two-seat British roadsters such as MGB and Triumph, it was championed by a new star in Detroit’s executive firmament, Lee Iacocca. In November 1960, after Bob McNamara accepted John Kennedy’s invitation to become secretary of defense, the thirty-six-year-old Iacocca became the youngest man to run Ford Motor’s flagship Ford division (as opposed to the separate Lincoln-Mercury division). He quickly saw the need to put some pizzazz into a competent but dull product lineup and asked his underlings to develop a car that would look sporty, be suitable for a small family, and be profitable at a price under $2,500.

  The price criterion was key. To reduce engineering costs, Ford’s product planners decided to use the underlying architecture—engine, transmission, chassis, and so on—of the boring old Falcon. But to create a roadster-style look, they moved the passenger compartment back to create a long hood and a short rear deck; and they chose sleek styling that made the car look like it was straining forward. It was, said one of Iacocca’s underlings, “like putting falsies on grandma.” The car was launched on April 17, 1964, at the New York World’s Fair with a base price of $2,368.

  Ford booked advertising on all three television networks and ran ads in newspapers nationwide. “Americans will have to be deaf, dumb and blind to avoid the name,” wrote Newsweek, which put Iacocca on its cover, as did Time the very same week. Americans were smitten. Some dealerships had to shut their doors to control the crushing crowds inside. A New York City diner posted a sign in its window: “Our hotcakes sell like Mustangs.” Ford sold 525,000 Mustangs in 1965, the car’s first full year on the market, and another 550,000 the next year. One reason: by 1964 nearly 20 percent of American families had second cars, which were becoming necessities in the suburbs. Thanks to the Mustang’s success and the booming economy, U.S. car sales passed 8 million vehicles in 1964 for the first time ever.

  The Mustang’s success caught General Motors flat-footed, but the industry leader had some tricks of its own up its white-shirt corporate sleeves. In the spring of 1963 a young executive named John Z. DeLorean was driving a Pontiac Tempest at the company’s proving ground near Detroit. During a break one of his engineers remarked that it wouldn’t take much effort to pop the monstrous 389-cubic-inch engine from the full-size Bonneville into the compact Tempest. The deed was quickly done, and DeLorean was wowed by the sensation of driving a small car with a big engine. He wanted to put the car into Pontiac’s showrooms.

  In October 1963 Pontiac introduced the Tempest with the GTO option, a 325-horsepower, 389-cubic-inch engine, that cost $295.90. The initials stood for Gran Turismo Omologato, a name DeLorean ripped off from Ferrari, which had neglected to copyright it. Pontiac’s advertising, playing on the initials, called the car The Great One. American kids nicknamed it the “Goat.”

  The GTO landed DeLorean in the corporate doghouse because the car hadn’t been officially blessed by GM headquarters. But GM’s bosses were mollified when Pontiac sold more than 32,000 GTOs in the first year—six times the initial forecast. The next year sales more than doubled to 75,000 cars. Ford was selling seven times as many Mustangs, but for a car that had cost little to develop, GTO sales were awfully good, and the car bestowed a high-performance image on the entire Pontiac lineup. Part of the impetus came from a song recorded on a lark by Nashville session musicians who took the name Ronny and the Daytonas. The lyrics rhapsodized about the car’s engine, transmission, and three two-barrel carburetors:

  Little GTO, you’re really lookin’ fine.

  Three deuces and a fours-peed, and a 389 …

  The tune soared up the charts. Together the car and the song gave birth to the late-1960s muscle car era. By 1968 the GTO had a monstrous 400-cubic-inch engine producing 350 horsepower and a host of new competitors. Ford reconfigured the Mustang, making the once-nimble chassis much heavier, to accommodate a more powerful engine. Chrysler’s Plymouth division put Pontiac on the defensive with its Barracuda, which had as much power as the GTO but sold for less money. The muscle car parade also included the Dodge Coronet Super Bee, the Olds 442, and the Chevy Chevelle SS. The craze fostered impromptu drag races all around the country. It was all great fun, both for the car companies and for the kids who would blast their way to muscle car memories that would last a lifetime.

  In the 1960s Detroit’s car companies stood at the pinnacle of their profitability and prestige and brought new opportunities to many Americans. In September 1965, three months after Chrysler opened its new assembly plant in Belvidere, Fred Young started on the assembly line building the Plymouth Fury sedan, which sold for $3,200. The job required demanding physical work. Young would hop down into a sunken trench under the assembly line to wield a welding gun and apply welds to critical points on the underbody of the car. So many sparks flew that he was always burning holes in his coveralls, and his wife got tired of mending them.

  But there were compensations: a then-princely wage of $1.85 an hour at the start, along with raises and cost-of-living increases over the years. In addition, the medical benefits were the best available anywhere, requiring Young and his co-workers to pay hardly anything out of their own pockets. And the company pension plan held out the promise of lifetime financial security. The Young family would be linked to Chrysler and the American auto industry, for better and for worse, for two generations and decades to come.

  Ponies and goats supplanted dagmars and gonads in the latter half of the 1960s. From a marketing and innovation standpoint, Detroit now turned to big engines instead of tall tail fins and layers of chrome. But even at the peak of Detroit’s power, not everything was idyllic. On March 16, 1966, the last Studebaker rolled off an assembly line in Canada. The company’s demise would convince Detroit executives that no modern car company could survive bankruptcy.

  In 1964 a young Harvard-educated attorney named Ralph Nader grew bored with practicing law and moved to Washington to work for the Labor Department—while also doing freelance research and writing on automotive safety. A year later he accepted an offer from a fledgling New York p
ublishing house to write a book about the topic. Unsafe at Any Speed began with the sentence: “For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.” That might have been news to the farmers liberated from their isolated homesteads by Ford’s Model T and its successors, but Nader was just getting started. Only the first chapter of the book was about the Corvair, but it was devastating.

  Nader described the case of a California woman who had lost her left arm in a 1961 accident when the Corvair she was driving at thirty-five miles an hour spun out of control. After three days in court, Nader wrote, GM settled the case for $70,000 “rather than continue a trial which … threatened to expose on the public record one of the greatest acts of industrial irresponsibility in this century.” He described how in early 1960, with the Corvair new on the market, several automotive “after-market” companies started selling stabilizer bars to be bolted under the car’s front end to better balance the weight. GM itself had begun selling similar devices in 1961, the book continued, but hadn’t advertised them. What’s more, Nader wrote, GM finally overhauled the suspension on the 1964 model Corvair, but by that time more than 1.1 million Corvairs had been sold.

  Unsafe at Any Speed marshaled evidence that the Corvair’s concentration of weight in the rear made it prone to spin out when taking sharp curves. Nader’s argument was impressive, but a book written by a no-name bureaucrat and printed by an obscure publisher wasn’t about to make waves. Until, that is, GM itself handed Nader a public podium.

  The company was facing more than one hundred Corvair lawsuits around the country, and the GM legal staff noted that Nader was providing expert witness testimony in many of them. The company’s lawyers asked one of the company’s outside law firms to find out more about Nader. The firm retained a New York private investigator, who in turn put some freelance private eyes on the case. Somewhere along this lengthy and unwieldy chain of command, the private eyes started snooping into Nader’s sex life, politics, friendships, and drinking habits, in the hope of finding facts to impugn his credibility.

  As the investigators got more aggressive, Nader sensed something was going on. The New Republic, which had published some of his freelance writing about auto safety, did a story about his suspicions. Then on March 6, 1966, The New York Times published a story headlined: “Critic of Auto Industry’s Safety Standards Says He Was Trailed and Harassed.” At that point GM had to respond. The company acknowledged that it had “initiated a routine investigation through a reputable law firm,” and a sensation ensued. GM president James M. Roche, who hadn’t even known about the investigation until the Times story broke, was subpoenaed to testify before Congress. On March 22, before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, Roche publicly apologized to Nader.

  Roche’s apology drew network television coverage and made Nader an instant celebrity. The debacle propelled Unsafe at Any Speed onto the best-seller list. The effect on Corvair sales was somewhat less salutary: sales dropped by more than half that year, to 104,000 cars. In late 1966 Nader sued General Motors for invasion of privacy. Just as bad, from the company’s point of view, Congress passed the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. The new law required, for the first time, that car companies publicly disclose any recalls of their vehicles.

  The Nader hearings effectively killed the Corvair. After a couple of halfhearted attempts to revive it, GM finally pulled the plug in 1969. On December 12 of that year, Nader made the cover of Time, with his face depicted alongside the taillights of a Corvair, driving off into oblivion.

  It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the Corvair disaster for General Motors, indeed for the entire American auto industry. The scandal occurred just as the Vietnam War was fostering a new and profound mistrust of establishment institutions—the government, the military, universities, churches, and others. The Corvair added General Motors—and, by extension, all of corporate America—to the list of organizations not to be trusted. In some ways, GM’s corporate reputation would never recover.

  Nor would any aspirations harbored by the company’s engineers to pursue innovative technology, as opposed to styling or horsepower, as the path to commercial success. The Corvair was, in many ways, ahead of its time. Its roomy interior belied a lightweight design that allowed the car to get twenty-nine miles on a gallon of gas, double the mileage of most other cars of its day. If GM had fixed the weight-distribution problem from the outset, which would have been relatively easy to do, history might have been different. But Ed Cole stubbornly believed in his design. After the Corvair, Detroit’s inclination to play it safe was solidified.

  Despite the Corvair, Cole went on to become president of General Motors. In the early 1970s, with government clean-air legislation looming, Cole championed a device called the catalytic converter, which required cars to run on lead-free gasoline and sharply reduced tailpipe emissions. His stand put him at odds with most other Detroit executives and thus required considerable courage on his part. Thanks to Cole, catalytic converters soon became standard on cars. But Cole, sadly, would be remembered as the “Father of the Corvair” instead of the “Father of Clean Air.”

  The adverse publicity from the Corvair dragged on for years, thanks to Nader’s suit against GM. It wasn’t until August 1970 that the two sides settled for $425,000. By then, Detroit’s power was beginning to wane. Though it was little noticed at the time, the average profit margins of GM, Ford, and Chrysler had peaked in 1963 at 17 percent. By 1969 their cumulative margins had dropped below 13 percent. And during the 1970s Detroit’s automotive oligopoly—now just the Big Three plus little American Motors—would be rendered asunder.

  FOUR

  CRUMMY CARS AND CAFE SOCIETY

  On November 11, 1970, General Motors and the United Auto Workers ended a bitter sixty-seven-day strike over the union’s demand for big wage increases to offset rising inflation. At a testy press conference in the GM building, reporters pressed weary executives on whether the new contract would fuel inflation, but they couldn’t get a direct answer.

  When the press conference ended, the frustrated journalists retreated to a nearby men’s room. There New York Times correspondent Jerry Flint pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket and drew two large circles on the floor. He firmly planted a foot in each circle and shouted, “Inflationary!” Then he informed his fellow scribes that they could write, with accuracy, that the contract was “described in some circles as inflationary.” Which is pretty much what Flint’s story would say, and not without reason.

  The new GM contract granted the company’s 400,000 hourly workers (triple what the Big Three’s combined total would be forty years later) a 30 percent wage hike over the next three years. It ended the cap on cost-of-living adjustments and accelerated the payment schedule from annually to quarterly. Most notably, the new contract allowed workers to retire after thirty years on the job at age fifty-eight with a full pension of $500 per month. To the UAW’s leaders, the “thirty and out” provision represented social progress. Thirty years was long enough for mind-numbing work on Detroit’s assembly lines, they reasoned, and early retirements would create new job opportunities for young Americans. GM’s bosses didn’t like the idea, but sixty-seven days of idle factories melted their resistance.

  While company officials wouldn’t directly answer the “inflationary” question, they did concede that the new contract’s compensation increases would outstrip productivity gains. So the contract “was thus by definition inflationary,” said the next day’s Times. Both the company and the union maintained, however, that they were victims of inflation rather than causes of it—starting a chicken-versus-egg debate that would continue for years.

  The new contract was the first one the UAW had negotiated since the mid-1940s that wasn’t shaped by Walter Reuther. At sixty-two, Reuther had been killed in a plane crash the previous May while traveling to the union’s northern Michigan conference center. His death made front-page news around t
he country, because Reuther had twice graced the cover of Time, advised five presidents, and helped to shape American domestic policy. His biggest disappointment, in the early 1950s, had been his failure to convince the Big Three to push for national health insurance, which executives equated with socialism. Decades later Detroit’s CEOs would wish that Reuther had succeeded.

  Reuther had dominated the union for a quarter-century thanks not only to his powerful social vision but also to his mastery of union politics. Both were reflected in the gains he won for UAW members in the 1950s and 1960s. Besides cost-of-living allowances and generous wage increases, autoworkers got company-paid health and hospitalization insurance, supplemental unemployment benefits during layoffs, and much more. The wages and benefits allowed UAW members to live comfortable, middle-class lives, and Reuther reasoned that similar pay and perks eventually would spread to workers in other industries. In other words, what was good for the UAW was good for America.

  Another part of the Reuther vision was that the union should help its members improve not only their financial standing but also their health, education, political consciousness, and social outlook. To that end every car factory had, not just a shop committee and grievance committee to handle bargaining and worker complaints, but also an education committee, a health and safety committee, and a recreation committee. In the interest of preserving “labor peace,” all these committee members and their staff appointees—a number that could be one hundred or more in large factories—got paid by the companies for doing union work instead of for toiling on the assembly line.

  The committeemen and -women received the premium wages paid to skilled-trade workers such as electricians, as opposed to ordinary assembly line wages. When their plants’ assembly lines worked overtime, they got extra pay too, even if they themselves weren’t working. Plant committee jobs, in short, were plum posts, and the best way to get one was to ally yourself with the UAW’s leadership caucus, which was the Reuther caucus. The bottom line was that in his pursuit of social justice, Walter Reuther got the car companies to fund his union patronage machine.

 

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