by Mark Binelli
But by 2009, all the major car companies were stressing their eco-warrior bona fides, setting aside prime real estate for their hybrids and concept electrics. An inordinate number of these vehicles were unsubtly painted some chlorophyll shade of green. The new Cooper Mini was housed inside a giant fake ice sculpture, because nothing says the opposite of global warming like a giant fake ice sculpture. Animated ads in the Lincoln display, meanwhile, showed the cars growing out of a leafy vine, as if future trips to an auto dealership would be more like picking organic produce at a farmers market. Toyota went a step further, passing out little Prius-shaped flyers that actually had wildflower seeds embedded in the paper, so you could figuratively plant a Prius in your Earth Day victory garden. Toyota also passed out red paper swag bags bearing the message “Recycle This Bag.” (Ford’s plastic, flag-bedecked bags, by contrast, recommended shoppers “Buy American.”)
In the basement, an entire artificial forest had been constructed, and people waited on line to be driven around a track in one of a fleet of hybrid vehicles. It felt like the National Public Radio version of Six Flags. I half expected Terry Gross to be driving my 2010 Ford Fusion hybrid, but instead I got a chirpy Ford salesperson. We slowly drove off, soon shaded by the plastic trees and creeping past a little waterfall. All of this was surely meant to be soothing, though something about the poky speed and utter silence of the car began to feel sinister, like intimations of a future where our robot cars won’t let us drive too fast or tailgate or listen to loud hip-hop with lots of bass.
Cynicism regarding the car companies’ sudden green epiphanies flowed abundantly, especially in light of Detroit’s continued and vociferous opposition to any sort of reasonable national fuel-efficiency standards. Charles Kettering, a groundbreaking auto industry engineer, once gave a speech warning about the finite nature of oil and proposed making lighter cars with more fuel-efficient engines.5 This was in 1925. The technology was there, but Kettering’s omen fell on deaf ears. Now, like T. Boone Pickens slapping windmill arms on his oil derricks and claiming to be Al Gore, the automakers’ showy new appeals to the Sierra Club demographic seemed unconvincing.
I began to notice a striking discrepancy at the auto show between the green PR blitz and civilian interest. People milled near the hybrids with a detached curiosity, the same way you might check out the albino calf at a state fair but not necessarily write about it in your journal when you got home. The sports cars and the big polluting trucks still seemed to generate the most excitement. Over at Ford, scrums of large men surrounded every F-150 pickup, testing out the rear bed flaps with their feet and marveling at the new “smart” technology that would let you know if you’d forgotten one of your tools at home. As I wandered past Chrysler, a gelled spokesmodel was talking up the special features of another truck.
“That’s right, guys,” he told his audience. “Satellite TV!”
* * *
The real hand-wringing over the future of the auto industry was taking place at the Renaissance Center, where Automotive News, the local trade publication, held its annual World Congress, a four-day conference for auto insiders. The theme: “Global Strategies for Challenging Times.” To get to the conference, I rode the People Mover, an elevated tram that runs through downtown Detroit in a three-mile, one-way loop. The city used to have an extensive trolley system, but it was purchased by National City Lines, a front company formed by GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, and other firms with automobile interests, after which the trolley tracks were ripped up and replaced with buses. The People Mover began running in 1987 and seems, in its utter uselessness, as if it might have been built by another secret auto industry cabal, as a way of mocking the very idea of public transportation. The monorail cars are automated and driverless, like trams at the airport or an amusement park; occasionally, walking along a barren downtown block, you might glance up and notice a pair of empty cars passing above your head at a haunted crawl. In the People Mover, I rode by the Gem Theatre, where I worked one summer as a cocktail waiter (I remembered standing outside one afternoon as two of my coworkers showed off their respective bullet wounds), past Joe Louis Arena, where I saw my first concert (Springsteen, Tunnel of Love tour), and then the Joe Louis Fist. Louis worked briefly at Ford, pushing truck bodies onto the assembly line for fifty-five cents an hour, a job that quickly convinced him to return to the boxing ring. “I figured,” he said, “if I’m going to hurt that much for twenty-five dollars a week, I might as well go back to try fighting again.”
In the Marriott ballroom, speaker after speaker approached the podium, which was silver and gleamed like a hood ornament, to soberly address the challenges of the current market. The crowd could not have been friendlier, with the grimness of the times resulting in a chummy survivors’ bonhomie, even among rivals. After a while, the room was so filled with positive vibes, it began to take on the air of a support group.6 UAW president Ron Gettelfinger (who retired in 2010) apologized for his annual salary of $155,000 in a folksy Ross Perot twang. GM president Fritz Henderson (fired by late 2009) said nothing about his own $1.8 million salary, though during a Q&A with the moderator, he was pushed to admit that GM would run out of cash well before March 31 that year if a second round of bailout money didn’t come through.
Those who followed offered no greater reason for hope. Frank Klegon, Chrysler’s executive vice president of product development, exuded such barely concealed desperation, you got the impression he might personally try to sell you a car. Even his PowerPoint presentation felt half baked: one page had only the word Innovation! over a photograph of a Dodge Ram pickup.
Likewise, Jon Lauckner, a vice president at GM, who was wearing a red, white, and blue tie and an American flag pin, should probably not seek a second career as a motivational speaker. When the moderator asked, somewhat jokingly, if designing cars for use on the Autobahn resulted in making a better car, Lauckner responded, “Better is a value judgment. I don’t like the word better.”7
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The headline speaker on the final night of the conference was Ralph Gilles, Chrysler’s thirty-nine-year-old design chief, considered one of the most talented designers working in the industry today. In 2004, he styled the elegant and much-loved 300C sedan, described in the New York Times as “gangster chic” and “swagger[ing] into the full-size sedan market … like a mob underboss.” The hippest guy in a roomful of blue suits, he was also one of the only black faces in the house—of Haitian descent, he was born in Long Island but raised in Montreal—and his keynote slot, coming just one day after Obama’s inauguration, was perhaps meant, on some level, to give the conference a subliminal dose of audacious hope.
I had visited Gilles in Auburn Hills, a tony Detroit suburb considered the sticks when I was a kid but since turned densely residential as more and more people fled farther from the city proper. It was also the home of Chrysler’s world headquarters, a gigantic complex the size of a shopping mall; my PR escort told me it was the second-largest office building in the world, after the Pentagon.
Gilles said he had loved drawing cars since he was a kid. After dropping out of college and working at a hardware store, he applied, on a whim, to the College for Creative Studies, an art and design school in Detroit. His decision to apply was so last-minute and half-considered, he had only a week to assemble a portfolio and was surprised when the school accepted him. After graduation, he received offers from a number of car companies but chose Chrysler because, he said, “I’m an underdog person. Also, at the time, they were doing K cars, so I thought, ‘Man, they’re gonna need a lot of help.’”
Ironically, it was Gilles, working for the most beleaguered of the automakers, who offered a reason to believe that Detroit might find a way forward. He was a reminder that Detroit, after all, was built by visionary entrepreneurs. Before I met Gilles, I wandered through the nearby Chrysler Museum, three floors of classic models, from the early art deco Chrysler Airflow to sixties muscle cars like the amazingly named Dodge Fury. Here, you r
ealized why so many early rock and roll songs were about hot rods—back then, there was a good chance they would be sexier than your high school girlfriend. Because people identify with their cars to a degree they don’t with almost any other material possession, Detroit once knew, better than anyone, how to infuse a mass-produced consumer product with lust and danger, high gloss and ineffable, darker undercurrents.8
Even today, there aren’t many hipper applications for an engineering or industrial design degree than building a car; the Chrysler Design Studio had the creative energy, and edgy talent pool, of a video game lab. And the disembodied car interiors Gilles showed me hinted at the sensual appeal of the museum pieces next door. He insisted the company’s new ethos would be about perfecting niches rather than chasing volume: “less cars done better.” At this point, Chrysler had just announced its coming merger with Fiat, though the ink had not yet dried on the deal. Gilles seemed to be laying the groundwork for a way in which consumers might come to see Chrysler, thanks to the new partnership with the Italians, as some kind of European luxury product.
“I’m an X, but my kids are millennials,” Gilles said, “and the good news about millennials is they’re not brand loyal. They’ll skip around as long as the product is good. Boomers may have had an American car in the late eighties or early nineties and they’ll probably never buy another one again. But there’s a whole new group of people coming, so it’s our chance to address that. I know where the perception’s at. We have to create products so delicious, so mesmerizing, people forget all that stuff and say, ‘I have to have this.’ People have short memories. It wasn’t too long ago that Apple was a write-off. Then the right product comes along.”
* * *
Gilles was not alone in hoping a Steve Jobs–like visionary would come along and create the iPod of hybrid electrics. Over at General Motors, engineers had been developing a car that perhaps could fundamentally alter not only the perception of the domestic automakers but their very DNA: the Chevy Volt. The most hyped vehicle to emerge from Detroit in decades, the Volt was eventually politicized by right-wing opponents of both global warming science and the auto bailout, for whom it became a moving target (barely moving, they’d say) and perfect distillation of Obama’s penchant for overreach. Debuting in late 2010 to rave reviews in the automotive press, the Volt was meant to be General Motors’ answer to the Toyota Prius. Like the Prius, it was a hybrid, running both on battery and a small gasoline engine, but the Volt’s technology took a great leap forward, in that its gas engine would never be used to turn the wheels of the car—it was merely present to keep the battery going if the power began to run out—and so, since the battery could last forty miles, the average commuter, who traveled far shorter distances, would not burn any gasoline. Overall, the car would have a fuel efficiency of 100 miles per gallon.
The Volt’s chief engineer, Andrew Farah, worked at the GM Tech Center in Warren, a fading east side suburb, where I met him. The tech campus was huge, and in winter, with its vista of gray skies, snow-covered fields, and blocky, grimly functional buildings, the place felt like an industrial park in Volgograd. Farah had thin wire-rimmed glasses, salt-and-pepper hair, and a pen sticking out of his blue shirt pocket. We slipped on plastic safety goggles and he took me into the battery lab, where batteries were tested at a variety of temperatures inside thermal chambers that looked like meat lockers.
In the world of hybrids, the quest for the perfect battery is everything and remains a daunting technological challenge. Engineers have to maximize driving distance and overall life span—the batteries must be able to survive a Detroit winter just as easily as an Arizona summer—all while keeping costs reasonable. At the moment, the lithium-ion battery has emerged as the most efficient. At the Volt lab, the batteries, covered in black plastic shells, were T-shaped, about the right size for crucifying an eight-year-old. There were two hundred individual cells inside each battery. Farah pulled out a cell to show me: it was roughly as big as a trade paperback, but only the thickness of a few pages.
Farah grew up in Flint, where all of his family’s neighbors worked for GM. He studied computer engineering in college, but when he graduated in the early eighties he didn’t find working on PCs interesting enough, so ended up joining the automaker. “I preferred the idea of sticking a computer in something and making it do something for people,” he said.
In the nineties, Farah worked on GM’s EV1, the purely electric car produced in limited quantities for three years before its controversial removal from the market. The EV1 inspired the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, which implied deliberate self-sabotage by GM and reinforced the idea of the venality of the car companies. Farah explained that the car had fallen short of basic market demands. It was tiny and expensive, with a short range and no backup when the battery ran out, and therefore had an inherently limited appeal—a dune buggy for rich people. I asked if there was a point when Farah realized the EV1 was not going to work. “Well, technically, it worked,” he said quickly, a hint of engineer’s pride creeping into the peevishness of his tone. “It had a lower coefficiency of drag than a fighter jet! Was there a point we realized market desires for the EV1 weren’t going to be there? Oh, yeah. I’m sure there was, for somebody.” He paused for several beats, then continued, “Maybe even for me.”
Farah had felt such a personal commitment to that project, its cancellation meant he was very hestitant when GM called him about working on the Volt. He’d transferred to a European division by that time and wanted to know the company’s level of seriousness. They assured him it was real. “And I have to say, it has been,” Farah insisted. “One of the reasons we’re coming to market so quickly is because we have the full support of the company.” He claimed that all of the problems with that first wave of electric vehicles were being addressed with the Volt. “You can end up with a battery on wheels, which people don’t want. I have to think about what segment of the population will want this car. Is it only these ultragreen types? Hopefully not, because there are not enough of them. Soccer moms? Probably not. But there is a big space in between there, a little more to the green side, but you also get utilitarian people and early-adopter techies.”
After the EV1 experience, Farah was acutely aware of the challenge. “If you want to get to the mass market and really drive a change in the population, you have to do it without making people feel like we’re asking them to run around without a shirt. The change can’t be that big. It has to be something they can deal with.”
And yet the sheer scale of what needed to change for the auto industry, and Detroit, to look like a going concern could make your head hurt, especially when it came to something as fundamental to our lives and economy as vehicular transportation. As Kristin Dziczek, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research, an Ann Arbor–based independent think tank, pointed out to me, even the most incrementalist steps toward greater fuel efficiency had to be “coupled with a more sensible energy policy from the government, because otherwise, with my new forty-five-mile-per-gallon car, I’m just going to drive more. People might start to choose automobiles over air travel. You can’t do this on the backs of the auto industry alone.”
Automakers loved this market-based defense: while gas prices remain low, consumer demand for inefficient vehicles does not change, and therefore it’s not their fault for responding to that demand. (It’s the Milton Friedman 101 version of “Stop me before I kill again!”) Of course, for years the carmakers opposed any environmental legislation that might affect their industry, with the help of lobbyists and friendly legislators like Michigan congressman John Dingell (and complicity from the UAW). As recently as 2008, GM’s vice chairman Bob Lutz called global warming “a total crock of shit.” As Jim Kliesch, a clean-fuel expert at the union of concerned scientists, told me, “The average fuel economy of vehicles produced today is roughly the same as vehicles produced in 1987. The automakers have demonstrated they would rather apply other technologies that improve amenities—
you know, putting DVD systems in the backs of chairs and whatnot—because they can get a higher profit margin out of that than from putting the money into fuel economy. Their research at the time showed consumers didn’t care about fuel economy. So we’ve gone nowhere on the fleet average in two decades.”
* * *
The auto bailout that passed later in 2009, over the objections of congressional Republicans, came with numerous strings, all being manipulated by an Obama-appointed “car czar” who forced tough modernizing and belt-tightening measures on a recalcitrant Detroit. The result—significant union concessions, radically altered corporate structures, Chrysler’s merger with Fiat, and all three domestic automakers (including Ford, which never took any loans in the first place) posting profits for the first time in years—handed the president’s economic team a tangible achievement and made the Big Three seem like twenty-first-century corporations with viable business models.
The dependence of the auto industry’s comeback on underemployment, slashed benefits, and corporate profits mirrored the larger economic “recovery” in a predictable and depressing way, but the city was buoyed by the prospect of the carmakers actually turning a corner. Restored profitability, while not exactly trickling down to the average worker, still seemed like a sign of something, as did the on-time arrival to market of the Volt. Even more unbelievably, Chrysler—Chrysler!—had aquired a patina of hip, at least in advertising circles, thanks to a celebrated 2011 Chrysler 200 commercial featuring the rapper Eminem, filmed driving through the city to the opening chords of his hit song “Lose Yourself.” Downtown Detroit is shot in a gauzy and melodramatic noir mistiness, and in a brilliant final touch, the ad heralds the new Chrysler line as being “Imported from Detroit,” at once tweaking the historic quality- and bourgeois-cachet gap between the Detroit automakers and their foreign competitors and playing up the notion of Detroit as an alien, potentially hostile world, technically but not exactly part of the rest of America.