I am a careful driver, having been scared witless in driver’s ed way back when by Highway Safety Foundation films such as Signal 30.  Plus Traveler, my new Mercedes-Benz C300, cost me 45 thousand dollars.  I’m here to tell you driving a 45 thousand dollar car down the road makes you a more careful driver.  But the other day I was driving home and some lout in a bright red new model Mustang with racing stripes started hogging my tail on the Baltimore beltway…and what happened next got me to thinking again about something this American boy deeply regrets.

I was in the passing lane as I was…well…passing.  But not fast enough for Mr. Mustang.  We were approaching a series of nicely constructed twists and turns as two lanes of I-695 (the Baltimore beltway), peeled off onto I-83 heading into the city.  Normally I would have just accelerated a tad and pulled over to let the jerk pass.  But alas, I had been spending the night before at home watching Top Gear on YouTube, and whatever Mr. Mustang had under that hood, I knew what I had planted on the asphalt.  Yes…I’m driving a little white Mercedes four door sedan and you’re driving a Mustang.  What do you think that means?  And I thought to myself, Okay…you’re on…

And I put my foot down.  Not hard at all, just firmly and deliberately pressed Traveler’s fly-by-wire pedal a tad further into the Go zone.  It wasn’t the first time by any means…I’ve taken Traveler up a few notches when I felt it was safe to explore what was up there.  So I knew what to expect.  Traveler is German and, more generally, European.  Never mind the sports cars they make on that side of the Atlantic, even their four door sedans are built with a different mindset.  Traveler woke up a bit from the stately sensible pace I normally drive at, hunkered down just a tad on the asphalt and simply walked away from Mr. Mustang.  And I mean walked away.  In the curve.

Traffic was very light and I had no trouble pressing it into the second set of curves after that one.  Then I slowed back to normal.  I was almost a half mile down the long straightaway into the city, before Mr. Mustang came into sight again out of the last curve.  So having proved my point I was perfectly willing to let him pass me then, but he kept his distance.

Never mind how well Traveler is made, how tightly fitted together everything is, or how vault solid it feels sitting in it.  I bought it for all that.  Never mind.  I have never, Never, owned a car that performs as well as this one.  The only thing I’ve ever even sat in that’s in the same universe is my friend Stuart’s BMW roadster (which I’m sure could take on Traveler since its smaller and lighter and closer to the ground).  I hadn’t really understood what owning a car made for the Autobahn meant until the first time I pressed down slightly on Traveler’s accelerator, to see what was up there a bit and my jaw nearly dropped on the carpet.  Decades after my uncle blew away everything my little teenage brain thought it knew about luxury four door sedans with his 220D, my head still isn’t completely wrapped around the notion that a luxury four door sedan can do that.  It wasn’t just that it was fast, or even that it was smooth fast.  The car simply felt so taut and securely glued to the pavement at high speed that there was simply no sensation of being hurtled down the road at all, but more like…well…cruising.  Comfortably.  In the triple digits.  This car could get me into serious trouble if I’m not careful.

Why doesn’t America build a car like this..??

My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto.  I bought it new when I got my first somewhat decent paying job after high school.  It cost me $1997.48.  I had to get mom to co-sign the loan, which took me the full three years to pay off.  It wasn’t a great car by any means.  It’s engine was tiny compared to other cars on the American highway…the 1.6 liter overhead valve Lotus block with a one barrel carburetor.  It had a solid rear axle on leaf springs and the lightest, squirrelliest ass of any car I’ve ever driven.  The slightest bump on the road would make its back end dance around.  The fastest I ever had it to was 85 miles an hour and that was in neutral going down a mountain on the interstate in Nevada.  It was like to rattle itself apart at that speed and so I didn’t keep it there long.  But I took fastidious care of it, drove it to California and back, and got 135 thousand miles out of it before it all began to fall apart.

I felt as though I’d accomplished something stunning.  In those days, nobody drove their cars for a hundred thousand miles, even if it was a nice one.  It just wasn’t done.  The car was supposed to have found its final resting place in the junk yard long before then.  The odometers on American cars back then only had five digits.  When the one on that Pinto turned over once again to all zeros, I pulled off the road and took a picture of it. 

I’ve driven almost every car I’ve ever owned out to California and back.  But that Pinto was the last American designed car I would ever do that with, and it broke down on the way home once.  After the Pinto I was flat broke for many years and could only afford junkers, none of which I took on a road trip largely because I had no money for road trips. But I would have been crazy to trust any of them to get me through the Rockies, or across the Mojave, let alone the stretch of I-8 just south of the Imperial Valley.  I knew the risk I was taking with the Pinto, but at least I’d been its only owner, had spent many long hours under its hood, and I knew it inside and out.   The point is, I felt it was the same risk I would have been taking with any other American designed car of the time.  Mom’s first car, a 1968 Plymouth Valiant with its 225 slant six engine was legendary for its stubborn never say die reliability, and it blew a coolant hose on the one trip out to California it took.  But that kind of reliability was what you reckoned on back in those days.

I became entranced by Mercedes-Benz sedans around 1971, after an uncle brought his new 220D down for a visit. That car just blew everything my little teenage brain thought it knew about luxury cars away. I figured back then that a luxury car was one that had all the options, and maybe even a few you couldn’t get on other cars. Leather upholstery. Air conditioning. Stereo FM radio. Power seats! Then comes my uncle down for a visit in this boxy little German car and it just made my jaw drop.

First of all, it was a diesel. I thought diesels were what you put into trucks, and here was one in a luxury car. And you knew it was a diesel the moment he started it up. That just didn’t compute. But it was sitting down in it that first time, that I realized I was in a different world. It wasn’t flashy, not ostentatiously expensive at all like the Cadillacs. It was rather understated. But it was built like a goddamned vault. Everything fit together exactly right…there wasn’t anything in that interior or on the dash that was the slightest bit off. Everything you touched felt solid. The door handles, the buttons on the dash, the sun visors. And when my uncle drove us somewhere in it, that car was Quiet in a way I’d never experienced before. Not muffled quiet, but solid quiet. When my uncle left, I began digging up information about Mercedes-Benz and talking to anyone I could who owned one. And then I discovered the other jaw dropping thing about them: Their owners typically drove them well over a hundred thousand miles. The joke was, 100k and it’s just broken in. I began falling in love.

Understand, this was at a time when the odometer on American cars only had five digits on them. You just didn’t expect to drive a car that far because you knew it would be coming completely apart by then. We had neighbors and friends who routinely traded in their cars after they hit 50k, because you just expected it would be more trouble then it was worth after that. Here was the Mercedes, proving that this didn’t have to be so. You could make a car last. But they were expensive. People could point to the cost of a Mercedes and say, ‘well, for that money you could buy several American cars though’.

Then came the oil embargo, and Detroit suddenly found its ass was getting kicked by the Japanese. First it was on fuel economy. The little Japanese cars just ran rings around ours on gas mileage, right as the price of gas was starting to go up. But later, and devastatingly, they began pummeling Detroit on quality.

The argument up until then had been that, well sure some European cars are better…but look at how much more expensive they are. Here in America, we build cars for the common man. They’re affordable. Maybe they aren’t as good, but at least the average American can afford one. Well, the Japanese slapped them upside the head on that one. Suddenly cars were coming into the country that were cheaper, And Better.

A friend of mine bought a Toyota hatchback back then, and I remember us popping the hood and just marveling at how tightly laid out that engine compartment was, and at all the simple little things they did to protect the hoses and electrical lines from wear and tear. Many of the parts had little tick marks on them, to show the factory workers how they were supposed to be fitted together. Hoses had little arrows printed on them which matched up to little arrows that were literally cast into the fittings they connected to. What a concept…the parts themselves showed the workers how to put them together. Detroit was struggling then to hold on against the Japanese onslaught…American Motors was headed for bankruptcy and would finally fold in 1987…and I took one look inside the engine compartment of my friend’s new Toyota and knew they were all doomed unless they got their act together. It just couldn’t be business as usual anymore. But they never really got that message. Not completely.

Here’s a passage from Time Magazine article from 1980… 

In these late summer days, Detroit’s automakers are bustling to complete billion-dollar programs that they hope will turn the fortunes of their industry. The Jefferson Avenue plant, for example, is daily turning out 400 new Dodge Aries, Chrysler’s front-wheel-drive K-car that will determine whether the company survives as a major automobile producer.

Twenty-five miles away, at Ford Motor Co.’s Wayne, Mich., plant, workmen are busily assembling the company’s new subcompacts, the Ford Escort and the Mercury Lynx. Developed at a cost of $3 billion, the new cars are the first autos that Ford has built from the ground up since the Model A in 1927.

–Time Magazine, September 8, 1980

If you look closely, you can see the root of the problem in that last paragraph. …the new cars are the first autos that Ford has built from the ground up since the Model A in 1927.  Your typical American car buyer would have scoffed at that.  Why…they come out with a new model every year.  But they didn’t.  They just kept rehashing the old stuff with new skins.  Hell, the legendary Ford Mustang was based on the friggin’ Ford Falcon.

This…

…and this…

…are the same fucking car where it counts, in the chassis suspension and drive train.

There’s your problem right there.  Michael Nesmith mocked it back in 1981, a year after that Time article I quoted above appeared, in his video LP, Elephant Parts… 

Jeremy Clarkson, in his video on the quality of American cars, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (in eight parts on YouTube), puts the blame on our disposable culture.  Well…if you take his insults seriously, he also blames it on our being a bunch of inbred ignorant hicks too.  I can’t seem to find this video for sale here in the U.S…oddly enough…or I’d post a link to where you can buy it. I suppose that might have something to do with the fact that he spends the first five minutes of the video bellyaching about everything he doesn’t like about America. And about a third of the rest of the video as well. You need to get past that. He’s an automobile enthusiast and he knows what a good car is. And if you know what a good car is too then it isn’t all that surprising that Clarkson really trashes most of what he finds on his desert test track in that video. And I don’t think he actually hates us or he wouldn’t be so offended by our halfassed efforts at making cars. I think he does, for all the snark about billy-bob and American ignorance, honestly expect better of us. I would like to wave his video in the faces of everyone on the GM, Ford and Chrysler board of directors. Although I think Chrysler already got an earful of it from Daimler before the divorce.

I would especially like to wave at them this one point Clarkson raises in that video, and which I’d like to restate here because it’s important.

Look at this…

…and then, this…

…and ask yourself what went wrong.  The same country made both of those things.  And I’m not cheating here.  The airplane represents the best of it’s class.  It’s a military spy plane.  It’s not a fighter plane, but it’s fast, damn fast, because it has to be to avoid being shot down.  It flies high and fast so it can do it’s job.  It’s design and execution brilliantly and…beautifully…fulfill its function.  The other photo is of a mini van.  Okay, minivans aren’t supposed to be fast and flashy.  They don’t even have to be beautiful really.  But a mini van has its function too.  And that minivan represented at the time of it’s making, seriously, the best this country could do at manufacturing something that does what a minivan is supposed to do.  And if that’s not depressing enough, the airplane, an SR71, was born in 1964.  The mini van, a Ford Aerostar, is a product of the early 1990s. 

Three decades after producing the SR71, we were making Ford Aerostars.  Which wouldn’t be so bad if we had made something better we could point to…some mini van that just ran and ran and ran and would never say die, was safe to drive, handled well, was put together with care and craftsmanship, and did its job impeccably.  Don’t tell me that the country that can produce the SR71 couldn’t do that.  But we didn’t.  American mini vans were then, and still are, abominations.  And so are most of our sedans, our coupes, and our sports cars.  And the ones that are good, supposedly the best of breed, still don’t even touch the best that come from Europe.  We’re not even on the same planet.  In his video, Clarkson tests out a new Cadillac XLR…one of these…

By all rights it ought to be as good a performer as it looks.  And yet…it’s horrible.  Clarkson notes all the ways it fails on the track to be a good sports roadster, but it was his tour of the mind numbingly stupid low quality of materials and build inside the cockpit and was the biggest letdown.  It was all too familiar territory.  From the cheesy workmanship on the upholstery, to the cheap plastic in the center console, and the cheap toy like sounds the shift lever made when you moved it, I saw the same pathetic lack of pride and care that has kept me out of American big three designed cars ever since I could afford to buy one again. 

In 1991 I was mowing lawns and doing spot work at temp agencies to make ends meet. I was living in a friend’s basement wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life when another friend called with a job offer to write software for Baltimore Gas and Electric. I’d been tinkering around with the new desktop computers since the mid-1980s, and even had the odd job setting other folks up with theirs. The money was fantastic considering I was officially below the poverty line. But there was a catch. I had to drive up to Baltimore and I had no car. So the agency I signed on with rented me one: a 1991 Chevrolet Geo Prism.

It was wonderful…everything I’d ever hoped an American economy car could be. It was well made, not fabulously well made like my uncle’s Mercedes, but well made nonetheless. It drove well, got great gas mileage, and just felt overall like it would drive forever without giving you a lot of headaches. I later learned the Prism was a Toyota Corolla under the skin. (sigh) I had it for a week and then I had to swap it for a different one because the car rental agency had some sort of policy that you couldn’t hold onto a car for more then a week. The next car they gave me was a Chevrolet Cavalier. The difference between them couldn’t have been more stark. The Chevy certainly looked like a nicer car. But then you drove it. Small as it was, it handled like a cow. And it rattled. I hadn’t noticed really, how well made the Prism had been until I drove the Chevy and it started rattling. The dashboard was plastic, as the Prism’s had been. But it felt cheap where the Prism’s didn’t. Point of fact, nice as the car looked, everything about it just felt cheap.

After my first paycheck I arranged to buy a junker from a friend of a friend. I kept it together with chicken wire and duct tape until I felt confident enough in my new career to buy my first new car since the ’73 Pinto. It was 1993, and when I figured I could finally afford it, the first thing I did was drive right to my nearest Chevy dealer and buy…a Prism. I never regretted it. I drove that thing to California twice, and twice more around the four corners area of the American southwest. I drove it across the Mojave Desert and the Imperial Valley. I still vividly remember how well the car behaved in the high altitudes of the Rockies west of Denver. In 1974 I’d taken the Pinto along the same route through the mountains and the poor thing huffed and puffed through it’s little one barrel carburetor like it was dying of asthma. The Prism just hummed along unperturbed. Cheap, basic transportation that just worked. And Americans had built it.

That’s right. It had come off the same factory lines in southern California that the Toyota Corolla did. That car was made in America. But it wasn’t a GM product. That’s the difference. Not American workmanship. American workers can build a great car when they’re given a great car to build. The proof as far as I’m concerned was in the Prism. I got over two-hundred thousand miles out of it. After the Prism I bought a 2005 Honda Accord five speed with all the trimmings. It was just lovely, and as solid as the Cavalier had been a plastic can full of rattles. The Honda was also made in America, on an assembly line in Kentucky.

And I don’t think the problem is American engineering either. Take another look at that SR71. No. The problem isn’t American workmanship nor American Engineering, but American corporate mentality. The boardrooms in Detroit don’t care enough to make the best cars they can. They just have to be good enough to sell.

In his video, Clarkson demonstrates what comes of that by trying to fill a 1989 Lincoln and a 1989 Jaguar sedan both with water.  Yes, yes…it’s over the top…but it makes its point. And he’s not cheating just by using an old American car for the test because he compares it to a perfectly lousy European car of the same model year. The Jaguar Clarkson uses, and as he notes, is regarded as being the worst car ever made in Britain. But if fit and finish were all there were to a car, the Jag would shine.  You can’t fill a 1989 Lincoln with water, it isn’t built tight enough.  In the video the Lincoln leaks like a sieve.  But you can fill the Jag almost to the windows.

Now Cadillac is making the XLR, and it’s supposed to compete with the BMWs and Mercedes roadsters of its class and it is Still junk.  Not in junk in the sense that it has springs popping out from the seats, and pistons falling out of the engine, but junk in the sense that it’s still being made as though good enough was good enough. You don’t put a shift lever that makes plastic toy sounds when you move it into a 75 thousand dollar car.  You don’t give it a cheap plastic fake wood ashtray lid that looks more like a toy part then a 75 thousand dollar car part.  Well…we do.  To the rest of the world, it must seem like we simply can’t make a good car.

Yes we can.  That’s the damnable fact.  We can do better.  Tons better.  We just don’t.  Clarkson lays the blame for that on our disposable culture. I don’t think that’s the root of it though. We have a management problem, not an engineering problem, and not a skilled worker problem.  The boardrooms just aren’t interested in making good cars.

Why? I don’t think they’re enthusiasts. Not for automobiles anyway. They’re into business, not cars. They’re about running corporations, not driving cars. The automobile doesn’t get their blood going. Wringing out the last little bit of road hugging performance out of a suspension doesn’t do it for them the way wringing out the last little bit of efficiency in a just-in-time delivery pipeline does. They’re not into cars, so much as Product. And so Product is what we get.

There’s another difference too I think. Over here, many car enthusiasts work on their own cars and customize them heavily. New engine, new drive train, new suspension. You see people completely re-doing the interior and exterior, sometimes to the point that you can’t even recognize what the base vehicle actually was. The after-market here for car parts and customizing is huge. So a lot of enthusiasts don’t really care so much what Detroit gives them to start with. That takes some pressure off.

But most folks don’t do that. They need a good car they can buy right off the lot and it’s that customer base that has walked away from Detroit over the past few decades, and which Detroit simply won’t win back unless they start paying attention to workmanship. I read a story some years ago, about the frustration some GM engineers had being constantly overruled by management and the design department. We don’t need to make it that good…it’s too costly to do it that way…make it cheaper…make it flashier…good looks sell better then good engineering… One day, so the story went, in protest, the engineers all came into a design meeting with management wearing visitor’s badges. That’s the problem. Ever since Japan kicked their butts they’ve been saying they get the message. And they are certainly not making the same drek they did back in the 1970s and 80s or they’d all be out of business by now. But the mindset is still Good Enough and this country will never produce anything like the Toyotas or Hondas, let alone the BMWs and Mercedes, let alone the Rolls and Bentleys, until good enough isn’t anymore.

This is the perenial problem with my countrymen. We want to win at everything we do. We are a very competitive people. We love a good contest. But we don’t really think about what winning means. Let me give you a specific example. We’re having a little culture war here in America, and at the center of it is religion. More specifically, the brand of protestant Christianity practiced over here. The religious right likes to point to the fact that mainline liberal protestant churches are loosing membership, whilst their own are undergoing vast increases in size. The stellar examples of this, are the American Megachurches. These aren’t so much churches as indoor football stadiums, capable, I am not kidding, of seating thousands of people.

These Megachurches usually have several stadium size TV screens mounted behind the pulpits so the back rows can see what’s going on. The pulpits are on a huge stage now, suitable more for a rock concert then a sermon. They have stores where you can buy videos of previous sermons, books from Christian publishing houses, and everything from Christian greeting cards to keychains. Some Megachurches have in them, I am not kidding, indoor basketball courts, game rooms and sports size swimming pools. There are day care centers, and of course, private Christian schools often located on the grounds, if not right in the Megasanctuary itself. Every Sunday here in America these days, hundreds of thousands of American fundamentalists pile into huge Megachurches beside thousands of other worshipers and enjoy a multimedia extravaganza. Oh…and a sermon too. Which they can buy later on DVD. The religious right points to all this as proof that they are winning the battle for souls over the liberal mainline churches hands down. But what is ‘winning’?