Serendipity.  Just as I’m busy buying a German import, Fred Clark has a post up about the quality of American automobiles, or rather, the perception by the buying public of their quality…

National Public Radio’s "Morning Edition" yesterday discussed the image problem facing American automakers:

According to global marketing information firm J.D. Power and Associates, 42 percent of all car buyers … won’t even look at a vehicle built by a U.S. company.

Dave Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of auto research, said [that is] a mistake.

"Many consumers still have a view of the Detroit automakers that the products are not as reliable as the imports, but what our studies show is that that is simply not true," he said.

Detroit has been closing the quality gap in recent years, Sargent said. In a study this summer of three-year-old vehicles, J.D. Power said Buick tied Lexus as the most dependable brand. In another J.D. Power study on quality, Ford won in five categories — more than any other company.

But Sargent said when it comes to cars, it takes years for perception to catch up to reality.

I appreciate the dynamic J.D. Powerman is describing. My own experience with cars designed by the Big Three is an unbroken string of hoopdies. My Honda Civic has run for more years and more miles than my Dodge Colt, Ford Escort, Chevy Cavalier and Chevette combined. Those earlier cars all broke down so often, stranding me at so many key moments, that I can still feel the anxiety of those strandings in my muscle memory. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn. I can’t imagine easily coming around to feeling secure about relying on another Ford or Chevy to get me from point A to point B if I need to get there.

I have no problem with buying an American-made car — my Civic was built by the UAW in Ohio, my Escort was built in Korea — but it will be a long while before I overcome my hard-earned, visceral distrust of Detroit engineering.

That’s me.  My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto and I loved it, and got 135k miles out of it (by taking care of the motor fanatically…changing the oil every two-thousand miles and so forth…) and still it broke down on me repeatedly.  But it was 1973 and that was just what you expected of cars back then.  Except for the Mercedes, which back then was legendary for its bombproof reliability.  My mom’s first car was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant slant six (we were carless for most of my childhood), which just ran and ran and ran.  But after she traded that one in, she endured a string of just awful Chryslers and I swear I wouldn’t trust a Chrysler motor any further then I could throw it.

I endured a string of really marginal used cars myself after the Pinto…but that was mostly because I was flat broke more often then not, and couldn’t afford more then a couple hundred buck junker.  Then I started getting work as a software developer, and could actually afford a new car, and bought a 1993 Geo Prism on the recommendation of Consumer Reports.  I got over 200k miles out of that car, and it never once left me stranded.  Under the skin, that car was a Toyota Corolla.

My next car was the Honda Accord I just traded in.  I drove that thing across the Imperial Valley and the wastelands of Western Wyoming and Idaho and eastern Oregon and never once worried that it would break down on me in the middle of nowhere.   Thing is, that Accord, and that Geo Prism, were both made in America, by American labor.

American labor can build solid, reliable cars.  But for ages it seems to me, Detroit just doesn’t want to design cars that way. 

So I understand that aspect of what the J.D. Power guy is talking about. But he fails to notice another equally significant reason that the Big Three automakers have a lousy reputation: They’ve spent millions of dollars over the past several decades on a PR campaign designed to persuade us that they don’t know what they’re doing.

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have loudly insisted for years that they are technologically incompetent. They have spent millions of lobbying dollars to explain all the things they cannot do, all the improvements they are unable to make, all the ways their abilities, designs and engineering are inferior to those of their competitors. All of that money spent advertising their limits and incompetency has had an impact. American car buyers listened. We believed them.

Consider, for example, CAFE standards — targets for corporate average fuel economy. Every time that Congress or Al Gore or the Sierra Club has suggested these standards should be higher, Detroit shrieks that they can’t take the pressure, that it couldn’t possibly be done, that they don’t have the skill, the know-how or the basic competence to pull it off. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes and Volkswagen, on the other hand, just said, "More fuel-efficient vehicles? Hai. Ja. We can do that. We’re good at making cars."

The same thing happened earlier with air bags and emissions standards. When California passed strict new emission standards in the 1990s, GM and Ford shipped their top lobbyists to Washington and Sacramento to argue that the new rules were technologically impossible. Toyota and Honda didn’t send lobbyists — they sent cars that met the new standard. The same dynamic occurred even earlier with seat belts. With GM’s lobbyists arguing that the company wasn’t capable of meeting the technological challenge of the seat belt why should consumers trust them to build reliable engines?

You know…I hadn’t thought of this before, but it fits.  I can appreciate the big three arguing against government dictating auto design…I don’t agree with it on the basis of safety and emissions standards…but I can see them making that argument.  But that’s not the argument that emphasized.  Instead, like Fred says there, they cried doom and gloom and said repeatedly, over every friggin’ safety or emissions requirement, that it couldn’t be done.  Meanwhile, Europe and Japan just kept..well…doing it.

It’s not that Americans can’t build good cars.  It’s not that Americans can’t engineer good cars.  It’s that corporate management didn’t want to.  The mindset was, good enough to roll out of the factory is good enough.  If there are problems, fix them after the fact, until the warranty runs out. 

It’s not that they just didn’t design them to be maintained or repaired either…I remember one car, I think it was the AMC Pacer, which needed to have the engine jacked up to replace one of the spark plugs…a routine operation, something you did with every tune-up back in those days…but they didn’t design them to be Assembled either.  I remember looking under the hood of the Toyota a friend bought in the late 1970s, when Japan was starting to actually worry Detroit.  It was a marvel.  Not only where there all sorts of little things they did in there to protect vulnerable hoses and electrical cables from the engine compartment environment, and thus decrease the likelihood of a breakdown, but there was all kinds of little things they did, that you could see, to the individual components to help the assembly line workers put it together right the first time.  Little tick marks, or fittings on the individual parts that at a glance told you, attach this part to this other part Here…This way.  You didn’t have to even think about it.  The pieces Told You how to put them together.  That kind of thinking did not penetrate Detroit management for decades.  I’m not sure it has even now.

You go to a Toyota or Honda showroom now, and you’ll see some of the finest cars American labor can build.  Absolutely world class stuff. They’re just not Detroit designs.  And that’s not the fault of American engineering either.  I recall reading a few years ago, about a guy who’d been put in charge of GM’s Cadillac devision, who was proposing to build an American supercar, something to compete, not merely with the top of the line Lexus, Mercedes and BMWs, but with Rolls and Bentley.  Right On, I thought.  It doesn’t matter if the market for something like that is small…Build It dammit!  Let’s produce one America sedan that’s made as well as a car can be made, not just at the state of the art, but defining it, and cost be dammed.  Go ahead and make it for the fabulously rich…and maybe…hopefully…the techniques learned will trickle down to the rest of the GM line.  You think what Toyota learns while making Lexus doesn’t find its way eventually to the Camry?  That’s why they’re so damn good…they have a line where they just go for it.  Every car maker should have one of those.

But no…it was never done.  And I don’t think that guy’s with Cadillac anymore.  The new styling in the line since the 1990s is his, and maybe some engineering improvements.  But Cadillac still has the worst reliability record of any luxury model.  That’s not the fault of the people who build them.  American workers can build a great car, if they’re given a great car to build.

[Edited a tad…]