And In This Corner

I find the current crisis running rampant through the American automobile industry fascinating. In the 1960’s I was a youthful foreign sports car salesman in California. I choose that profession because I loved sports cars and wasn’t in a position to buy one. But I found out that if you were a salesman you got a demonstrator. Sounded great to me, I got one to drive, hung around sports car people, and got paid for it.
There was a national trade newspaper called Automotive News that came out ever so often, I have forgotten the frequency, which reported the nation’s automotive news. Rather a clever name for an automotive newspaper, don’t you think? It’s important to keep that type of thinking prominent when you consider the American automobile manufacturer.
I remember one particular news item of the time that discussed the impact of foreign automobiles on the domestic market. At that time Detroit considered itself the center of the automotive world and pooh-poohed a possible threat by the foreign import on domestic production and sales. The article claimed that nationwide foreign sales only amounted to three to four percent of the total automobile sales in this country.
The reason that article has stuck with me is that I clearly remember that where I was located, Los Angeles County, foreign auto sales ran in the thirty percent range. No one in Detroit had noticed that California had become the mecca for the automobile nut. Cars were a way of life in California and cars that provided what the buying public wanted were selling like Levi’s priced at $1.98.
I was working at a small sports car agency when the owner got a wild hair and decided to pick up the then unknown line of Japanese cars called the Datsun. Rebellion in the ranks! We were “sports car” salesmen; we weren’t going to demean ourselves selling those Japanese rice burners made of surplus Campbell soup cans. Unfortunately, we would get trapped by a customer who would shove us into a corner and force us to take their money so they could drive away in one of those rice burners.
To understand the next point you have to know that we were selling English sports cars. Time passed and one day we realized that we were selling these Japanese tinker toys and they never came back! That was unheard of in the sports car world, especially in the English sports car world. We found out, to our surprise, that Datsun was a very good automobile. It started, it ran, it kept on running, it got good gas mileage, and went down the road without parts falling off.
Time passed again and one day Detroit noticed that a Japanese tsunami had swept across the country and anti-Detroit waves were battering their sacred premises. People were drifting away from the lumbering Detroit hulks and actually buying those ridiculous little gas powered baby buggies. Detroit immediately took action, called in focus groups, consulted designers, conducted market surveys and said, “Very well, if the American public wants small cars we’ll give them the biggest small car in the world, and the most luxurious!”
The rest of the story is American automotive history.