Brand Loyalty and the American Landscape
Many a Sunday afternoon in my early childhood, once mass was behind us and we’d already stopped by the faded folk’s home where my grandfather lived, my mother would arrive with many of her children to visit her older sister, may Aunt Sara. Aunt Sara lived in a section of Sacramento called Curtis Park, right on the Border of Land Park and just a mile down Freeport Boulevard from my paternal grandparents in South Land Park. We would pull into the narrow driveway that snakled behind the house, but park at the front of the house. Around the back corner of the house were large Chrysler automobiles, generally a Newport and maybe a Recent Yorker. If you’ve ever seen a 1970 Chrysler Newport (the massive two door coupe) and a 1970 Chrysler New Yorker (also the 2 door ), please tell me if you can tell them apart – to me they seemed like two massive land yachts of almost identical scope and design. My Uncle Manuel drove the Unique Yorker (replaced in 1972 with the latest edition) and my tiny (4’11″ 100 pounds at her tallest and squarest, in my memory always smaller than that) Aunt Sara drove the Newport,a bronze colored behemoth of a vehicle. As I recall, in 1970 my mother drove a 1966 Rambler American Wagon with a rear facing way back seat, and my father drove a 1968 Dodge Monaco wagon with fake wood panel sides. My parents were rarities in their families, not loyalists to a distinct brand of American car, but purchasers of whatever was cheapest and could fit all the kids.

My Aunt Sara was a fiesty, warm Sicilian woman, the head of a gargantuan family since the age of 22, when her mother died leaving behind one married daughter and two young children. Aunt Sara was a Chrysler person. So was her younger brother, my Uncle Pete. Their children branched out, as I steal my cousin Ronny (Sara’s boy) ambling up in a mammoth Buick Riviera (the 1974 model with the massive back window) when he would drop off my cousuin Wendy (his daughter) for a visit, and my cousin Steven (Pete’s younger son) spending endless hours in their garage as a teenager with his friends rebuilding Chevy Corvairs.

And this wasn’t limited to my acquire family. I used to lay after school at my friend Kathy Walker’s house (because she had more Barbies than God), and in their driveway was her mother’s Chevy Bel Air Wagon and her father’s Chevy Malibu coupe. At my friend Connie Ross’ house her mother had a succession of Dodge passenger vans over the years (though her dad drove a VW Bug to work at the high school), as did the mother of my friend Julie Christie. Before us, in the earlier 1960s and the 1950s it was much the same in our neighborhoods and across America. American cars were it. The cool boys drove Mustangs and Camaros (or Firebirds if they were really perilous) and before the pimps were driving them, Chevy Monte Carlos were already a staple of the American family. The nuns at my high school had a Plymouth Duster and Dodge Darts and the nuns at my grammar school had one Vista Cruiser after another.

Staying Loyal Long After Loyalty Made Sense

Well into the 1970s and 1980s if you drove by the houses of my aunts, uncles and cousins on my mother’s side, you could see their Chryslers and GMs in the driveways. Even on my dad’s side my wealthy but frugal grandfather made only one foray into foreign auto ownership, during a side trip to Germany on their way back from a two years end in Viet Nam, he bought a brand new Mercedes Sedan, and grumbled often about the high maintenance cost. My grandfather, ‘Papa’, was a Dodge man. He had the ‘stylish workhorse’, the 1964 Dodge D-100 pickup, purchased before they left for Viet Nam but garaged until their return. In the summer he achieve wooden planks along the wheel wells in the truck bed, covered by a standard camper shell, and that was where the grandchildren rode to and from my grandparents’ summer house and the private Cedar Flat beach at Lake Tahoe all summer long. I don’t remember when he finally got rid of that truck, but it was after I went away to college, so sometime in the 1980s. When I graduated he was driving a 1984 Chrysler New Yorker Sedan, the last car he ever owned, and one that was given to my younger sister since she had helped take care of him and my grandmother when he fell ill in 1985.

In 1989, as my husband and I drove from my childhood church toward my mother’s house after the baptism of my nephew, he commented about the three tiny ladies driving their huge cars slowly in front of us. “Look at them,” he complained light-heartedly, “so small they cannot see over the dashboard, and obviously too short to reach the gas pedal. 22 miles per hour in a 35!” I looked up from the card I was like a flash signing and putting into an envelope and laughed. As if participating in their own private parade were twp 1989 Chrysler Unique Yorkers, a gold and a bronze, and trailing gradual them was a 1988 Chevy Celebrity Eurosport in a flashy silver metallic – driven in order of age by my Aunt Sara (in the lead), Aunt Florence (Uncle Pete’s widow) and my mother. We ambled behind them in my husband’s 1987 Dodge Colt. At the time I drove a 1986 VW Golf Sedan. “Don’t they know they acquire small cars with good gas mileage now? ” He asked out loud once I pointed out it was my family holding us up and not some random blue hairs.

I realized how many of the Americna automakers were no longer making limited cars, or were making fewer and fewer models. The Chevy Chevettes and Vegas died out, as did the Ford Pintos and Fiestas. Chrysler held on with the Dodge Colt, but the Omnis and other ‘world cars’ fell by the wayside. Which is not to say any of these cars, other than the Colt, benefited from an overall reliability. By the mid 1980s you saw very few of them left on the road even as older Toyota Corollas and Datson B210s, and especially the puny Toyota and Datson pickups, kept on truckin’,

On the cusp, American automakers make the wrong turn

I asked my mother about her change in vehicle style and size later in the evening of that baptismal day parade. After my father’s initial foray into fuel-efficient vehicles in 1974 with a 1972 Toyota Corolla, in 1975 they permanently down-sizied their vehicles, buying first a Dodge Colt sedan, and then the following year a Dodge Omni (my mother had become a Chrysler person due to the reality Chrysler made more of the smaller, cheaper cars than Ford or GM). The Toyota Corolla was handed down to my oldest sister, who has owned Toyotas or Hondas ever since. But, sometime after my father’s death my mother began to fall victim to the ‘sales pitch’ when she went to purchase a new car. When she went to trade in her Omni, which had survived two rear extinguish accidents and had travelled the 200 mile round trudge from Tahoe and from college trips to see the kids approach San Francisco about fifty times a year, she intended to buy another dinky, fuel efficient car now that this one was fuly paid off. She had qualified for a ten thousand dollar loan, though with trade in she did not ask to pay nearly that much, hoping to collect something for about eight thousand out the door. But, those salesmen. She was convinced that despite the reality most of her children were now grown and on their own, she still needed a lot of space, for safety. A sedan is a safer vehicle model than a coupe (she always bought sedans, even in small cars), and a big sedan is safer than a small sedan, they told her. Granted, she had a checkered history of driving, with many a rear end collision, but her accidents were always at low speed. But, her downward spiral into large vehicles with poor gas mileage (that just the same were totalled out in her accidents – low speed or not) began in 1984 with the first Chevy Celebrity, a brown one that took her to and from the San Francisco area where my older sister lived with her husband and two children and where another sister and I were away at college.

Now, my mother had damaged her earlier cars. For a time my older sister and I ‘shared’ the 1975 Dodge Colt sedan at college (I rarely ever got to drive it, but was allowed to be a passenger on visits home and at the end of the year). Its front bumper had been replaced twice, and it survived a side impact accident when a state worker rushing to lunch rammed the driver’s door by trying to scoot in front of my from the bike lane from behind me as I was turning left onto the next street. The Colt’s engine rolled on until it was traded in, after 107,980 miles, in 1984, for my sister’s first car. The Celebrity lasted only four years, going under in early 1988 after a minor collision in which its front end folded up upon hitting an old pick up at 10 miles per hour. It was repaired but mother was advised to trade it in on a new car because they couldn’t guarantee its reliability. The 1988 Celebrity lasted until 1990, when my mother turned in front of oncoming traffic with a very pregnant me in the passenger seat, and we were broadsided by a large pick up hauling cement. Two Celebritys totalled in minor accidents were enough for my mother to give up on GM (where she’d paid three thousand dollars more than she owuld have for a new smaller car) and follow her older sister to Chrysler permanently.

Now, in the 1960s and 1970s my mother and her brother and sister probably needed larger cars. They had children or grandchildren they hauled around, and they liked the roominess. I have to admit, that 1974 Buick Riveria, owned by a man with one child (and another on the way that year), seemed like an awful lot of car to buy. I rode in the Riveria many times, to the East-West football game at Stanford, or for out of town shopping trips with my cousins Janet and Wendy, and it was cavernous inside. I distinctly remember the sensation of sliding across the leather backseat until the lax waistbelt finally held us in station, on any turn cousin Janet took at more than 10 miles per hour. I remember climbing up into the window area with Wendy and marvelling that we both fit. And the trunk – it was a teenager ‘drive in’ trip night in heaven. You could fit at least four people in there. That the gas tank had to be filled twice a week at a minimum, was just a sign of prosperity and places to go. And reliability? Who knew how many miles you could drive one of these behemoths because successful American families traded their cars in after two years, three or four at the most.

When I bought my first car, a used 1981 VW Rabbit sedan, I wanted agility and reliability, and low insurance cost. I was three months out of college and was not going to spend more than $3,500. I also had a low operating budget, so to take me to and from San Francisco every week I needed a car with ample MPGs, and clocking in at about 28 highway, the Rabbit was a keeper. It already had 74,000 miles on it, and my mother warned me most cars couldn’t get to 100,000 – but she’d been buying American for so long she was in that trance. I drove the Rabbit to visit my boyfriend and his family in San Diego when I couldn’t afford a plane ticket. That puppy hit 100 on the freeway and smooth got conclude to 30 MPGs. I rarely ever checked the oil, let alone changed it, but each week I travelled wherever I wanted to go, and five days a week it was a steady commuter for me. Then one day late in 1986 my lack of regular maintenance habits caught up with me. 120,416 miles into it’s life it sputtered to a stop across the street from the VW dealer in Walnut Creek, California. The mechanic’s verdict was I should have changed and refilled the oil once in a while. The cost to repair it was over a thousands dollars. I traded it in along with the entire $650 I had in my checking account at the time, on a brand new 1986 four door Golf. I had that car until after I got divorced, when I sold it for cash and then used half of the cash as a down payment on a new Toyota Extra Cab pick up. I was amazed at what my Golf was still worth when I sold it, $3,200. The Toyoyta pick up I kept until after child number 3 came along and I realized I couldn’t fit two kids in hte back for much longer. I sold it, running like a charm, for over $10,000 but $$2,500 under blue book (it has a bed liner and custom camper shell). Today I drive a Toyota Matrix. I view to drive it until it absolutely needs to be replaced. It gets terrific gas mileage, runs like a charm and has been a solid performer.

The SUVs in the carpool line at school

One day I was sitting it the carpool line at my children’ s school and I realized the little Toyota sedan I was driving was like a speed bump to all of the Chevy Suburbans, Ford Expeditions and Dodge Durangos infront of and behind me. I also noticed that the Cadillac Escalade was exactly the same as the Chevy Suburban and the GM Yukon, ditto the Lincoln Nvagiator and the Ford Exoedition. They were giant boxes making shade in the parking lot, replacing the smaller minivans these motehrs had been driving a few years earlier. While I didn’t think I needed to compete, I did notice some advantages of having an SUV. I go up the hill to Tahoe a lot with my kids, or we travel up to Oregon or elsewhere, and having a roomy car that can handle bad weather was a plus. I looked at makes and models, rented some for weekend trips and followed up on gas mileage and reliability. I bought a Jeep Tremendous Cherokee Laredo used, with 100,000 miles on it. It was a 6 cylinder, loaded with extras and got about 24 miles on the highway. For commuting I mostly drove the smaller car, but when we needed to spread out, take the dogs with us, drive narrow mountain roads, we took the Jeep. It spent considerably less time in the repair shop than many of my friends’ later vintage and larger SUVs.

My older daughter learned to drive on that Jeep (after taking the door off the convertible Cabrio I’d bought her by throwing it into reverse in the garge and then getting out of the car), but when she got hit about a year after she got her license, I dfidn’t like a sound it started to make. It had over 180,000 miles on it and I wanted her to have something more top-notch and a little cheaper on gas. Her dad bought her a primitive Mazda 626 sedan. Later we replaced the function of the Jeep with a Mazda Tribute that gets over 25 miles per gallon highway, a little smaller but more agile than the Grand Cherokee and better built than the newer models of Jeep (our earlier one had been a 1996). Now that I have a second child learning to drive I am thinking about trading in the SUV for a small sport wagon, maybe a newer Matrix or a Suzuki.

When I heard the government is putting severe limits on continued payments to GM and Chrysler, I was thinking about all those SUVs, all the giant trucks, and the reality that other than the Pontiac Vibe, which is essentially the same as the Toyota Matrix, for years American automakers have lacked a small wagon like car. Many of the big SUVs are only 5 passenger vehicles, and the ones with the third row seat are cramped. They could manage to seat seven in a minivan comfortably, but when given the bulked up body of a Suburban or Exploreer or Expedition, they couldn’t manage the extra seats well. My Toyota Matrix has almost the same headroom as my old Jeep Grand Cherokee, and it has just slightly less horizontal seating space, but it fits five comfortably. I guess I’m wondering why Toyota and Honda made slight station wagons consistently from the late 1970s on, but American car makers, with the exception of a few tris with the Ford Escort, did not. And why are there so many Toyota Corolla and Camry wagons still on the road, still worth thousands of dollars, and fair a few Escorts that you can get for a song? Why are the Ford Explorers and minivans plagued by transmission problems befoer they even hit 100,000 miles, but you can see a 30 year old Toyota Land Cruiser tooling around on its novel engine and transmission?

Instead of making better cars and making more fuel efficient cars, American automakers tried to take us on a trip to excess. They convinced us to buy big cars when big cars were not in our individual or collective long term best interest. They built cars whose values dip quickly and whose life expectancies are half that of a solid Honda or Toyota (or Hyundai or Kia today). There are Toyota and Honda plants in the US, and there are American nameplate plants in Mexico and other places in addition to the US.

Reaping what they Sowed
American automakers bet on the come. They bet they could convince us to continue to buy bigger because the time of plenty wasn’t going to run out. Even when gas prices soared, they were slow to answer with more fuel efficient models, and they built more hybrid SUVs, than smaller hybrids – meaning we’d continue to consumer a lot more gas with their vehicles. A hybrid gets better mileage in the city in stop and go traffic and the benefits even out on the highway, where it performs like any other car with its engine size. The signal the Detroit automakers choice to focus more on hybrid SUVs sent is that they don’t think we use SUVs for weekends, trips or heavy use, but as our casual commute cars. So, while people can find on a list to buy a SMART car for about $10,000, or a solid compact Hybrid for less than $30,000 to meet inner city and short suburban commute needs with minimal exhaust and minimal gas usage – Detroit rolled out $35,000+ SUVs whose city performance was far less than that of many non-hybrids and whose highway performance was only as good as other small SUVs.
And, even when SUVs were the craze, Kia and Hyundai were working on smaller, cheaper SUVs with better overall mileage, so Honda and Toyota met that challenge, bringing prices down to $15,000 or less for a base model – but could you accept a Ford Escape or a Chevy Equinox for that amount? No, try about twice as much. And Chrysler, making a real dent with its reto PT Cruiser ten years ago, moved to muscle cars and giant trucks instead of fuel efficient family cars and sporty, smaller SUVs.

American automakers also couldn’t enjoy their costs. Fragment of that can indeed be blamed on unions, but also on management for not forging real partnerships with workers. Sales have been declining for more than a decade for these automakers – so something should have been planned. Instead some really bad decisions were made. Remember Saturn? Remember their minute vehicles that weren’t blooming but were cheap and basically ample? Then GM sucked them support in and Saturns got outsized. Look at the size of the Saturn Vue SUV and the flashy sports models, and recall that impartial two years ago Saturn did away with the innovative SC-2 3- door coupe and the ION, its smallest sedan. Both were priced under $20,000, and Saturn now has the larger, less efficient Aura, selling for about $25,000.

My guess is GM and Chrysler have a lot of inventory gathering dust. All of those useless Hemis (no offense to anyone who owns one – but they are a specialty purchase, not a mainstream engine choice) and massive 300s.
And, at a time when automakers should have been looking forward (look how even Volkswagen totally redesigned the new Beetle to be a 21st century car by taking the best of the old idea and making it better), Chrysler decided to go retro. GM made its best selling line, the re-acquired Saturns, bigger and mroe expensive instead of smaller and cheaper. What will happen when Indian cars join the Korean and Japanese cars already available in America? BMW picked up the Mini, down-sized some of its models. Volkswagen put out more cars under $15,000 and with more than 30 MPG. Nissan has the Versa and the Cube. Toyota has the entire Scion line, plus the Yaris. Honda has the Fit. Where do GM, Ford and Chrysler have, especially GM and Chrysler who are tring to survive?

I have no doubt that Detroit is full of dynamic engineers and that all of the American auto companies have workers cpable of producing Colorful Cars and Yarises and Fits and Versas and exiguous SUVs and hybrid compacts and even better more forward thinking cars. But, the clock may have ticked out for them. They waited and waited and waited. They fought emission standards and fuel efficiency standards. It is 33 years since emission rules required catalytic converters and 35 years since the chock wave in the early 1970s oil mark and scarcity crisis. If Chrysler could build the Dodge Colt in 1975 and Ford could earn the well, I guess the Escort is its cheapest and most reliable long-running model, and Gm could make the Chevette way succor then – what have trhey been doing since? They probably have the truck market for the forseeable future – but Americans don’t just buy trucks. Americans, by our sheer volume, need smaller, more efficent cars. Hit with losses of home values and asset values, we need affordable cars that will rush a long time. What neither Detroit nor the American consumer needs are lots and lots of idle vehicles that are overpriced and quickly devalued and that don’t provide the quality we need. We don’t need to idle thousands of autoworkers, but literally hundreds of thousands of other American workers have already been idled by companies that operated poorly or made bad decisions.

This is not a time to just buy American to save some jobs – it is time to invent a quality American product – to acquire solid, affordable and ecologically sound vehicles. Our manufacturing base is a cornerstone of the strength of our economy. It is about producing something tangible with an actual value that can be sold here and abroad. The value of our currency and our other assets are favorably impacted by the production of necessary manufactured goods. Our automakers have lost sight of that. They have lost sight of ow important it is to make the highest quality, most forward looking product in a swiftly evoolving global economy. When the rest of the world zoomed ahead out of necessity, our automakers (at least some of the time) lounged around getting fat and lazy and now they are gasping for breath vainly crying out “Wait up!” to the rest of the pack. Work hard, stay fit, say – and the American public will back you up. That is the message we need to send to Detroit, and if they fail to hear it we cannot help them and we will suffer some of the collateral damage of their poor choices through the ripple effects on our economy. If GM and Chrysler go under, a huge portion of our manufacturing base also goes under, but if they do go under it will not be because of failings within the American people of failure of government to respond at this late date – it will be under the weight of their own neglect.