The more I think about the Big Three automakers, the more I hear the word bankruptcy floating in the gray matter between my ears. And I don't mean Chapter 11 where a company gets sent to its room without dessert or allowance until released as an almost new enterprise ready to fight for customers. I want to see a total liquidation.
I can hear the hate mail landing in my inbox as I write. Don't I know that upwards of 3 million people will lose jobs?
What do I have against fixtures of our economy that style themselves the "Heartbeat of America?" Yeah, yeah, I'm not stupid, but I still want to put a bullet in the head and put a stake through the heart of Ford, GM and Chrysler.
Let's start with the autoworkers. They refused to make any wage concessions during this last round of begging from the government. Apparently, greed and shortsightedness don't confine themselves to the management classes of these corporations. Failing to realize that both management and the government were telling the truth this time when they pled poverty in an attempt to break outrageously expensive compensation packages means that the workers deserve some time dealing with the indignities of unemployment.
But to be fair, the union has dealt with management for decades and guessed that the bosses would throw the workers under the bus and maintain the benefit reductions long after the economic crisis ends. But, while I can't support anyone cutting their throats to save themselves, I do understand wanting to stick it to what must collectively be the most useless leadership on the planet.
From my vantage point, Big Auto hit the wall in 1968, or possibly even earlier, by making decisions that continuously put Detroit two decades behind the rest of America. The Big Three were among the last automakers in the world to make two-point seatbelts standard issue. It was the same for the safer three-point seatbelts. And even though American engineers invented the airbag in the 70s Japanese and German firms employed them first in the early 90s.
They covered up the Pinto with a smile and advertising. They sold us muscle cars and SUVs that inhaled gasoline like an alcoholic going after beer. They loudly proclaimed that "Quality is Job One" when everyone knew that the lady doth protest overmuch.
These bad decisions led me to two conclusions. I will drive the average American car only with a gun to my head and I have no loyalty to these morons despite the song that equates Chevrolet with baseball, hot dogs, Mom and apple pie. This loyalty eroded further when Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Subaru started opening factories in the United States, because they had to hire Americans to build their cars.
I got to choose the American autoworkers that worked for companies that actually made cars where door handles didn't break off. I got the kind of engines on which I could put 140,000 very hard miles with only routine maintenance at regular intervals. If I had to rent an American car, even the good ones felt like Microsoft Windows: nice but the other guy got there first and better.
So now we have the Big Three whining to the government that we should bail them out even though this violates everything we ever learned about capitalism. Bailing out the banks may have been necessary to open up the short-term credit that companies use to make payroll ahead of sales collections. We don't need to extend this courtesy to Big Auto to save some notion of the Way Things Used to Be when that is what got us into this mess.
I envision a lively sale of assets at the hands of an auctioneer. I'm hoping for an American cattle, foreclosure and/or seizure barker simply because they are more fun than those bloodless Brits that move art for Christy's and Sotheby's. Whoever calls the action and bangs the gavel, I'd want to see the auction on TV.
Who would likely win the auctions for all of that great stuff owned by Ford, GM and Chrysler?
I figure that some assets will be taken by foreign automakers on the cheap. Toyota would probably dogfight with Honda over which of them got the Ford Mustang or the Chevrolet Corvette and the right to profit from maintaining those cars in perpetuity. Someone will break up the parts business because cars need parts and no one will sell their cars before the planned obsolescence built into the car at original purchase.
Most foreign automakers won't buy up very many factories because they already have all the production capacity they need, but plenty of Americans will pool their money and buy these assets. Some may want the land for something else, but there are plenty of entrepreneurial Americans who dream of doing good cars their way.
We have had the technology to remake the way cars are produced for some time and the Big Three didn't want anything from that but robots to reduce the human workforce and do certain jobs with near perfect accuracy. What if a local collective found the money to make the factory that builds cars the way I publish books on Lulu.com: one at a time custom printing?
Imagine a showroom where there are no cars on the floor, but holograms, driving simulators and a computer to help the customer decide. We could walk in and pick out the right chassis on which we could bolt the appropriate engine, frame and body panels. We could get the paintjob we wanted, even if it's totally garish. What is the price tag for my car, my way?
This on-demand car making has been talked about for years, tried successfully with large trucks and then allowed to fade back into the woodwork. The Big Three missed opportunities to do this themselves. General Motors killed off the Oldsmobile brand and Chrysler did the same with Plymouth and I remember yelling at the TV that they could save the brands by investing in on-demand cars.
The brands were eliminated because the Big Three forgot the point of separate brands: separate cars. Sometime after the 1960s, all three companies used one of their brands as a dumping ground. Chrysler dumped the bad cars made on a Monday into Plymouth as GM did for Oldsmobile. And even when they didn't the cars were all the same.
Why did the management believe that we would be fooled into believing that there was a difference between a Dodge Aries and a Plymouth Reliant? So of course, one brand at each company would become the red-headed stepchild. In the 1940s, Mercury didn't make clones of Fords. They made cars identifiable as a Mercury.
So if the management had tapped into the custom car culture, they might have saved these brands. Now, let's do that with smaller companies created from the vast amounts of capital that still exists within our system despite our foolishness. These businesses would go a long way towards eventually rehiring most of the autoworkers fired by letting Detroit go Blam.
For the workers who don't get rehired by Joe's Custom Cars, there will be job retraining. How many people who can assemble an engine can also install a countertop in the kitchen? The myth of the American man and his garage workshop certainly says there should be a high correlation. How many would go from talented amateurs to professionals with just a few months training?
We are already committing to paying for some kind of transition. Why not go all the way and use it to transform our businesses and society into something that takes what is good and adds to it instead of allows us to repeat the mistakes of the past? But, perhaps too much change all at once is scary. I just hope we don't look back on this moment and wish we did take the opportunity.