Introduction: Okay, Where Were We?
What was happening when The End of Detroit was published in 2003
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How my book came about
Although The End of Detroit was published in 2003, the germ of the idea for it came to me as far back as 1990. Sitting in the newsroom at USA Today, where I had just begun work as an automotive reporter, I was reading a paper copy of The Power Newsletter, published by J.D. Power & Associates, the analysis firm founded by Dave Power.
Being the dataphile that I am, my eyebrows went up when I spotted this tidbit: half of all car owners under age 45, aka the Baby Boomers, owned vehicles from companies other than Detroit’s Big Three automakers.
It described me, and my brother, who was the first person in our family to own a Toyota. It was a yellow Corolla on which I learned to drive a stick shift. After my very used first car, a Dodge Dart that died at 180,000 miles, my first brand new car was a tiny blue Toyota Tercel.
We made our purchases based on recommendations from Consumer Reports, and apparently, millions of Americans were following their advice, too.
By 1990, a series of Japanese car companies had launched joint ventures with the Detroit companies and had begun opening their own plants - Honda in Ohio, Nissan in Tennessee and Toyota in Kentucky.
The catalyst was protectionism. In 1981, the U.S. and Japan agreed to voluntary restrictions on Japanese vehicle imports, limiting the companies to 1.68 million total vehicles per year. Cars built in the U.S. were exempt - a clear signal to start building where they sold.
Initially, production began with vehicles that were designed for Japanese consumers, but the automakers would soon be building automobiles designed or adapted with Americans in mind.
The 1990s seemed to be a strong time for Detroit, however. After a precarious couple of years following the war in Iraq, auto sales rebounded mid-decade, fueled by the growing category of sport utility vehicles. Among the most popular were the Ford Explorer, Chevrolet Blazer and the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The latter made Chrysler such a hot ticket that Germany’s Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler in 1998, primarily so it could tap into Jeep, creating Daimler-Chrysler. They were supposed to be a marriage of equals but soon, it was clear that Germany was in charge. (The merger spawned a sly industry joke riffing off the Daimler name. Q: How do you pronounce Daimler-Chrysler? A: The Chrysler is silent.)
Throughout the decade, Ford went on a luxury car buying spree, snapping up Volvo, Jaguar and Aston-Martin. G.M., meanwhile, bought Saab and added Hummer, giving it a broad lineup of brands.
Yet, the cracks were opening, as I found whenever I looked at auto sales reports. By 2003, when my book was published, the contrast was especially sharp if you went back to where the industry stood in 1960.