Vroom, Doom
A friend of mine from college went to work for Ford Motor Company in Detroit after she attended business school, and at times the culture there drove her crazy. It wasn't just that she was about the only female executive in the entire country. It was also that she found the top management at Ford incredibly isolated, both geographically and culturally. "You can't believe these people," she said. "It's like they're living in a different era."
I thought of that reading today's Times story about how American automakers are finally succumbing to political pressure to raise fuel standards. Well, kind of:
Even as recently as last weekend, a lobbying group financed by auto companies was still running radio ads in 11 states, raising the prospect that soccer moms might lose the opportunity to buy big sport utility vehicles if they did not urge Congress to reject legislation calling for higher mileage.
“Why can’t they let me make the choice?” one of the ads said. “I’m all for better fuel economy, but for me safety is my top concern.”
These people really are complete idiots, aren't they?
(And not just because we know that SUVs are actually less safe than smaller cars.)
Why do American auto executives need political pressure to tell them that they need to make cars with better gas mileage? You'd think that the marketplace would have made this fact obvious to them by now. Ford, GM, Chrysler—whatever Chrysler is called now—they've all been making the same clunky, ugly gas-guzzlers for years now. No one wants 'em. And yet, they still say, Don't make our cars get good gas mileage, it'll kill our business.
Which would, of course, make it a race to the bottom, because Detroit seems to be pretty good at committing suicide.
Carmakers say the plan will probably cost the industry tens of billions of dollars in development costs for new vehicles and technology over the next decade.
It's called research and development, Detroit. Perhaps you should have been investing it over, say, the past 20 years?
Imagine if the American computer industry had the same mentality as the auto industry. We'd have computers that got slower and had less memory with every passing year, and were plagued an unfortunate tendency to roll over....
