“In late 1958, Printers’ Ink conceded that ‘there is a widespread feeling that ‘they don’t make cars the way they used to’ — either mechanically or from the point of view of interior decor.’ And an official of the Automotive Finance Association in testifying at a Senate subcommittee hearing told of a survey he had conducted with association members on the state of the automobile industry. He quoted one member as responding: ‘The quality of today’s automobile does not compare favorably with past years. . . . The price of the product continues to go up and the quality continues to go down. Improvement in automobiles in the past few years has strictly been tinsmith work.’
Meanwhile, Automotive News reported charges that new cars were missing bolts, that they suffered from malfunctioning parts, squeaks, rattles, and other maladjustments that had become ‘the rule and not the exception in present American cars.’ The charge was made that motorcar manufacturers had been resorting to ‘slipshod assembly method’ and that the ‘poor quality of mass production cars’ was becoming evident.
The American Automobile Association released some figures on automobile breakdowns which indicated that the mounting garage bills of individual motorists were not isolated cases. It disclosed that although motorcar registrations rose by less than one million from 1957 to 1958, the number of motorcar breakdowns leaped upward by five and one half million!”
— Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (1960)
RE:SOURCES
- Packard, Vance; 1960. The Waste Makers. Ig Publishing, Brooklyn, NY: pp. 183-184.
This makes a nice companion piece to your post “Halberstam: Big Three’s ‘shared monopoly’ held back innovation for years”. The race to build more cars with more gadgets and more sheetmetal creases as the 1950s progressed, no doubt had a huge impact on the ability of the average assembly line worker to do their job well. I remember reading many years ago about how Chrysler used cheap metals for exterior trim on their 1957 models and also about the huge recall for failed motor mounts on Chevrolets, dating back to 1958. I guess that’s why Detroit never advertised its new models as longer, lower, wider AND better built.