“Cars and the car business infect some people’s blood, which is why that agglomeration of machinery and brains and money we call Detroit functions as a state of mind as much as an industry, not unlike the Elks or the Masons in its binding rituals and traditions and argot, shared by a loyal clan of initiates usually in it for life. As an initiate myself in an earlier incarnation I have gloried in it all, in the fevered pace, the zealotry, the camaraderie, even the macho culture and even the city of Detroit, that ramshackle Athens of the biggest, toughest, most exciting industry in the land.
But Detroit is so exasperating to love. It’s a self-isolated world, a kindly way of saying its worldview matches that of any West Virginia hollow for insularity. The lodge is a fortress, wary of outsiders, i.e., non-initiates, if not hostile to them, and unreceptive to their automotive concerns (or, in the argot, meddling). A ‘not invented here’ pathology has over and over stalled adoption of big European-bred technological advances — disc brakes, the air bag, antilock braking — for years.
Such is the arrogance of Detroit’s economic power that its leaders often seem to see the nation’s interests less as parallel than rival to their own, one reason why their sense of social responsibility would do a 19th-century coal baron proud. Only after Ralph Nader’s one-man crusade shamed them into it, back in 1965, did the Big Three get halfway serious about safety. If it’s not a matter of putting its bottom line ahead of the common good, the industry has yet to state a principled reason for undercutting every jot and tittle of clean-air and fuel conservation regulation. The well-wisher’s heart sinks.”
— Bruce McCall, The New York Times
RE:SOURCES
- McCall, Bruce; 2002. “Hogs on Wheels.” The New York Times. Posted Oct. 6.
Also see ‘‘Detroit Mind’ led to collapse of U.S. automakers’
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