Detroit City Blues

The American auto industry is in ruins. General Motors Corp. is on the brink of bankruptcy. The United States are abdicating as an industrial power.

This Friday, the rumors started to flow.

Monday, GM was downgraded by the risk management company Moody’s, and yesterday, people in Washington worked to find a financial solution for the U.S.’s legendary automaker.

The Detroit News is intensely reporting the company’s struggle, where a planned merger with Chrysler is an important piece combined with a possible injection of government money.

But GM is not alone. The entire country’s gigantic auto industry is shaking. Ford had a 34 percent drop in sales from August to September.

Auto industries all over the world are slowing down because of the financial crisis, but no one is struggling more than the Big Three in Detroit: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

The situation is dramatic, but the decay has been evident for a long time. A car is much more than just a car in America. It is the symbol of the dream of freedom and mobility. That is why it is a serious problem that American brands have more or less disappeared from popular culture during the last ten years.

Elvis and Johnny Cash would float through the 50s and 60s in huge Cadillacs, while today’s American heroes are driving European cars.

This is most evident in the TV series “Entourage,” where cars are like oxygen for the boys, just like shoes and clothes are for the girls in “Sex and the City.”

The cool cars in the show are not American. They are German (Mercedes S-Class), Italian (Maserati) or Japanese (Lexus).

The American hip-hoppers are driving Escalades, though, Cadillac’s huge luxury sport utility vehilcle, but they still have European cars in their garages.

It cannot get much clearer than this: The young people are no longer dreaming of American cars, so the U.S. has lost the battle.

We have to go back to the oil crisis of the early 1970s to find the point where the world auto industry changed.

While European automakers started to think environment and efficiency in production, the Americans stuck to their three sacred principles: big engine, big seats, big car.

Through the 1980s, most American automakers did make their models smaller, but the changes were only reluctantly made without enthusiasm.

The U.S. was still synonymous with the automobile, and it was still the home market that was the most important. Exporting was like a side business and the foreign import was never taken seriously in Detroit.

Meanwhile, German and Japanese automakers gradually ate into the market. Offering higher quality, dramatic improvements and lower prices, the Japanese and Europeans snuck in the back door and charmed customers.

GM and Ford were busy celebrating their own brilliance, Senior New York Times journalist Micheline Maynard writes in her 2003 book “The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market.”

In August of the same year, Toyota outsold Chrysler in America for the first time.

It is too early to bury the American auto industry, but if it goes away – will we really miss it?

We can still enjoy the sight of a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, also known as the King of Kitsh. The world will still give us better cars, and it is a long time since we rejoiced over a new model from Ford or GM.

And while we are nostalgic, does anyone seriously miss British Leyland – the old British maker of Rover, Morris, Land Rover and Jaguar?

The two first brands are gone, but Jaguar and Land Rover are still developing with the world’s 20th largest manufacturer, the Indian Tata Motors Ltd.

And so the world moves on – even in the auto industry.

There are many myths that are falling with the stock markets these days. For me, the illusion of an efficient American business world was lost when I was queing in front of the till in a convenience store in New York recently and witnessed the man in front of me filling out a check.

Bank branches are many in America, and they are full of people. But American banks are miles behind their European competitors when it comes to internet banking. You’ll quickly lose out to the competition like that.

“Where GM goes – so goes the stock market,” was a saying in American financial circles.

There is reason to hope this is no longer the case.