Along the Way: The tragic decline of the American auto

How lucky we are, I’ve heard it said, that the wheel was invented before the automobile.

Otherwise, can you imagine the awful screeching?

We’ve heard some awful screeching lately about the bailout of the Big Three carmakers. Or is it the bailout of the United Auto Workers union? Choose your side.

Beyond economics, bailouts and politics, this situation has been discouraging, if not disheartening to those of us in love with the folklore of the American automobile.

To watch as Ford, General Motors and Chrysler beg for money in order to stay in business is agonizing. It only worsens the pain that the money they need is taxpayer money.

Yep, despair is everywhere. Or so it seems.

For sure, the downfall of Detroit is darn near unimaginable if you grew up with an admiration bordering on reverence for the shiny new models from our carmakers.

Names such as the Buick Roadmaster, the Oldsmobile ‘88, the Chevrolet Belair and Impala, the Ford Victoria, Thunderbird and Fairlane, the Chrysler Imperial and New Yorker — remember the Hudson Hornet? — are cherished in the memory of anyone who remembers how exciting it was when they rolled out the new roadsters and cruisers and hard-tops, etc. of yesteryear.

In a lot of small towns, it was a veritable holiday half a century ago when all the dealerships stayed open on one special night to show off their spanking new lines.

We’ve seen too many great names banished to a rusty junk-yard death over the years ...

Studebaker, Packard, Hudson, Nash, DeSoto, Kaiser, Fraser among them.

To lose the Big Three would be to lose it all to foreign carmakers. That’s just not acceptable.

Detroit has made too many mistakes, namely failure to keep up with the class and style and economy of Japanese cars such as Honda, Toyota and Nissan.

Looking back, the Nash Rambler had it right. It was American and it was “way ahead of its time.” It just didn’t survive, for some reason.

The Rambler was compact (compared to other cars on the road back then) and had a great design. The entire Rambler line was given Motor Trend’s “Car of the Year” for 1963.

In my mind, Toyota, Honda and Nissan are what Rambler would be today, had it survived.

There have been a slew of Detroit ventures into compact automobile production, eventually abandoned. It’s as if the Big Three opened the door — for Japanese carmakers.

Ford’s British operation built a fine, mid-size family car called the Cortina from 1962 to 1982. It sold like crazy, almost entirely in Britain.

Ford did give us, here in the U.S., the Falcon, one of many in the new “compact class.” Others included the Plymouth Valiant, Studebaker Lark and Chevrolet Corvair. The Corvair had a rear engine, inspired by the popular Volkswagen Beetle.

Years earlier, in the 1930s, what we would have called “sub-compact” cars were introduced by the American Bantam and the Crosley companies to generally widespread indifference.

They came and went, all of them. Even though they had the right idea — smaller, economical rides.

As a nation we maintained a fondness, unfortunately, for big, roomy gas-guzzlers. But was it the public’s affection for them — or Detroit’s insistence on building them — that sent the early U.S. compacts to the junk yard?

My first car, the one that got me to college a couple hundred miles from home, was a used 1946 Chevrolet coupe. It had the innovative “vacuum shift,” which was not one of Chevy’s better ideas. Other than that, it was a great car.

The unstable oil market and high price of gasoline today makes it unwise for Detroit to continue turning out battleships on wheels.

If we are to have a General Motors, Ford and Chrysler in years to come, those companies must keep up with the times by producing quality automobiles that get good mileage using gasoline, as well as hybrid cars — and somewhere down the road, autos that run on hydrogen or some alternate fuel.

It would be nice if cars ran on pennies and emitted quarters. We’d all be rich.

I just hope those proud American names ... Ford, Mercury, Lincoln, Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, Chrysler and the rest ... survive.

And I hope this business of automobile CEOs going before Congress with a large tin cup comes to a sudden death.

No matter what size of car Detroit builds, it will be we the people who determine its ultimate success by deciding whether to buy it. And if we keep bailing the car-makers out, we won’t have any money left to buy anything.

Corky Simpson writes a weekly commentary for the Green Valley News.