Motor media monoculture: 10 car crowd constants

Today, we have more sources of information than ever. Yet, in many areas, we end up with less information than we used to have back when we had just two or three newspapers and two TV networks (three if you count ABC and four if you count PBS).

As a quick national test, quick - tell me what was in the recent telecom/domestic spying bill, what the penalty is for ignoring a Congressional subpoena, and what laws Congress is voting on this week. No? Let’s move on to cars.

Here are the basic stories we have across all media outlets for automakers which are never questioned, and which are repeated over and over and over and over again, the only variance being the level of sarcasm (with TTAC and Autoblog on one extreme and the old school print publications on the other), and sometimes whether Japan or Germany is best (with some online publications and Consumers Reports taking the former tack, and print enthusiast publications taking the latter).

1. Chrysler moves faster under private equity than it ever has. (This is very debatable but who has a memory that goes back to the 1990s?)

2. Detroit is technologically backwards and has been since the 1960s. (Who invented electronic ignition, electronic feedback engines, and the catalytic converter? Not that there isn’t some truth in applications here - Toyota used four-speed automatics and five-speed manuals long before they were common in domestics, and was well ahead with VVT and other technologies too.)

3. Detroit automakers can’t compete because they have unions and the Japanese don’t. (This is obviously untrue - even if you refer to unions as meaning “the UAW and CAW,” it’s still not true!)

4. The best car is the one that sells best. (By this standard, the Ford Escort was one of the best cars ever made. So was the Ford Taurus, even in the days when it needed new transmissions with ever other oil change. Today it’s the F-series pickups. And how do you deal with sales split by model? GM pickups outsell Ford pickups but they’re split between Chevy and GMC. For that matter, most people don’t agree that the Spirit was better than the Stratus, but the Spirit outsold the Stratus by a huge margin.)

5. American automakers can’t design small cars. (The best proof this is not true, though, is the Neon, which in the public eye was the biggest piece of rubbish ever sold. Never mind that its problems were almost all due to insane cost cuts, not engineering, nor that they were all fixed by 1998. The Reliant also comes to mind - it was terrific when first introduced but Iaccoca let it become a joke by not upgrading it enough as time went on; a performance version might have helped, too. It would have been pretty easy to get good numbers on a car that light.)

6. You can’t build a small car in the U.S. and make a profit. (Don’t tell Toyota that. They’ve been making Corollas here for decades. Come to think of it… the Neon pops up again!)

7. The PT Cruiser is slow, while the Mini is quick (the base Mini used to have around the same acceleration as the base PT.)

8. Chrysler can’t design small cars. Chrysler was foolish to not put its money into cars rather than wasteful trucks. (This was actually Daimler’s strategy. In 1998 Chrysler was planning a subcompact and was putting a lot of time and effort into its regular carline. However, when Daimler took over, that all ended; all small car were to be Mitsubishi’s responsibility. Then they were to be Hyundais. Then Hyundai turned out to just be using Daimler to get a halfway decent engine, which was all they really needed to make a good enough car, and Mitsubishi discovered first hand what Daimler did to a company. Unlike Americans, the Japanese apparently stand up for their own and took over Daimler’s share in Mitsubishi Motors; and Daimler ended up with no partners. That’s when Nissan and Chery showed up on the list. Chery was just plain foolish, especially since Daimler could not buy them according to Chinese rules; Nissan sort of made sense, if you assumed that Chrysler could not make a good small car. What’s funny about that, really, is the amount of respect at BMW and Toyota for what Chrysler did with the Neon, which WhatCar! called the best American car ever imported into the U.K.)

9. American cars are for losers unless they come with rear wheel drive and a V8 engine. (That’s pretty much the Autoblog line, as I understand it. They might make an exception for GM’s 300-horse V6.)

10. Environmentalists are weenies who want everyone to go slow all the time. (I won’t dignify that but it’s pretty clearly the dominant thought of the enthusiast press if not the mainstream, non-car-dedicated publications.) Environmentalists are greenies. Greenies hate you and hate the Challenger and hate the Hemi. Greenies are all wimps with no muscles who are afraid of Hemi engines. Greenies want to kill you so you don’t emit toxic gases. Greenies made up global warming so Al Gore could make $200 billion from it and take away your Hemi, too. Greenies are in collusion with the oil companies to drive up gas prices so you won’t be able to drive because they hate you and your truck, and they’re anti-American, too. Greenies are the reason Japanese companies are selling more cars than American companies.

11. Car guys make better decisions at car companies than non-car guys. (Tell it to Mullaly, who started to move Ford over to small cars from their European operations before gas prices started rising. Tell that to railroad man Walter P. Chrysler, who turned around more car companies than anyone else. Tell that to the bicycle men who created Britain’s once vibrant car industry. Or to DuPont, who had to take over General Motors from a car guy to keep it running, and made it the dominant automaker of the world.)

12. _____ is going to declare Chapter 11 very soon because they’re out of money or because they want to break their union contracts. (This was applied to GM, Ford, and Chrysler in turn — and to Apple for more years than I’d like to remember.)

I’m sure you can think of many more, but it’s important to realize that most journalists are like sheep; they herd around and run off assumptions. There are some excellent journalists and auto writers, but they tend to get drowned out by the herd - by those who think throwaway sarcastic lines are loads of fun (and who don’t care about the people thrown out of work by the impressions they create), by those who loathe their country’s work, by those who are too far above the rest of us to have any regard for what we drive or build, and by those who simply follow the crowd without question — probably the most common problem.

Just think about that the next time you read something like “… if Chrysler had anything worth buying.”