Eros and Unreason in Detroit

John Keats, author of this article and such talk-provoking, bile-churning books as "The Crack in the Picture Window" and "Schools Without Scholars," wields one of America's angriest young pens. Herein, Mr. Keats' deep dudgeon is aimed foursquare at a medium-sized mid-western metropolis that sits on the north bank of the Detroit River and is chiefly responsible for the conception, design, production and marketing of the American car. He performs an incisive autopsy on the still-thrashing carcass of a depressed automotive industry and delivers a scathing diagnosis of the corporate yelps. (Next month, Lippincott is publishing his expanded broadside on the subject, titled "The Insolent Chariots.") Whether or not you take umbrage at Mr. Keats' nasty nouns and acid adjectives, we have no doubt that his piece provides an indignant, provocative case against the automakers of Detroit.

For slightly more than the price of a college education you, too, can own a kind of rolling, illuminated Crystal Palace, wherein you can recline on a couch, idly pushing buttons and wondering what might lie in front of the glistening hood, while the sun burns into your eyes through a windshield that is strangely overhead. This Chinese love junk, or Perpetual Wurlitzer, is popularly supposed to float on air and to be powered by jets or rockets, somehow aided by wings and fins. It seems ludicrously appropriate that the best way to enter it is by crawling on all fours.

If you buy -- or own -- such a monstrosity, you may be interested to know what the people who made it think of you. Briefly, they think you are in dire need of the ministrations of a competent alienist. They imagine that you are the victim of aggressive impulses, or that you aren't so hot in bed and need a kind of mechanical aphrodisiac, or that you're a frustrated lecher or -- at best -- that you are simply infantile.

Furthermore, they say they're not making all this up. They say they're giving you just what scientific research proves you secretly most want -- a great big shiny automobile festooned with sexual symbols that will tell the world that you're really not what you really are. What you really are, they say, is a sick fetishist who isn't sure he is male.

There might be a kind of shy, poignant charm in all this if they -- meaning Detroit's designers -- would only occasionally turn out a sick dream in metal to sell to some specific wealthy nitwit who suffers from some specific psychosis. Who is to quarrel with the idea of giving the customer what he wants? King Farouk ordered, and got, an automobile horn that imitates the howls of dogs being mangled beneath his wheels. Why not turn out custom-made symbols of psychosexual fantasies for those in need of them?

Of course, the trouble is that Detroit doesn't operate on a custom but on an assembly-line basis. Now that Detroit has heard a little third-hand gossip about Freud from the prophets of motivation research, Detroit is operating on the theory that we are all as daft as Farouk; that none of us is in a state of mental health; that we all want to buy automobiles that are portable symbols of twisted desires. For the sake of argument, perhaps we could stomach this preposterous assumption if Detroit thereupon mass produced a variety of representations of different desires. But no -- mass production admits no variety. Therefore, Detroit merely seized upon what it was led to believe to be the one great fault with most American males: an irrational fear of impotence. Hence, as noted semanticist S. I. Hayakawa observed in his paper Sexual Fantasy and the 1957 Car, Detroit decided to "give the men ... the One Big Symbol that will make them feel they are not impotent." The result: a four-eyed blather of chromium schmaltz, hoked up with meaningless, temperamental gadgets; a rocket ship containing enough electrical apparatus to illuminate Boston and enough power to make paterfamilias think he is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The worst things about these "fantastic and insolent chariots," as Lewis Mumford calls them, are not that they are too expensive. The worst things are that their design has nothing to do with any mechanical or human reality, that they are as unsafe as they are unsightly, that they are shoddily built of inferior stuffs, that they are idiotically costly to operate and to repair, that at the very most they are little more than four-wheeled insults to men of good taste.

An exact case in point is the Cadillac Eldorado Brougham, the most lavish and pretentious of all Detroit dream-boats; the car the shamans of motivation research insist that you are most lusting for because you're such an impotent wretch.

General Motors tells us the newest Eldorado has "anti-dive control, outriggers, pillarless styling, projectile-shaped gull-wing bumpers, outboard exhaust ports, four metal magnetized gold-finish drinking cups, [a bottle of] perfume, an antenna which automatically rises to urban height, ventipanes, [and a] sound-wave opening for the horn."

This contraption is more than 18 feet long, and more than 6 1/2 feet wide, but it has only 5-3/10 inches of road clearance and its roof rises no higher than the average Texan's belly button. Once you're inside it, you discover there is less than one yard from seat to ceiling and only 43.7 inches allowed -- hip to toe -- for your legs. Before we explore it, however, let's try to examine the Eldorado from a rational point of view, beginning with an attempt at English translation of that ad copy:

The name implies it is a light, closed carriage that comes to us from an English lord's estate that is curiously located in an imaginary land abounding in gold. "Pillarless styling" might mean the top is as collapsible as a Japanese lantern, as you may discover in case of accident. The carriage has "anti-dive control," which doubtless means there is some built-in device that keeps it from not diving when you slam on the brakes. A "sound-wave opening for the horn" apparently means the horn's noise is permitted to be heard outside the car, "Ventipane" is gibberish. The image of a projectile shaped like a gull's wing, or a gull's wing shaped like a projectile, is not for the rational mind to grasp. One wonders what is meant by "urban height" -- presumably it means the average height of all cities. Why an antenna should automatically seek such a mean altitude is difficult to understand. One also wonders why a light carriage from a golden land should have outriggers attached to it. Only when one comes to the outboard exhaust ports do the words fall sweetly on the ear, because one can readily imagine how difficult ordinary respiration would become were the exhaust pipes to empty themselves within the car.

At this point, it is clear the Eldorado's description is not meant to be taken literally. Instead, it is designed to create the impression that the Eldorado is really not an automobile at all. It is a souvenir of English gentility. Your attention is directed to the dreams of Spanish conquistadors. You are asked to think of Hawaiians skimming past sunny lagoons in outrigger canoes; of the intimacy of milady's boudoir; of 16-inch naval shells; of gulls soaring and, apparently, oddly bumping into each other. You are asked to don a white suit to enter a laboratory to measure sound waves with your fellow-physicists. All of these potency-symbol associations can be yours for a measly $13,000, plus tax.

The price, like the description, implies that this thing which is more than an automobile is not built for most people. Physical inspection proves it. It is a thing built for very rich, very short people who have no parking problems. Let's wander around an Eldorado and see for ourselves.

If you can keep up a brisk pace of six feet per second, it will take you slightly more than eight seconds to circumnavigate the Eldorado. In slightly more than one second, however, you have marched past all the linear room reserved for occupants. Or, to put it another way, of the 117 square feet the Eldorado measures, only 35 square feet -- less than one-third the area -- is devoted to people. Barely one-fifth of the 503.1 cubic feet of the Eldorado's vast bulk is reserved for human habitation. In short, either two-thirds or four-fifths of the Eldorado is not concerned with human reality, depending on the way you choose to compare the usable space with the overall size.

Next, we discover the usable space to be equally aloof from reality. A six-foot man will have only 6.2 inches tolerance sitting inside the thing because the total maximum number of inches of combined head and foot room is 78.2. It is therefore obvious that a six-foot man cannot wear both a hat and ripple-soled shoes at the same time and drive an Eldorado Brougham. On the other hand, the seats are more than five feet wide, and so we can say that a man who happens to be five feet tall and four feet wide would have at least a foot of room in which to bob up and down, and six inches to sway from side to side.

Suppose, now, we are to fill the Eldorado with six skinny midgets. They sit three in front, three in back. One reaches for the perfume bottle and dabs at a tiny ear. Applying Boyle's law governing the expansion of gases in a confined space, we discover that not one, but all six people will immediately take on the odor of crushed rose petals, whether they want to or not.

There are other, minor contradictions about the Eldorado from a humanistic point of view, but let's get on to some mechanical aspects.

Why the power steering on this or any other car? To move the sow fat, squealy tires and the enormous front-end weight. Why power brakes? To stop the overpowered, overweight jugger-(continued on page 24)Unreason in Detroit(continued from page 18) naut. Power steering can whisk a novice off the road at 80 miles an hour, and power brakes can hurl him through the windshield.

Why the electrically driven windows? Why, indeed? Temperamental as most of today's gadgets, the electrical windows on one car of vivid memory stuck shut on the hottest Texas day in 30 years. On another, they jammed open during a Vermont blizzard. Those on a third caught a three-year-old child's hand. On another, a child was actually strangled to death. There is almost no point to such gimmicks, unless it be that they keep repairmen in food and beer.

There is an automatic light dimmer mounted on the dashboard, which itself resembles the answer to a pinball addict's dream. It dims your lights as another car approaches. But it also clicks on and off while you pass streetlights, and, worse, it doesn't dim your lights when you follow a car.

Air suspension? Many a cheaper car on the market today gives you a better ride on metal springs.

Automatic transmission? A wretched device, wasteful of gasoline, hard on brake linings, less accurate and less safe than a manual transmission in the hands of a good driver. And who else, pray tell, should drive?

That big, soft, gooey ride? Here is a superficial advantage indeed, because it is well known that you can operate an Indianapolis racing car at 100 miles an hour with far greater safety than a professional race driver can operate a Detroit dreamboat at 60. For one thing, there is no feel of the road in a dreamboat -- the driver doesn't drive the thing, gadgets drive it for him. For example, there is that passing gear. Idea is, you floor the accelerator and are at once jolted from 35 to, say, 55 miles an hour in a matter of seconds. The excuse is that this will save your life if you have to get around another car in a hurry. But such a device is also an excuse for a loose mind to weave through tangled traffic. Worse, it sometimes may not work, and you will never know that it is not working until you desperately call on it.

Automatic choke? Here is yet another dingbat that can easily go out of kilter, thus divorcing the driver in still another way from practical control of his machine.

Four headlights? Why the hell not eight, or 16, or 32? Anybody want to try for the 64-headlight car?

Shoddy? Of course. Why the "metal magnetized gold-finish drinking cups?" Lady Nora Docker uses gold lavishly in her custom-made Daimler. She's even plated the exhaust pipe with the stuff. If you're going to sink 13 Gs into a bit of rolling stock, you'd think the least you'd get would be 14 carats. Likewise, look with suspicion upon the Eldorado's "high-pile nylon Karakul" rugs. No doubt nylon lasts longer. But if we're going to do the extravagant thing, let's have genuine Karakul. Steel? The Stanley Steamer used a heavier gauge.

Expensive to operate and repair? You said it. Not only does today's monster engine suck up nothing but the most exotic fuels, delivering eight to 13 miles a gallon in return, but if you dent a fender it doesn't cost you eight bucks to hire a man with a ball-peen hammer. Instead, you'll find yourself faced with a repair bill slightly larger than the price of a Caesarean section. Furthermore, to find the spark plugs on most Detroit cars these days, you require the services of a specialist in a white suit, equipped with Geiger counter and contour maps.

Finally, we come to style. The idea of a luxury automobile is that it is supposed to reflect the quiet good taste of a man to whom money is no object. There is nothing about the Eldorado, for example, that is not blaring ostentation, as far removed as Jupiter from the graceful not-a-line-wasted simplicity of the Rolls-Royce.

It is necessary to take such an acid look at the Eldorado because it is General Motors' theory that the Cadillac is the most beautiful car there is. It is beautiful, thinks GM, because it costs more than any other GM product. GM therefore believes the more a car looks like a Cadillac, and the closer it approaches the Cadillac's price, the more beautiful it is. Thus, all GM cars are designed to look like apprentice Cadillacs; and since GM sells more cars than all other manufacturers put together, all other Detroit manufacturers, with the exception of George Romney's American Motors, try to make cars that look as much as possible like GM cars. And they have succeeded -- not only in style, but in performance as well, as advertising agency president David Ogilvy rightly notes.

"There isn't any significant difference among American automobiles, any more than there is among cake mixes," he said. Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer who did the postwar Studebaker, says the reason for this lack of difference is that every company produces "imitative, overdecorated chariots, with something for everyone laid over a basic formula design that is a copy of someone else's formula design."

Detroit spends an annual fortune to ensure its lack of originality, and its effort takes the form of a perpetual Keystone Cop comedy. To protect its styling studios, Ford has a force of 20 security guards commanded by an ex-FBI agent. Different-colored passes admit different people to specific, different rooms and to those rooms only. Unused sketches and clay models are destroyed. Ford's studio locks can be changed within an hour if someone loses a key. To pierce such a wall of secrecy, each company employs spies and counter-spies, rumorists and counter-rumorists. Rival helicopters flutter over high-walled test tracks. Ford guards peer at an adjacent water tower with a 60-power telescope to make sure no long-range camera is mounted on it by a rival concern. One automotive company installed a microphone in a blonde's brassiere and sent her off to seduce a secret. There is just about everything in this desperate hugger-mugger that you might expect to find in an Eric Ambler thriller, except a genuine sense of humor -- although the results are laughable enough. All secrets are discovered! The shape of a Ford hubcap! The number of square inches of chromium on the new Buick! The final result is that all the companies know all the secrets of all the other companies, and everyone brings out the same car. But the cars would have come out looking alike, anyway (with the possible exceptions of the Corvette and the Rambler), because they are not designed to be automobiles in the first place, nor are they advertised and sold as such. Instead, from Eldorado down, they are sold as dreams, because the pseudo-scientists of motivation research told Detroit that people don't buy automobiles. Instead, they said, people buy dreams of sex, speed, power and wealth. Your problem, the researchers told Detroit, is to find some way to provide everyone with his private variation of these favorite illusions, while, at the same time, practicing mass production.

According to Vance Packard's incisive best seller, The Hidden Persuaders, one psyche-probing agency discovered what every automobile dealer knows to be true -- that a convertible in the window lures men into the store, whereupon they buy sedans. Mr. Packard says Ernest Dichter, president of the Institute of Motivation Research, chose to regard all this with Viennese eyes. The convertible, it seems, was the mistress the men wanted. It represented a perpetual daydream of youth and beguiling sin. The man who stared at it like an Elder at Susanna knew perfectly well he would never have the courage, the brains nor the money to keep a mistress, but he dreamed his little dream, anyway. Then he marched into the store and bought the plain old frump of a sedan that represented the humdrum wife the customer knew to be the best female bargain he had any right to expect, and (continued on page 28)Unreason in Detroit(continued from page 24) Mr. Packard tells us that Detroit swallowed this bilge without blinking an eye.

Mr. Packard also tells us that when the hardtop burst upon the scene to become the fastest-selling innovation since the self-starter, the motivation researchers smoothly said this was because the hardtop represented both mistress and wife in one sanitary package. Thus, gullible Detroit's current view of a hardtop or convertible customer is that he's a frustrated lecher whose automobile is a portable symbol of his baffled desires.

Likewise, Mr. Packard says, motivation researchers told Detroit that people buy big, powerful cars to relieve their aggressive impulses and to be reassured of their masculinity. Detroit's general decision, as noted above, was that most American men feel sexually insecure. Detroit never questioned the advisability of allowing some insecure nut to vent his psychosis by speeding 90 miles an hour through a school zone. Instead, it deliberately made cars more powerful, in order to capitalize on what it mistakenly believed to be a serious defect in the American male's character. Likewise, it built ostentatious cars, believing that most people equate ostentation with good taste, and that conspicuous consumption symbolizes high social status.

Now, motivation research certainly has its place, but as Hayakawa pointed out in last spring's issue of Etc., A Review of General Semantics: "Motivation researchers ... tell their clients what their clients want to hear; namely, that appeals to human irrationality are likely to be far more profitable than appeals to rationality. ... What [they] failed to tell their clients ... is that only the psychotic and the gravely neurotic act out their irrationalities and their compensatory fantasies -- and it is because they act them out that we classify them as mentally ill. The rest of us -- the mildly neurotic and the mature, who together constitute the majority ... are reasonably well oriented to reality. ..."

In other words, Detroit cynically sought to exploit mental illness for profit, unaware that most people aren't really sick. But Detroit should have known this. For instance, sober marketing research long ago turfed up the news that most new-car buyers are in their twenties and thirties, and since when have young Americans ever doubted their abilities in the sack? (Check, if you must, the rapidly rising number of babies born every year.) Young America needs potency symbols like it needs a second set of elbows.

Detroit managed the difficult feat of swallowing the depth-probers' nostrum while keeping its head in the sand. Thus, Detroit not only put a dream girl in every advertisement of a dreamboat, but also built deliberate sexual symbols into automobile design in the expectation that the cars' outward appearance would precisely represent the shape of the customers' sexual shortcomings.

This is the reason the manufacturers stick penial shapes on the hoods of their cars. This explains why Cadillac's stylists candidly talk of the breasts on their bumpers; why Buick came up with its famous ring pierced by a flying phallus; why knowing Detroiters complimented the Edsel people for achieving "the vaginal look"; why so many Detroit stylists lavish so much attention on the rear ends of automobiles.

Meanwhile, Detroit also was advised that 65% of this nation's population is found in the upper-lower and lower-middle classes -- the bulk of the nation's consumers. Further, Detroit was told that women do 80% of the nation's buying (a dubious statistic at best), and so it would be logical to assume that most women would have at least something to say about the cars their husbands bought. Detroit therefore thought of a lower-middle-class woman, and it sort of naturally envisioned one of its own, which is to say, a somewhat paunchy, mentally restricted, myopic aardvark with stringy hair. Because of this mid-western beauty, Ford's design chief George William Walker says Ford spent "millions" trying to find a floor covering that would duplicate the insipid rug in her Philistine living room. Because of her, Chevrolet hired seven psychologists to investigate the Chevy's sounds and smells, and you can imagine the glee at Chevrolet when the company came up in 1957 with what it proudly called "the finest door slam this year we've ever had -- a big car sound." Because Detroit cared about a blowzy, lower-middle-class hausfrau, a farmer can't just go out and buy a pickup truck that looks like a truck, but has to buy something done up in white sidewalls, two tones of bile green, chromium knickknacks and tufted upholstery. There isn't anything else available in these days of market research and motivation research.

Hence, if you suspect there might be something unpleasant about Detroit's automobiles, you might reflect that Detroit is trying deliberately to mass produce something that will appeal at once to a male misfit and to a rather common, empty-headed bag.

How do you market something that is a symbol of speed, sex, wealth and power to Pop when it must also appear unimaginative, unspontaneous, routine and unexciting to Mom?

So far, Detroit's answer is that you, as a designer, need not try to do anything well. First, you start out with a basic shape -- an oblong over four wheels, with a smaller oblong on top, like a matchbox on a shoebox. You do not depart from this basic pattern lest you wend into the area of the unique, the unfamiliar and the unconventional. Then, you put breasts on the bumpers and a gaudy stern on the thing to titillate Pop. You shove Mom's rug inside to make her feel homey. You go on and on, putting curlicue on curlicue, adding the fragment of one illusion to the fragment of another.

Whatever you have created cannot be called a motorcar. What you have done defies description for the simple reason that it is not designed to be any one thing, but is an agglomeration of the constituent elements of wet dreams.

For the first five years after World War II, Detroit congratulated itself. People were buying cars as fast as Detroit could smash them out and slap them together. Therefore, Detroit told itself, "We're obviously giving the public what it wants. Freud was right -- everybody is screwy. Barnum was right -- there's a sucker born every minute." What Detroit failed to understand was that the automobile had become essential to America. During the war, the government discovered 24 million automobiles had to be kept on the roads to get war workers to their jobs. One out of every seven businesses in this land is concerned, directly or indirectly, with the manufacture, distribution, sale and maintenance of automobiles. More than 6,000 American towns lacking rail or water transportation simply could not exist without automobiles.

Naturally, therefore, Detroit sold automobiles, but it is not quite correct to say that Detroit was giving the customer what he wanted. It is more correct to say that Detroit could sell whatever it decided to make, since the public had no choice but to buy from Detroit.

In the spring of 1952, however, a cloud no bigger than a Volkswagen appeared on Detroit's horizon. By the end of 1952, only 27.000 foreign cars had been sold in this country, and Detroit paid no attention to this phenomenon. As one Pontiac dealer remarked at the time, "There'll always be a few nuts." By 1955, however, foreign car sales had doubled to 54,000 units. It was nothing to Detroit. What percentage of six million sales is 54,000?

The following year, foreign car purchases nearly doubled again, to 107,675 units, and Detroit stopped pooh-poohing. The next year, 1957, foreign car sales more than doubled to 225,000, and at that point, Detroit went into conference. In fact, when Detroit brought out its "new, all new" 1958 models in 1957 (they were designed in 1954) it took care to import some of its own European (continued on page 42)Unreason in Detroit(continued from page 28) cars -- automobiles made by Detroit's European subsidiaries. Typically, General Motors modified its foreign cars to make them slightly larger, heavier, more bechromed and more expensive. As the miserable sales year of 1957 wore on into the impossible sales year of 1958, it became hideously apparent to Detroit that foreign car sales were not only steadily increasing in proportion, but that in fact, foreign cars were the only cars selling at any sort of clip, except for the American Motors' Rambler, which had been specifically designed to compete with them. Thus, in midwinter, word went around that every manufacturer would produce some small cars in 1960. At this point, it seems safe to predict that Detroit will miss the boat once again, because Detroit simply doesn't understand that the virtue of the small European car is not specifically that it is small.

It might pay Detroit to take another look at those European cars and at the people who buy them. For instance, if the foreign car's small size can be considered a virtue, it is only when the purchaser's specific use of the car is such that any larger car would be too big; any smaller car would be too small.

The real virtues of the European models are that they bear something resembling an honest price; that their quality is all the advertising they really need (thus they are advertised as automobiles, and not as sick dreams); that they are soundly built of good materials and are well painted; that their horsepower is no greater than necessary to meet any legitimate demand; that their fuel consumption runs closer to 30 than to 13 miles a gallon; that their repair rate is low; that the driver actually drives the car instead of being at the mercy of capricious gadgets; that they are a much more adequate means of transportation economically, aesthetically and in every other way than anything Detroit is currently selling -- again with the exception of the Corvette and the Rambler. This is true of foreign cars in all sizes, from Rolls-Royce sedans to Volkswagens. Thus, it is quality and not size that speaks for the foreign car. And, the quality is essentially that the design exactly matches the intended function. This is the real test of good taste in industrial design, just as it is in the fine arts.

Now, who usually buys the foreign car? Answer: young men buy most new cars; of these, the most youthful in fact and in heart buy most foreign cars. Youth has always had the ability to see through sham because youth is naively honest, rebellious and suspicious of convention and pretense. In this case, when youth buys a machine, it wants to buy an honest machine, responsive to youth's dominant control. Detroit could find out why people buy foreign cars simply by asking its own young executives why they don't buy the Fords. Plymouths, Dodges, Cadillacs, Buicks and Mercuries that their companies make. Why are these young executives driving Jaguars, Porsches, MGs, Triumphs and Citroëns? Price has nothing to do with that list of preferences. Neither has size. But something called quality has.

Everything indicates Detroit is blind to the implications of the foreign sale. While all manufacturers promise eventually to produce some small cars, they don't promise many. In fact, they're thinking in terms of 15% of production. It was precisely this preoccupation with bigness in cars that led Ford to ruin whatever raison d'être the Thunderbird ever had. The Thunderbird looked like a sports car. It is a sports car's function to provide the driver with sport, however, and sports car buffs were quick to say the Thunderbird was nothing but a small Ford in disguise, not to be mentioned in the same breath with Corvette, much less with Jaguar. Instead of building a sports car's function into the Thunderbird's appearance, however, the Ford company next abandoned its tentative step in the sports car's direction in favor of a giant step in exactly the opposite direction. It converted the Thunderbird into a small, four-seater hardtop, thus winding up with something not quite a sedan, certainly not a sports car, and not even a Thunderbird. Here is yet another example of Detroit's characteristic remoteness from reality, but the worst is yet to come.

The 1959 models to be unveiled this fall will be wider, lower, longer, more bedizened and befinned than ever. As The New York Times puts it, they will be "devoid of any radical engineering principles." Learning nothing and forgetting nothing, unwilling to admit that lagging sales may reflect consumer revulsion, Detroit, plagued by depression, this year will spend $1.5 million on those "new, all new" 1959 models (designed in 1957) merely to lengthen Ford's wheel base two inches; to substitute spears for fins on Plymouth's stern; to abolish Chevrolet's folded rump effect in favor of sharp fins; to lower roofs; to bend those glaring windshields even farther up and around; to slap multicolored aluminum about in the interiors; to fritter and fiddle with trivia. Sic semper Detroit.

Detroit dug itself into its own bog largely because it has always been an introverted, provincial town. Detroit's provincialism is almost self-explanatory. Our automotive pioneers, humble men with the hayseed's fear of being laughed at, never got over the embarrassment of equipping the first Oldsmobile bodies with whipsockets. Thus, Detroit turned its attention to itself, where it felt safe. It has been estimated that Motor City's conversation consists of 75% talk about automobiles, 15% about sports and 10% about television. More important, every observer of Detroit reports that Detroit's executives talk of almost nothing but automobiles at home, at the office, at lunch, and at the country club. Thus, far from being in touch with the outside world, far from understanding the real implications of market and motivation research, Detroit became as remote and as inbred as the Jukes family.

Additionally, Detroit has rarely contributed an original idea to automotive engineering; it has always been afflicted with creeping Charlie Wilsonism and is dedicated to "dynamic obsolescence." Creeping Charlie Wilsonism can best be explained in terms of General Motors' research and development center, which is dedicated neither to research nor to development, but to applied tinkering. This bespeaks the dicta of Charles Wilson, former director of GM destiny, who said: "Basic research is when you don't know what you're doing," and again, "If we want to go ahead and have pure research, let us let somebody else subsidize it."

The result of this policy became apparent when The New York Times asked Edward T. Ragsdale, GM's general manager of the Buick division, what Buick was doing in 1958 toward achieving fuel economy. "Oh," Mr. Ragsdale said lightly, "we're helping the gas companies, the same as our competitors."

Thus, GM devotes more effort to fiddling with superficial styling than to increasing the efficiency of its products. In styling as in engineering, however, the word is sloth. For instance, GM introduced its vile two-tones in 1940; its dangerously unsupported hardtop in 1948; its vision-distorting windshield in 1954 and Europe's old air springs in 1958.

This brings us to "dynamic obsolescence" for which there is no excuse or English translation other than blind greed. The trick is to bring out a car just a little different each year, but not too different, so that this year's dream-boat will become next year's old hat without causing a sudden drop in used car prices. Detroit calls the process "cycling" and this is how it's done at GM:

For its more than 50-odd models, GM has three basic body shells, forthrightly called A, B and C. Chevrolet and Pontiac use A bodies. B bodies go on Olds-mobiles, Buick Specials and Centuries. (concluded on page 65)Unreason in Detroit(continued from page 42) C bodies fit Cadillacs, Buick Road-masters and Supers. The idea is to leave body A alone this year, tinker with the shape of B, bring out a new C. Next year, leave C alone, horse around with A, bring out a new B. The third year, bring out a new A, leave B untouched, monkey with C, and the cycle is complete. It is Detroit's version of the shell game.

Furthermore, just in case you're the kind of man who doesn't fall sucker for changing frills, but who is content to drive a car until it falls apart, dynamic obsolescence has another meaning. It means your car is also so poorly made out of such shoddy stuff that it will begin to fall apart within three years, anyway.

The whole idea is to ensure a constant sale of new cars. The immorality of it lies in the fact that Detroit doesn't try to make you buy a new car because the new car is better than the old, but simply because it looks different. Slightly different.

Moreover, Detroit is not above terminological inexactitudes, or plain old-fashioned fibbing, in order to make a sale. For example, while it is true that Detroit automobiles are obscenely overpowered, their advertised horsepower has nothing to do with that power actually generated at the wheels. Detroit puts an engine on a dynamometer block in a clean, well-lighted room. There is no radiator, no fan belt. The engine is connected to nothing -- it does not have to turn so much as a phrase. Nothing is allowed to impede the happy scamper of the pistons. Indeed, a partial vacuum is created to remove back pressures at the exhaust ports. Special fuel is carefully mixed. The spark is adjusted manually through changes of speeds, even though this often causes the engine to knock ferociously. The resulting measured "power" is called the "test stand rating." This figure is whisked to the advertising department where it is multiplied by whatever number pops into a copywriter's head. Thus, a Detroit automobile might turn up anywhere from 100 to 200 less actual horsepower than that advertised.

Detroit's senseless preoccupation with its own navel has not only led it to ugliness, to fantasy, and to outright truth stretching, but has also helped to foment a national depression. Foisting extravagant, ridiculously overpriced crudities through the use of vicious sales practices and unsound 36-month credit terms resulted in an oversale of the 1955 market with the result that sales practically ground to a stop for the next three years. People were still trying to buy their 1955 cars. Simultaneously, the public was suddenly confronted with a real choice when the foreign car invasion gained momentum, and this meant even fewer sales to those people who could still afford to buy new cars.

Then, because Detroit, biggest user of steel, glass and other commodities, is so central to our entire economy, depressed sales in Detroit meant fewer orders for raw materials, and hence, less national demand for labor. Ergo, a depression in Detroit resulted in partial depression nearly everywhere else in our interdependent industrial society. Wherefore, it is high time that Detroit began to ask itself some questions. Perhaps we can suggest a few:

Even if it were true -- which it is not -- that most male Americans are psycho-sexual screwballs, where is the morality in designing an automobile to meet some defect in an unfortunate's character?

Where is the business morality in selling what you can as compared with turning out the best product you can possibly devise, for sale at the lowest possible cost?

What, oh hard-headed Detroit, do you really think of selling a man something artificially designed to become obsolete before he's through paying for it? Would you make such a purchase yourself?

Why tell whoppers? Why say a car has 300 horsepower when it really has 185? Why claim a car has a smooth ride when in fact, on any but a boulevard surface, it rattles the fillings in your teeth and, further, is unsafely suspended -- as is the newest botch, the Edsel, that $250 million mistake which not only boasts a ludicrous style, but which is properly regarded by competent experts as a mechanical mess?

Since your contraptions carry people along the highways at high speeds, why not build in real pre-crash safety factors, such as the sports car's handling ease and roadability?

There are many more questions Detroit could ask itself with considerable profit to us all, and unless Detroit begins to do so, the reasonable man of good taste will have no recourse but to buy foreign products, no matter how often he is advised it is his patriotic duty to purchase an overpriced, blaring excrescence of unmitigated vulgarity from Detroit.

In sober truth, what is good for Detroit is good for the country, beginning with honesty. The way to persuade Americans to buy new cars, however, is not by sticking a more obvious penis or vulva on the hood, but by constantly improving the design and the operation of the machines.