Detroit: It's Not About Size--It's QUALITY!

One hears a lot of chatter these days about how Detroit needs to buckle down and build cars that “America wants to buy”. I agree that’s a good idea—I just have real problems with the standard interpretation of what a car “I want to buy” means.
Conventional wisdom says that this will be a small car. When I was in my twenties, I drove a classic VW Beetle. In my thirties I drove a Toyota station wagon with “a wheel base smaller than a VW”. Today my wife drives a Dodge mini-van and I drive a smallish Buick Skylark.
I confess if I went out and bought a new car tomorrow it would very possibly be a full size Ford or Mercury. It might even be an SUV. I can hear the gasps now—I am betraying all that is holy in the realm of Al Gore and his greenies.
Simple answer: I am an aging American. This means two things, vis-à-vis an automobile. One) I now creak more than my Skylark when I try to get in it. Two) as part of my national heritage, I am no longer as thin and trim as I was in Volkswagen days. (Understatement.)
Even a lot of thin Americans are large people. Stand next to some of the tiny people who come from other parts of the planet. Let them drive the little bitty cars so in vogue now. Even a 5’2” mommy would rather load three small kids into a mini-van or an SUV—along with soccer gear, coolers, folding chairs, and the occasional bag of balls—than a Toyota sedan.
Your burly construction worker really doesn’t prefer to drive a Fusion onto the construction site—especially if he is expected to run out and buy a couple of extra sheets of 4’x8’ plywood or a new water heater. People who do serious hauling call the little Japanese pickups, “Truckettes”.
I’ve carried long 2’x4’s in a VW. I angled them in—but they stuck out so far that I felt like King Arthur riding into the tilt yard. A lot of us substantial citizens, aging citizens and citizens who work out of their vehicles really aren’t calling for much smaller cars and trucks.
Those who try them are liable to switch back to something bigger as soon gas drops a dime or two. People like Al Gore who insist we should go for small can probably afford to have everything delivered to the door by people who drive really BIG trucks.
The two big foreign cars in the late ‘50s were the VW and the Volvo. We drove VW’s because they were so cute and so counterculture. (We could and did sneer at all those philistines who drove Chevys and Oldsmobiles—that was before we had kids, strollers and groceries to haul.)
Volvos were popular because they were built to last for years and years. That was back in the days when no one but a fool attempted to drive an American car past 100,000 miles—when the tight fit and reliability of foreign cars amazed those of us used to the glitches and incessant rattles in any US built vehicle.
Detroit responded to these foreign invaders—in all the wrong ways. When it went VW small, it built cars so unreliable that Ralph Nader correctly labeled them “unsafe at any speed”. General Motors reduced the size and width of its entire line in 1959 (except for the “wide track” Pontiac which simply stayed at its 1958 size). They did nothing for quality.
Lee Iacocca came out with the Mustang—a sales hit that, typically, avoided any hint of quality. And, then, look what he built at Chrysler. Oh my. Does anyone know ANYBODY who bought a second K car? He was typical of Detroit thinking.
I’m afraid when I hear Detroit talking about downsizing again. Size is NOT why their cars do not sell. Germans and Japanese beat Detroit not on size (the Ford F-150 goes marching on), but on QUALITY and RELIABITY. I’d LOVE another (bigger) Buick or Mercury that had the quality and reliability of my 1961 Volkswagen Bug. Am I dreaming?