Convention Wisdom: It's About Green
DETROIT It's easy to figure out where the automobile industry is going -- that is, at least where it wants to go.
It's heading toward the bank, and it will take any route, develop any car or truck, introduce any new vehicle to get there.
  Chrysler Group head Thomas W. LaSorda teamed up with actress Eva Longoria in Detroit to introduce new vehicles. (By Bill Pugliano -- Getty Images) |
It will cut sticker prices, as General Motors Corp. announced here this week. And in its desperate pursuit of cash, the industry will turn to sex -- drafting a bevy of young beauties to help show off the new edition of the Cadillac Escalade SUV and employing one of ABC TV's "Desperate Housewives," Eva Longoria, to introduce two new Chrysler Group concept cars, a super-luxury Chrysler Imperial and a hot-rod Dodge Challenger.
For proof, take a stroll around Detroit's Cobo Center, home of the North American International Auto Show, one of the global automobile industry's biggest annual stages.
The Detroit exhibit opened to the media over the weekend. An estimated 4,000 journalists showed up from all over the world, all eager to photograph, write, broadcast and blog about the latest automotive trends.
What the media reports is likely to be confusing. Journalists often search for themes and work from formulas. This year's formulaic approach to auto-show coverage goes something like this:
Gas prices are going up. That means consumers are turning away from sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks. "Detroit" -- essentially meaning GM and Ford Motor Co. -- are "truck-heavy," which means the shift to small cars puts them at a sales disadvantage, because "Detroit" has no small cars that people want to buy. Small cars are making a big comeback.
Empirical observation here suggests that a lot of conventional wisdom is wrong.
In certain sections of Cobo, it does indeed seem that small economy cars are rallying. Honda Motor Co. is showing off its fuel-sipping Fit subcompact. Nissan Motor Co. is introducing a born-again Sentra along with an even smaller car, the Nissan Versa. The Chevrolet division of GM has a revised, cuter version of its tiny Aveo, and there's Ford strutting its stuff with a sleek concept, a diesel-electric hybrid city car it calls the Reflex.
If that is all you see, or choose to notice, you will go away thinking that a bona fide small-car revolution is at hand -- that American consumers, at long last, have abandoned their lust for power and bigness in favor of vehicles diminutive and sensible.
But if you had run into that gaggle of journalists, most of them men, crowded around the DaimlerChrysler AG and Cadillac stages, you likely would have a different idea.
At Chrysler, there was the lovely Eva Longoria, a high-horsepower actress showing off two high-horsepower concept cars -- the Chrysler Imperial sedan and Dodge Challenger.
