Drive
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He spends a lot of time in the backcountry, skiing, climbing and hiking; it’s cold in the winter and tiring in the summer. “The truck is the first interface of civilization,” he explained, “and it’s always a whole huge amount more comfortable than where I’ve been.”
When Chris, his wife of twenty-five years, died in an avalanche, he tried to cope with the loss by driving around the continent and visiting friends. “Chris said that for some people, travelling is a place. I would stay somewhere for weeks, or a few months, and then move on.” His truck was the only constant. Whenever he grabbed the steering wheel, he felt safe—even though he knew there was danger on the highway—and comfortable. “I always knew that as soon as I got in the truck I was out of there. That was my escape and that was my home. That was what was reliable to me.”
At one point in his journey, a friend asked him, “How’re ya doing, Jon? I haven’t seen you around.”
“Oh, I’m not doing very well. I’m living out of my pickup and spinning.”
His friend looked at him and said, “What’s wrong with living out of your pickup and spinning?”
Not many people want to make a home out of their vehicle, even temporarily, but plenty have deep attachments with their rides. Tuners, for example, spend all their time and money customizing and accessorizing cars such as Honda Civics. But tuners make up only a tiny percentage of the population. We live in a society with so much choice that we can spend our money and our leisure time in many ways. Some people define themselves by the sports they play, some by their cottages, some by other hobbies or possessions. In the 1950s, people had fewer ways to define themselves or seek ego gratification. So while car owners are still unlikely to take kindly to local kids “calling grease” on their cars, fewer people now identify with their vehicles as strongly as they did in the past.
As ever, an unhealthy attraction to cars is most apparent among the young, but that doesn’t mean that as we get older, we all turn into appliance people. “You’d be surprised: there are elders who agree very strongly that it’s about style,” said MacDonald. “And there are young males—we have some working here—who wouldn’t know a dipstick from a key slot.” In fact, many car clubs are struggling to attract younger members. Nostalgia is part of it: a car can be a powerful symbol of lost youth.
Whether a person lives in a city, a suburb or a rural area, on the other hand, does play a role in how he or she views cars. Four out of five Canadians live in urban centres and 39 percent live in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. The country’s three largest metropolises all have reasonable population densities and good public transit—a mode of transportation Canadians are happier than Americans to take—meaning that more families can get by with one car or even none at all. By contrast, only 17 percent of Americans live in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago; and few people want to live in LA without a car.
Money is an even bigger factor. Canadians make less money, suffer higher taxes and pay more at the gas pump than Americans, and that certainly shapes their ownership, usage and purchasing patterns. They tend to buy smaller, cheaper vehicles—more Toyota Corollas than Toyota Camrys is the standard example— and keep them longer: 8.2 years versus 5.
Canadians are also more sensitive to hikes in gas prices. Between January and April 2007, when Vancouverites watched the cost of gas climb above $1.25 a litre, they didn’t just grumble and pay—instead, they took Translink, the city’s light rail system, more often, leading to an 11 percent jump in ridership. All that may help explain why when I ask Torontonians if they are car buffs, I’m likely to hear: “I would be if I could afford it.”
South of the border, some people have started buying more fuel-efficient cars, including Priuses, Corollas and Honda Civics, without giving up their SUVs or pickups; the small cars are just another addition to the family fleet. Americans buy more niche vehicles, including sports cars, luxury cars and convertibles, so while there is one car for every two out of three licensed drivers in Canada, vehicles outnumber drivers in the United States. Bigger stables of cars mean more less-practical, single-purpose rides and fewer one-size-fits-all machines. “Americans are getting some on the side,” suggested MacDonald, continuing the love affair metaphor, “whereas Canadians are monogamous, or even celibate.”
For many families, this reliance on a single vehicle means driving a minivan. In fact, minivans are twice as popular north of the border because they are cheaper and better on gas than SUVs and are more understated, just like the people who own them. American values, it turns out, are close to those of typical SUV drivers, while the values of Canadians and minivan drivers are similar. “We are,” confessed MacDonald, “the quintessential minivan nation.”
TO SERIOUS CAR LOVERS, the thought of their beloved machine being dismissed as something akin to what they’d find in a kitchen is more than a little unsettling. For his part, auto journalist David Booth doesn’t even believe the numbers. The publisher and editor of Autovision magazine and columnist with the National Post is a wound-up, fast-talking guy who swears with abandon, doesn’t mind indulging in hyperbole and calls environmentalists enviroweenies. Balding, he keeps his hair closely cropped, has a goatee and wore a black T-shirt the day I met him at his suburban Toronto office. He said he had only ten minutes as we sat down in a lunchroom, and after fifteen minutes asked me to walk with him to the Acura CSX he was reviewing. Even as he drove away, leaving me standing in the middle of the street, he was still talking excitedly. He was skeptical of the Environics research because he’s convinced people don’t want to publicly admit, “I bought this car with my heart.” So they make up an excuse. He pointed out that the Ford 500 and the Chrysler 300 came out at about the same time. “One appeals to the brain—the Ford 500—and the other appeals to the heart—the Chrysler 300,” he said, noting that while the powerful and impressive-looking 300 has been a huge success, “Ford comes up with this bland thing and they can’t fucking give them away.”
Less aggressively, Wayne Cherry, retired vice-president of design at General Motors, suggested that style and image are more important than many people realize. “I hate to talk about people who think about cars as appliances, but I know there are some out there,” he admitted before laughing ruefully. “But given that, some appliances are better looking than other appliances.” Indeed, even those new car buyers who just want something to get from A to B may compare several similarly priced practical models and end up buying the most attractive one. That’s why he couldn’t completely shake his skepticism about people who say design would never influence their buying decisions. “And here they’ve got the very latest suit cut, the right lapels, the tie, the shoes,” he pointed out. “A lot of it is subconscious. Something looks right. Some people say they wouldn’t buy something for the looks, but subconsciously they do.”
I wasn’t surprised that an auto journalist and a car designer would make such arguments, but I also ran the results of the survey by a few other people, including a couple of car dealers, the people in the auto industry closest to the consumer. Mike Shanahan is a guy I played hockey with for many years, though I hadn’t seen him for a while when I drove up to Shanahan Ford Lincoln Sales in Newmarket, Ontario. A strapping guy with a bushy moustache and huge hands that dwarfed mine—his handshake stopped a little short of crushing—he is the fourth generation of his family in the vehicle business: his great grandfather started making buggies and sleighs in 1880, his grandfather manufactured bumpers and motor bodies and his father opened a Ford dealership in 1965. In 1974, as a sixteenyear-old high-school student, Shanahan spent the summer working for his father as an apprentice mechanic. He’s been with the company ever since and now owns it.
He sat behind his big wooden desk in an office decorated with a model ship, nautical paintings and an old musket. Behind him, eight scale model cars—including an Edsel, a Cadillac and a Fairlane—sat on a credenza. “Interestingly enough, once I got into the car business I fell out of love with cars,” said Shanahan, who
grew up a big fan of auto and drag racing. He last owned his own vehicle, a five-year-old Pinto, in 1979. Since then he’s driven an ever-changing array of company cars, usually the dealership’s flagship or hottest-selling product. “To me, those aren’t automobiles and trucks out there on the lot. That’s $6.1 million in new cars and $710,000 in used cars. And if you ever take your eye off that ball, that’s when you get in trouble in this business. Then you become the bar owner who loves booze.”
Despite his own mercenary relationship with the car, he strongly dismissed the idea that his customers see their automobiles as appliances. For downtowners, a car might be a necessary evil, but not for most of the people living forty-five kilometres north in Newmarket. “People are very interested in what their vehicle looks like in their driveway. It’s amazing listening to people argue about what side of the driveway they get—it’s like what side of the bed!” said Shanahan. “A real estate agent who shows houses around here will tell you, ‘Look at the cars in the neighbourhood. Don’t just look at the houses; the cars will tell you the personality of the people who live there.’”
Although this fast-growing suburb of more than seventy-seven thousand is no longer a farming community, the residents still love their trucks. In fact, roughly 65 percent of Shanahan’s sales are pickups and SUVs. Of course, today’s pickups are a long way from the bare-bones vehicles with sheet-metal dashboards and bench seats that I remember from my summer jobs in the 1970s and 1980s. But beyond the newfound comfort and the addition of luxurious features, Shanahan thinks the popularity of the pickup has a lot to do with the “psyche of room” that attracts city dwellers to a place like Newmarket. “People say, ‘I’m going to move out of the city and I’m going to own a truck.’ On Saturday, they want to be able to drive to the Home Depot and maybe they’ll buy a box of nails, but they won’t put it in the cab, they’re going to put it in the box of the truck.” The pickup, in other words, is a functional vehicle that many people buy for the sake of image.
Next, I went to visit Ken Shaw, Jr., who co-owns Ken Shaw Lexus Toyota, a dealership in Toronto, with his brother. Like Shanahan, he started out working for his dad; unlike Shanahan, he prefers to stick to one car, a Lexus RX. “When you’re in the car business, people think it’s glamorous to have a new car every two weeks, but I just like having my own,” he said. “I know where my sunglasses are and where my CDs are and I guess after all the years I’ve been in the business there are not too many cars that make me wild. If someone said, ‘What would you drive if money was no object?’ Maybe some of the exotics—a Ferrari or something—but it’s not practical and I would never spend my money on it.”
Toyota is a brand that built its reputation on value, and while he wouldn’t want to put it quite as coldly as comparing a car to an appliance, he admitted there’s a difference between an intellectual purchase and an emotional one. “The Toyota buyer typically buys with his brain not his heart. He’s not riding that roller coaster of adrenalin,” Shaw said. “When people buy a Camry, they’re using their head: they know the reliability, the quality issues, they know the resale values. Somebody who buys a Mustang would be on a much higher high than somebody who buys a Camry.”
Or maybe the buying decision is akin to finding the right settings on a stereo equalizer. “You’ve got all these bars that equalize the sound,” said Dave Kelso. “So this one over here might be financial. This is what your grandfather said. This is what your neighbour said. And these are your practical needs. So how do you like your stereo to sound? That’s what car you’re going to buy.”
Even if a growing number of people see their cars as closer to an appliance than a status symbol or personal statement, that doesn’t mean they’re willing to give up their wheels. Not even our aging demographics will change that. David MacDonald was at a conference where some people were suggesting that when the baby boom generation retires, the car market will suffer because retired couples will need only one car. He and his colleagues thought that was “a crock,” and to prove it they said to everyone in the room, “Okay, stand up if you and your spouse both own cars now.” Then they said, “Okay, sit down if you will be the one to give up your car.” No one sat down. MacDonald’s conclusion: “That speaks to the love affair. It’s not just the physical car, it’s also the idea of mobility and freedom.”
Before I left his office, he assured me, “Even though Canadians are more rational in our love affair with cars, we do love cars and we can’t imagine life without them.”
“Do you agree it’s a love–hate relationship?” I asked.
“I’d say it’s mostly love. It’s not the first year of lust, it’s like a marriage: there are spats along the way, but it’s not hate,” he said. “Definitely not hate.”
IF THAT WAS TRUE IN CANADA, then I was excited to find out what it was like on the other side of the border. When I finally rolled to the head of the line, the guards were in the midst of a midday shift change. A tall, thin older man was just finishing up, and a younger woman with dark hair was taking over. The man started the questions, and when I explained that I was driving to Los Angeles to research car culture, the woman asked why I needed to do it in the United States.
“When it comes to cars,” I responded, “America’s the place, isn’t it?”
“No,” said the man, as he walked away from the booth. “It’s Japan.”
Now, it’s no secret that the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—are facing some hard times even as several of their foreign rivals go from strength to strength, but I didn’t expect to hear something so treasonous, so soon, from someone who works so close to Motor City. And yet it didn’t take long before I began to wonder if he wasn’t on to something. I knew I would see cars from around the world in big cities, especially LA, but I expected there’d be little but American cars in Michigan and the heartland. As I drove through the suburban sprawl around Detroit, it became clear my expectation of a steely allegiance to American cars in Michigan was positively naive. I saw a lot more Cadillacs than I see in Toronto, but I also saw many Toyotas, Hondas, BMWs and other non-American cars—rides that not too long ago many people considered un-American. That was my first surprise.
3 Detroit
Motor City Sadness
SHORTLY AFTER 5 P.M. on the first day of my road trip, I drove from Sterling Heights to Novi, Michigan, along roads and highways that were in surprisingly bad shape. Back home, I would do just about anything to avoid being in my car—especially on a highway—at the peak of rush hour. So I was thrilled to be able to bomb along at or above the speed limit, which much to my delight was seventy miles per hour—a speed I’m not legally allowed to travel anywhere in Ontario, where the top speed limit is one hundred kilometres per hour (about sixty-two miles per hour). But while the light traffic may be a pleasure for drivers, it says a lot about the health of the Detroit area. As director of transportation systems for Toronto, Les Kelman has a tough job, but he’s glad he does: “Never wish congestion away,” he warned me, “because if you want to see a city without congestion, you’ll find a city with high unemployment rates, high vacancy rates and an incredibly depressed economy. Congestion is a sign of success.”
Detroit was once one of the most successful cities in the United States. In 1950, when cars were American and no one thought that would ever change, close to 1.85 million people lived there. Even in 1970, after the population had slipped to just over 1.5 million, Motown was the fifth-largest city in the country and an essential engine of the national economy. When I was in Detroit in 2000, on a road trip to Tiger Stadium before it closed, a cab driver pointed to an abandoned train station and said that when he first arrived in the city as a ten-year-old, the place was so crowded that his mother made him hold her hand. But the downtown diaspora started long before foreign automakers became a serious threat to the Big Three. As in many other American cities, new suburban freeways made nearby communities more attractive while the construction of inner-city freeways ma
de the core less appealing. Worse, although the city boasted the highest rate of home ownership among blacks in the country, many of the communities destroyed to make room for the expressways and so-called urban renewal projects were African-American ones. The historic Black Bottom neighbourhood, just east of downtown, for example, gave way to Interstate 75 (also known as the Chrysler Freeway) and Lafayette Park, a seventy-eight-acre project featuring apartment buildings designed by renowned architect Mies van der Rohe. This development exacerbated simmering racial tensions that eventually exploded into violence during the infamous Twelfth Street Riot in 1967. (Though Gordon Lightfoot wrote the song “Black Day in July” about it, the riot actually lasted several days.)
White flight from the city accelerated in the following years and, during the 1970s, it accounted for much of the more than 20 percent decline in the population. Today, Detroit is a rust-belt donut city with a population of just over 886,000 at the centre of a metropolitan area that’s home to almost 4.5 million people. Unemployment is high in the suburbs, and higher in the city. And racial politics—invariably fraught at the best of times—complicate the relations between the city and its suburbs because more than 80 percent of Detroit is black while the surrounding municipalities are mostly white. On our 2000 trip, my friends and I looked out the car window in amazement as we drove through poverty and urban decay we had never imagined could exist in North America and then crossed into predominantly white Grosse Pointe, where we saw imposing mansions and massive manicured lawns that made the ritzy sections of Toronto seem modest.
That sequestered wealth is a lavish reminder of what Motor City once was. But while Detroit may no longer be a great metropolis, it was the obvious first stop on my journey for both geographic reasons—it’s just four hours from Toronto—and historical ones. If I wanted to understand our relationship with the automobile, I needed to learn about the lucrative past, rocky present and uncertain future of the industry that built the American dream machine.