Green Green, It's Green They Say

Mickey Kaus, who regularly writes about Washington politics, as well as the aesthetics of cars, is naturally blogging up a storm about the auto bailouts. As always, he's less than impressed with how industry leaders comport themselves. He's especially unimpressed by GM exec Bob Lutz. Lutz believes the Prius gave Toyota a good image, so the peope naturally bought their products.

Here's what Kaus has to say:

Lutz can't possibly be enough of a moron to believe that the Prius and its "halo effect" are a primary reason for Toyota's ascendancy. Toyota has been ascendant for at least three decades, and GM declining, for a simple reason: Toyota built cars that worked ("bulletproof," as they say) at a time when GM built cars that didn't work. That's what was "drawing people to Toyota lots" a generation before the Prius was conceived. Even today, when GM suffers "under the perception that they [are] saddled with cars of inferior quality," you only have to look at the Consumer Reports reliability ratings to see that the reason GM is saddled with this perception is that the perception is accurate. (The Cadillac CTS that Lutz boasts about, for example, may be a great performer. But it's still so unreliable that Consumer Reports can't recommend it. The beautiful Pontiac Solstice, which Lutz championed, has a true crap record. The Prius, meanwhile, is spectacularly reliable.)

For those three decades of Japanese market surge, much of the talk of Detroit executives has been an attempt to dance around the central issue of reliability and 'build quality,' and the inability of Detroit to provide it. For most of Lutz's career, he played down the importance of Japanese reliability by talking up the "romance" of the Euro-style sports cars and American muscle cars he (rightly) liked. Now he plays down the importance of Japanese reliability by talking up the "halo effect" that a cutting-edge "green" car can create with bicoastal elites (whom he doesn't like) and the media.

I've always driven American cars, but most of my friends went foreign. I assume they did it for the reason anyone buys anything--best combination of quality and price. Maybe they had false perceptions, but were millions fooled?

Some decades ago, GM practically had the market to itself. It learned a lot of bad habits, and couldn't adapt when new competition came along. Now with the government messing around, I have even less confidence.

Growing up in Detroit, General Motors was the company. (It was also the biggest corporation in the world.) I've been driving a GM for the last several years, but I think there's a Ford in my future.