[LINK] "The rise and fall of Detroit as the driving force in the car world"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Peter Cheney describes the collapse of Detroit as the symbolic heart of the global automotive industry, or even the North American one.

[D]oes Detroit still matter?

There was a time when no one could imagine that this question would ever be asked. In the 1960s, Detroit bestrode the car world like a colossus. This was the town that invented mass production, then fine-tuned the marketing systems that endlessly stoked the fires of consumer demand – Detroit turned the car into a status symbol, up-sold buyers with ever-expanding option lists and instituted the annual model change.

Today, Detroit is producing the best cars it has ever made. And yet, the city is a fallen empire and the gravitational centre of the auto industry it spawned has moved elsewhere. Gone are the days of Henry Ford’s famous, vertically integrated River Rouge complex, where ships and trains unloaded millions of tons of steel ore and timber at one end, and finished cars rolled out the other. Today’s manufacturing is defined by a decentralized supply system in which components flow in from around the world for final assembly in plants dominated by robots.

And when those new assembly plants are built, it’s not in Detroit – it’s in Mexico, China or right-to-work states in the Southern United States. Even more damaging to Detroit than the shift in physical operations is the relocation of the auto industry’s intellectual axis. When the next great shifts in automotive transportation are discussed, the conversation no longer centres on Detroit – instead, the cutting-edge is in Silicon Valley, Calif., where Google and Apple are focusing on a world where cars drive themselves and sales are no longer driven by social status and consumer aspiration.

For decades, Detroit shrugged off small, non-traditional competitors as irrelevant, and assumed its own massive scale and deep well of manufacturing and engineering talent would keep it on top of the automotive hill.

But now it finds itself in a world where technological disruption and social shift have altered the rules. The Big Three are regarded as legacy firms. When the talk turns to automotive cool and industrial innovation, the company on everyone’s lips is Tesla Motors, an upstart California firm that has played David to Detroit’s Goliath, designing and building the world’s finest electric car while its chief executive simultaneously crafts cutting-edge space ships.