I like restaurants that have photographs on the walls showing their towns in times past. Last weekend, I was in one with a picture of people lined up to get into the Bavarian Inn in Frankenmuth. Judging from their clothes and the cars, it was from the late 1940s.
Another diner near me has a large photo of Cadillac Square in what I am pretty sure is 1915. There are still some horse-drawn buggies on the street, but not many. Mostly there are cars.
In another picture taken five years later, the horses are all gone. Progress and change are sometime swift. Henry Ford sped up the total victory of the automotive era with the Model T and the assembly line. But it still took a while to put the buggy whip boys out of business.
Now, both the North American International Auto Show, and the auto industry itself, are changing. I knew that, of course, but it was newly impressed upon me yesterday afternoon by a couple of friends who grew up in Detroit but now live in Washington, and who flew back to take in the auto show. They weren’t very impressed by this year’s show itself.
Oh, they did find some pockets of cool. But they noticed many European manufacturers skipped the show this year. Other out-of-town journalists who came told me that by and large there seemed something a bit tired about this auto show.
But what amazed my Washington friends, one who whom worked downtown in the 1980s, was the progress in the city. They couldn’t stop talking about the revitalized downtown, and despite the cold, spent time after the show walking around and staring.
They aren’t naïve; they are trained journalists who work for national publications. Yes, they know many of the neighborhoods are still grim, though at least they now have streetlights. But while we who have been living here tend to see the remaining flaws in the city’s comeback, those who have been gone awhile see amazing things in a city the world gave up as dead.
Detroit may get more of a boost in the summer of 2020, when the North American International Auto Show moves to June. Detroit in January is usually horrible, as note Monday’s cold and today’s freezing rain. Detroit in early summer is usually wonderful.
I have no idea what the auto show will be like then, but the organizers are almost certain to put some of it outside, and will hopefully stage some events on the glittering riverfront.
The auto industry is changing dramatically, but then, it always has. The dealer network we take for granted today was once new; so were other exciting developments like automatic transmissions and four-wheel drive and cars with radios.
Nobody really knows much will change and how fast things will change in this industry, but I think two things are clear. First, automobiles, trucks and SUVs and anything people use to get around, are now extremely complex machines, and getting more so.
Second, having an automobile, being on the open road free to determine where you will go is as alluring now as it was to the masses who bought Model Ts a century ago.
Millennials may be less willing to fight traffic jams to get to work. Fewer may be crazy about cars. But one survey showed 84 percent of them feel they can’t live without access to one. The decline of the auto industry, like that of Detroit, may have been considerably exaggerated.
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