http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11677325/site/newsweek/
Detroit Muscles Up
Hold the obit! Motown finds some new life by reviving its monster hits of the motorway.
By Keith Naughton
Newsweek
March 13, 2006 issue - GM chief designer Ed Welburn sweeps into his Chevrolet design studio and it's as if he were stepping back in time. On one side of the cavernous white room, designers huddle over a silver retro remake of the Chevy Camaro. A few steps away, stylists scurry around a future Chevy family car that ripples with sinewy muscles from a bygone era. Papering the walls of the studio are photos of classic iron from Detroit's halcyon postwar years—the chiseled '65 Chevy Impala, the jet-age '65 Ford Galaxie, the long-nosed '65 Plymouth Fury. Welburn slowly walks around the work-in-progress family car, inspecting the latest nips and tucks. Suddenly, he notices an 18-inch clay model on a table nearby that offers an alternative take on the car with a gull-winged rear end. "Oh, my God," the normally soft-spoken designer shouts. "That rear is unbelievable! It links all the way back to the late '50s."
Detroit, desperate for a few hits, is driving in a new direction: back to its glory days, when its swaggering sedans and pumped-up muscle cars were the monsters of the motorway. Motown's hottest sellers—the hip-hop Chrysler 300C, the in-your-face Ford Fusion, the vintage Chevy HHR—all share an open-throttle American esthetic. Sales of a half-dozen new American-roots models are up 21 percent so far this year over the final two months of last year, and they're selling without the typical big Detroit discount. The stars of this year's auto-show circuit are remakes of classic American muscle: the Camaro and Dodge Challenger, which, just like back in the day, are gunning for the hot new (or is it old?) Mustang. "There's enormous good will for the glory days of American cars, when they really were American and didn't try to be Japanese or German," says GM car czar Bob Lutz. "We all recently discovered that was a gold mine we had left fallow for a couple decades."
Detroit could sure use some gold. Years of chasing the Japanese have left Motown facing its own mortality. GM could be surpassed by Toyota this year as the world's No. 1 automaker. Ford, which once posted BEAT CAMRY signs in its design studios, has shrunk from 25.5 percent of the American car market in 1998 to just 18.2 percent today. For two decades, the Big Three spent billions copying Toyota's factories in hopes of matching its topnotch quality. Yet for all the gains Detroit has made, it still can't catch up. Last week, Consumer Reports named all Japanese cars as its top picks for 2006. But Detroit's back catalog of hot cars is emerging as the one clear advantage it has over its foreign rivals. And it's not just sports cars. The Dodge Charger steroidal family sedan could sell more than 120,000 copies this year. "The Japanese can't manufacture this kind of heritage," says Peter DeLorenzo, editor of autoextremist.com. "But if you have it and can bring it forward, it can be a game changer."