Part 16b: Facing the Changed World
Nobody had any idea of what the 2020s would bring for much of humanity, but humans being who they are, adapting was just a matter of time and effort, and so it was in America. The need to rebuild a vast amount of infrastructure in the 2020s led to Detroit having to focus quite a lot of efforts on the production of machinery and equipment to do so, and its not coincidence that all of a sudden the need for vehicles with work needs, from pickup trucks to construction equipment to locomotives and rail cars, began to take up a lot of the resources of the Detroit makers. But after that job began to be put in order, life went largely back to normal, though more prosperous than ever.
Detroit's vehicle cycles slowed dramatically in the early 2020s, but after that they accelerated back up to speed in their usual way. By now, electric cars were in demand, though not quite yet up to the demands of their internal combustion engine-driven counterparts, and hydrogen fuel cells, thanks in large part to high-temperature nuclear reactors and the hydrogen they could create as part of normal operation, were getting to be usable (though expensive) as vehicle propulsion devices. The potential safety issues with hydrogen fuel cells meant that they were still largely on the back burner, but the battle for the future of the car was very much under way in Europe, Japan and North America. Following the development of the "Nuclear Charge" system by Altairnano, Western Electric and Better Place Technologies was followed in 2020 by the Advanced Nanoelectric Energy Supply System (ANESS), which was in developed by Phillips, Renesas, Centrica and Gurney Austin Rover and the similar Electric Car Operation Power System (ECOPS) by the Renault-Nissan-American Motors alliance (supported by Toshiba, RCA and American Nuclear Corporation). All three systems did largely the same thing in the same manner, though ECOPS differed in the use of lithium-ion batteries. The three alliances in the fall of 2020 agreed to develop a similar connector which all of their designs would use from 2023. The result was the SAE J2255 connector, which provided all of the power needed by any of the systems. An attempt by the three alliances to lock up patent rights for such cars or the J2255 connector was ended by the American courts in 2025, and so while the automakers could claim patent protection for the developed systems, they could not claim royalties for the connectors or the basic design ideas, so long as they were not blatant copies. These systems began being developed by makers all over the world. The basic need of the lithium-air batteries used by the Nuclear Charge and ANESS systems limited their usefulness in some cars, and so the system began to be less used. The Alliance makers developed systems to convert any of their electric-powered cars to the use of the ECOPS system, however, a fact which proved to be beneficial for many owners of older Nissan, Renault and AMC vehicles with such battery packs.
On the alcohol front, the growth in production of both ethanol from cellulose and methanol from bioalcohol methods made sure that there was much life left in the internal combustion engine yet beyond gasoline, and the cellulosic ethanol system had the advantage of being able to be used without problems with corrosion to aluminum components in an engine. By now, few engines had cast-iron engine blocks as the overwhelming majority were by now made from aluminum, but cars in the 2010s and 2020s began to use engines made from composites and ceramic components. Mechanical valve timing began to be replaced by systems using pneumatics or hydraulics in this time period as well, with the most advanced systems soon using electromechanical valve timing controlled by the engine's ECU. These systems promised to be the way of the future, but concerns over reliability and the possibility of electrical problems making engines inoperable made sure that this system was slow to develop, particularly as other mechanical ways of changing valve timing such as three-dimensional cam lobes (a Ferrari development), helical camshafts (GM was the first to make this idea a production reality) and eccentric cam drives (Gurney Austin Rover developed these in the 2000s) made for continuing advancements. Use of direct-cylinder fuel injection also added to the development of the internal combustion engine.
By the early 2020s, the "Big Five", as the North American automakers were usually called, were busy with developments in their product lines as well as in their technologies. All five were competitors in the car markets from small hatchbacks to the biggest sedans, as well as in most other markets. There were exceptions to this, though - Chrysler and AMC's domination of the minivan market (along with Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Volkswagen) was so complete that the other three didn't bother with it, and the large SUV market was overwhelmingly dominated by the Chevrolet Tahoe/Suburban and GMC Yukon twins as well as the Ford Expedition. Magna hadn't yet made a full-size pickup truck, but such a buyer had the Chevrolet Silverado/GMC Sierra, Ford F-150, Dodge Ram 1500 and the Jeep Commander, as well as the Toyota Tundra and Nissan Titan, to pick from. There were few areas where the companies didn't compete, but even inside the home market there were varying degrees of focus. Ford's "world car" Fiesta, Focus, Mondeo and Reflex cars and their Kuga / Escape and Explorer SUVs, as well as the ubiquitous Transit van, made sure that they largely made cars for worldwide markets. GM, by contrast, used its enormous engineering staff to make cars for each individual market, though they did try early and often to make common chassis and components. GM also tended more towards local manufacture of vehicles, tolerating the higher costs of this by pointing out the advantages of local employment and shorter parts supply lines. Chrysler and AMC, the former joined at the hip with Peugeot-Citroen, owning Subaru and importing Reynard and the latter part of the three-way merger with Renault and Nissan, tended to do some of both as well as give up some market share to their corporate cousins. (GM also did this to an extent with Alfa Romeo.) As duplication became concerning for a lot of the automakers' management, particularly at GM, they began to also reduce in North America their massive dealer network, a decision that in a lot of cases helped everyone - in hundreds of cases, foreign makers seeking to set up or add to existing dealer networks tended to bring on board a lot of these abandoned dealers. It also meant that those automakers who learned from past mistakes would be able to work within the American market in this way.
Several of the automakers who had entered the American market sought for this way to work, and success was mixed - Perodua eventually gave up and pulled out, as did Japanese automaker Daihatsu. On the flip side, Perodua's Malaysian competitor Proton did well and perhaps even more stunningly was the arrival in Canada, and eventually into the United States, of Russian firms Avtovaz and Marussia, the latter selling thousands of its F2 and F5 SUVs in the North American marketplace and eventually also selling the Hunter small sedan and Blista small compact in the North American market as well. Despite the efforts, over 75% of the American auto market remained in the hands of the Big Five, with the Canadian market massively dominated by Magna, Chrysler and GM (Ford and AMC trailed them, but remained competitive) and Mexico being dominated by the Detroit makers as well. Despite that, it was quite clear that good cars didn't always come from the most likely of places, and while Detroit had a lead, the rivals - be they from established Europe or Japan and Korea or less-established Malaysia, India, South Africa and Russia - didn't waste any time trying to pick up the pace.
A Marussia F2 on the stand at the 2015 Toronto International Auto Show
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You'd figure if the Russians could make any car worth a crap, it would be this sort of thing. I mean, huge, cold country with rather poor roads, you'd better have a good four-wheel-drive, right? Clearly somebody in Moscow thought the same thing, and then thought 'Why do I need to buy a Range Rover from England when I could do something like it here?' That's the Marussia F2 in a nutshell. Subtlety is sure as hell not a strong point. But get over the overbutch styling and deal with the terrible gas mileage and you discover that this is a comfortable truck, surprisingly quick, surefooted on-road and off and tough enough to win a fight with a locomotive. A Russian Land Rover? You bet. If you like comfortable trucks that don't hide, this is your rig, right here."
-- Motor Trend's first review of the 2016 Marussia F2 SUV
A 2014 Proton Suprima S, one of the first Protons to do well in the North American market
It also didn't take long for the Detroit makers to spread into new markets. Flush with cash from home markets even with the higher development and promotional costs, the companies expanded in places all over the world. Renault and Nissan networks around the world also began the selling of American Motors products in the 2000s and Chrysler also used the networks of Peugeot and Citroen around the same time period, but for Ford and GM it was nothing less than the task of building their own networks, which they did with some success over time and by the 2020s were strong in most of the world, but some were better in some areas. In India it was most important to get going - the subcontinent was one of the fastest growing economies in the world from about 1991 onwards, and their path of economic liberalization was rapid between 1991 and 2007, though the world's economic crisis of 2008 and then the two years or so after the Ichinsky eruption and the climate chaos it caused amounted to huge bumps in the road. India's problems with repeated flooding in the 2020s added to the problems, but by the end of the decade they had largely licked that problem and water supplies in much of the subcontinent had led to India becoming a food exporter, a situation it had never been before then. Reynard, which had jumped into India in 2011 to combat the Tata Nano, was encouraged by its majority owners in Chrysler to advance this, and as India got wealthier, so did Chrysler's interest in it. Chrysler ultimately took advantage of Reynard's network by buying into the Indian and South Asian divisions of the South African automaker, as well as conceding Reynard the right to sell Chrysler's cars in Sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of the decade, Reynard's position in India, Iran and Africa was such that there was talk of a second grand alliance of automakers between Chrysler, Reynard and Peugeot-Citroen.
GM and Ford took much of their efforts to Latin America as well as Europe. GM's European divisions had long been players across all markets, not dominant in any one particular market - Volkswagen was dominant in Germany and Spain, Fiat in Italy, Gurney Austin Rover in the British Isles and Renault and Peugeot-Citroen in France and the Benelux countries - but both were strong in all of them, with GM and particularly good in Eastern Europe (Poland and the Czech Republic in particular) and Ford holding down a comfortable #2 spot in the British Isles. In Latin America, despite strong pushes by Honda and the Europeans, Detroit held good positions, a situation that got better as wealth grew and the cars sold changed as well.
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The Automobile market is a global one now. Yes, each nation has its own laws and customs and driving styles and ways of using automobiles, but when you get right down to it many of the same cars use the same chassis and engines for a reason. That chassis has to be good enough and that engine strong and powerful enough to be used for all of the purposes that we need it to be, but if it is that way, how often can it be used? You can buy the Spirit or Ambassador or Eagle in dozens of different countries around the world and while it will not be exactly the same, it's lineage is obvious. And its not just us doing that - GM, Ford, Chrysler, Magna, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, they all do the same thing. They have to, because not only can this platform work worldwide, it allows worldwide resources to get it right and a more refined product as a result. I'm proud to say our colleagues at Renault in France and Nissan in Japan and everywhere else in the world help American Motors make better products, and I certainly hope that our efforts are beneficial in their efforts to make greater cars for the world. It's how this company and its partners to business."
-- American Motors President Mitt Romney, Speaking to Society of Automotive Engineers' National Conference in Los Angeles, March 2016
In Detroit, the engineering staff always found time to dream, and so GM, Chrysler and Ford all introduced supercar flagships in the 2010s - the Cadillac Cien, Chrysler ME-412 and Ford Shelby Daytona GR2. Names aside, there was a reason these cars were for real, namely to show that among the prospering 2010s, if somebody wanted a big-buck machine, they could get it from Detroit. Of these three, the ME-412 - the name standing for
Mid-
Engined,
4 Turbochargers and
12 Cylinders - was the rocketship of the bunch. Capable of racing to sixty miles an hour in 3.1 seconds, through the quarter-mile in 10.9 seconds and a top speed of 224 miles per hour, the ME-412 was the beast of the bunch, and its 6.5-liter quad-turbo V12 engine, made from two combined Pentastar V6s, was itself a new advancement through the use of power take-off from the center of the engine and a gearbox forward of the engine, with a driveshaft for the rear running along side of the engine. Dry-sump oiling and clever design allowed the whole works to fit well, and the Pentastar V12 became known for both its fast revving and strong reliability, though maintenance in many cases wasn't easy. Cadillac's Cien also used a bespoke V12 engine, based from a 7.5-liter Northstar V12 engine, but the Cien was a traditional rear-wheel drive chassis, though it used a double-clutch gearbox (a first for GM) and used many innovative techniques in its construction. Slower to accelerate and slower in top speed than the Chrysler, the Cien did become known for its incredibly-good handling and being comfortable and refined to drive at any speed, a true Gran Turismo.
A 2016 Cadillac Cien supercar
A 2017 Chrysler ME412, photographed in New York with the Statue of Liberty in the background
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Some people said that the ME412 was probably just made to appease Chrysler's bosses who wanted to show the guys at Peugeot that they could make a supercar. They might have even been right. But any idiot could tell one thing about the ME412 - one of those sold a heckuva lot of 200s and 300s and Imperials."
-- Andrew Ribiero, For Speed and Power, 2028
Japan, racked in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 tsunami and its economic problems after that, spent much of the 2010s focusing on how to work better in the world that they faced after that, but one reality sunk in hard for Japan - it couldn't economically survive without making its export industries more productive, and they couldn't do that while their markets and society was as closed as it was. The society that had brought a nation from devastated by war to one of the world's economic powerhouses in a generation was badly damaged by its economic problems, social issues and calcification of its society. Indeed, countering that had a price of its own, namely that they had to open their markets. They did this in the 2010s, focusing their efforts on building a new economy. This included a push to expand its economy into other creative areas. Japan began pushing its cars in the same way Detroit did, pushing its efforts upmarket while at the same time opening its own markets. Detroit took this on, and particularly in the aftermath of the tsunami and the devastation it caused, American cars swelled in popularity in the Land of the Rising Sun - but that was also proving true in reverse in America. The wish to search for new ways of doing life also saw Japan make considerable efforts at immigration reform and pushing a growth in birth rates, but the first effort ran into some issues with ethnic bias and the second ran into issues with the harsh life that many white-collar Japanese workers lived. Both problems, however, began to sink away, and as they did Japan got rather better at the design game. By the 2020s, they were genuine rivals to American and European makers across the world, and by then high-style design became something that the Japanese south to master.
After Ichinsky and the climate change, the world's industries woke up to find out that there was much more life in the nations of the Southern Hemisphere and the Third World. Food production in the world grew by over 25% between 2020 and 2030 and kept on going, while the gradual expansion of recycling in nations around the world kept up supplies of many materials needed for the world economy. The overall result was a growing economy across nearly the whole world in the 2020s - where the fastest development in the first world was in North America. Concerns about climate problems and a changing society resulted in growing populations in warmer cities and prospering regions. The baby boom that had sprouted in many of America's larger cities in the 2010s exploded pretty much nationwide by the 2020s, with the largest growth in populations happening in Hispanic and African-American populations, and a long boom of Indian-American populations also came during this decade. With the cities being hotbeds of activity, many of the people came to these. Compounding matters was the fact that concerns over the lifestyle of suburban dwellers caused many of the outer suburbs of cities to continue emptying while closer-in ones grew denser as development modified these. Mixed-use buildings, an American innovation in the first place more promoted in other nations, also began taking hold in many major projects in cities. For many of these people, cars began less necessities of life and more things that were fun to have, but lower transport costs and higher average incomes meant that higher disposable income was the reality for most, which manifested itself in higher standards of living in much of America, and for sales of fun cars, style cars and bigger machines to swell with the income.
Barack Obama's re-election in 2020 came in the middle of the time of concern, and Obama was able to push through several major advancements in America's energy infrastructure changes in 2021 and 2022. Among these was the ability for municipalities to enforce congestion charges into major cities, which some did, and a rise in fuel taxes to focus on improving mass transit infrastructure. GM and Chrysler even supported that - both had major investments in divisions which made transit vehicles. Obama's re-election wasn't an easy one - Republican rivals Chris Christie and Marco Rubio made it a tougher fight than many expected - but he came out of it with a real set of proposals from the other side. The Republicans, not particularly a fan of mass transit proposals, proposed instead to massively expand roadways into several major highways but trying to move people to smaller cars through very large taxes on large vehicles - a move which lost them a sizable portion of the vote in the Rust Belt. Detroit stayed quite openly with the plans to massively expand mass transit systems, and many developers advanced the idea of underground passageways and corridors or underground malls and promenades in major cities, with much inspiration coming from cities with underground tunnel systems (Houston and Toronto being two notable examples) and cities with Skyway bridges linking many buildings (Minneapolis and Calgary had the two longest systems).
It didn't bother many in Detroit that cars were becoming more boutique items for many in the cities - underground garages and storage spaces for cars were common in many cities, and the boutique, sports and luxury cars that saw their market share grow were areas where Detroit was in good standing, with one graphic example being that 2023 was the first year since 1981 where the "pony car" quintuplet - Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenge, AMC Javelin and Pontiac Firebird - sold a combined over 1 million units. One could buy trucks or vans in all matter of sizes from Detroit (and indeed now from Toyota, Nissan and Volkswagen), and SUVs began to be more style statements and be equipped with greater luxuries. One could still buy a stripped-down work truck - but not many did. With power everything, air conditioning, double-clutch or automated manual gearboxes and good seats being almost de rigeur on work vehicles in America, the old myth of the hard day's work driving such a vehicle was rapidly becoming less of a chore, even in the traffic of densely-populated cities like New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Boston or Atlanta. By now, many car dealers also stocked motorcycles - a point first seen by BMW and Honda dealers, but it did not escape Ford's notice that a sizable number of Ford car dealers also began taking on Kawasaki motorcycle dealerships. With boutique carmakers able to come up much more easily than huge-market builders, the top of the American auto market became full of builders of expensive luxury or sports cars, which Detroit in some cases openly encouraged.
In this environment, makers of sports cars which those with higher incomes could afford abounded. DeLorean, Saleen, Vector, Mosler and Shelby built sports cars of various levels for enthusiasts while Saleen and Shelby also made seriously-hopped up Mustangs. DeLorean's immense plant at Lordstown, Ohio, became more of a complete building facility and was expanded over time to allow for new paint shops, foundries, stamping and molding plants and recycling facilities, the huge plants turning eastern Ohio into a sportscar mecca and giving a new reason for being for the old Nelson Ledges road course, which became where every Lordstown-built DeLorean was tested from the mid-1980s onward. Vector moved its facilities from Florida to an immense brownfield site in the Hazelwood district of Pittsburgh in 2008, a move which would soon also seem them often using Nelson Ledges for testing and which was done after investors funded the construction of a $110 million facility for the company. These firms prospered as the wealthy country provided a good market for their products, and they also frequently would end up battling each other on the racetrack for supremacy, as well as with the Big Three automakers themselves and other specialist carmakers from the around the world. Outside of the sportscar world cars were still being made for fun, too - AMC's long-time hold on the off-road fun vehicle market was busted open by Ford's ambitious EX off-road buggy, and even makers of large trucks began to take notice of the need to be ambitious in style with such trucks as International chrome-nosed LoneStar and Peterbilt's monstrous Generation Two being rather more styled than the norm for Class 8 trucks.
A 2019 Freightliner Generation Two
A 2023 Vector R16 Origin
A 2015 Vector W8 Turbo II
TBC....
