Detroit Auto Show Aftermath: The rationalizations, the excuses and the "What the Hell were you thinking?”

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

Detroit. I get it, I really do. Auto executives at the Detroit Auto Show really don’t want to hear any discouraging words. They want to strut their stuff, bask in the glow, make their dealers feel like they’re truly special, emerge unscathed from interviews - hopefully with the media having dutifully regurgitated what they said in the most favorable terms – and move on to the NADA coming up this weekend with nary a discouraging word to be had.

That’s a noble and completely rational desire, but it also requires a complete cessation of reality that usually doesn’t accompany the script. After months of preparation, hundreds of hand-wringing meetings, countless revisions, rewrites and redos, these executives get up on the stage in front of the media and let it fly. And the result? Let’s just say it doesn’t always work out as planned, to put it mildly. Or more to the point, there were far more incidents of “What the Hell were you thinking?” going on down at Cobo Hall than not.

Let’s take VW, for instance. (If you want to read last week’s column wrapping up the Detroit Auto Show, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on “Next 1 Entries” – WG) VW’s brand-new leader in the U.S. is a guy by the name of Michael Horn. A VW insider, he insists that VW will gain momentum here by introducing more vehicles designed for this market. Umm, do you know how many VW executives have said the exact same thing when they took over the reins? Try all of them.

No one does the “It won’t be long now!” rationale – as in, certain success is right around the corner - better than VW. Actually, that’s not exactly accurate. The “It won’t be long now!” rationale was developed and perfected by the Detroit-based car companies in the midst of their 25-year pirouette to oblivion. And it’s only recently that the German and Japanese manufacturers have taken up that mantle, VW being particularly adept at it.

But the harsh reality for VW is that for all of the VW Group’s adeptness at wrangling its portfolio of multiple luxury brands and extracting huge profits while looking like geniuses, they don’t have a clue as to what to do here in the U.S. with their house brand. They careen around in fits and starts going nowhere fast, and showing that dreadful “Dune” concept at Cobo served only to underscore that fact.

VW is flailing about throwing whatever they can get their hands on up against the wall in a desperate attempt at seeing what will stick in this market. If I’m a VW dealer, I’m more than a little squeamish right about now. Especially since Horn made it clear that the return of the Phaeton – that monument to Ferdinand Piech’s runaway ego that had no business existing in the first place – is slated for a return to the U.S. Memo to the VW dealers here in the U.S.: You better start practicing your “Duck and Cover” drills because if you’re hoping for a shred of rational light to come out of Wolfsburg, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed.

The other cottage industry that rises up at the Detroit Auto Show is the spinning of rationalizations and excuses. It goes something like this: Allow the media a little one-on-one personal access with a difficult-to-gain-access-to executive (which the media is predictably on-their-knees grateful for because their editors are back at headquarters screaming at them to provide content, whether it makes a lick of sense or not), and for that access the executive and his or her PR handler will figuratively massage the neck and shoulders of the reporter slyly crafting rationalizations and excuses to mask the fact that well, they got nothin’.

And it usually works stupendously, except when it doesn’t. 

Example No. 1? Fiat-Chrysler and its Chrysler 200. After five years of The Sergio Show, you’d think the collective media who cover this business would at least be able to see through the Fog of War laid down by Sergio’s espresso-swilling PR-minions enough to step back, take a deep breath and wait at least five minutes before anointing this shockingly mediocre product entry as the next chapter of Sergio’s Miracle. 

No such luck.

The gushing canonization of the 200 was sickening. A fawning, fumbling, pathetically forgettable exercise in rote bootlicking that set the credibility of the assembled media who had partaken in it back below zero. And for a distinguished body of hacks that was already hovering just above the zero mark in credibility to begin with, that’s quite an accomplishment.

But as I pointed out last week, just being present and accounted for in a segment does not constitute greatness. It doesn’t even qualify as being the least bit laudable. The Chrysler 200 is a solid, uninspired, borderline-mediocre entry – think of a Dodge Dart rental car with a little more room and a little more thought - but because The Great Sergio is involved greatness must be assigned to it. And that is simply ridiculous and inexcusable.

As bad as the Fiat-Chrysler brain trust stumbled in Detroit, what’s going on at Nissan and Infiniti is cause for serious alarm. That this Japanese car company’s executives blithely go along thinking they have it goin’ on is almost incomprehensible. The Nissan Sport Sedan Concept that’s said to telegraph the look and feel of the next Maxima was so hideous that it was shocking to behold. I know certain other publications – especially those that qualify as card-carrying members of the fawning, have-knee-pads-will-travel media – canonized this egregious piece of shit as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but, really? It looked like a grade school kid’s fantasy drawing come to life, an amateurish vision bordering on the cartoonish.

That Nissan Design has become the industry’s Poster Boy of Underachievement is obvious – well, except for those in the media who have baka on their brains - and can be duly addressed with a regime change. What’s more disturbing is that Nissan seems to be immersed in a shit storm of arrogance wrapped in incompetence right now, underlined by its latest TV ads for the Rogue, which are so painfully embarrassing that they’re cringe-worthy every time you have the misfortune to be subjected to them. There is something desperately adrift at Nissan, and the more they talk like they’re world-beaters and the more they insist that it’s just a matter of time before they conquer the world, the worse it gets.

And then, there’s the chaos going on at Infiniti. As I said last week, Infiniti’s push to become great by association through its Red Bull Racing Formula 1 involvement is a nonstarter, and each time they try to state emphatically that they have it together and that they’re moving forward soon to ascend to the top tier, all the evidence is to the contrary. And the Q50 Eau Rouge concept did nothing to dispel that fact. As a matter of fact, it exposed Infiniti’s vacuous product “vision” even further.

Infiniti is so desperate to be The Hot Thing that they’re forgetting how long it actually takes. There’s no gravitas acquired through finger-snaps in this business. It takes a long, long time. Decades, even. And in Infiniti’s haste to jump-start their way to respectability, they’re forgetting that simple, albeit painful, reality. And the scariest thing? A careful perusal of Infiniti’s future product plans – both real and imagined – reveals a Black Hole of Nothingness that makes the blood run cold. And here I thought VW was the acknowledged King of flailing about in this market.

But in the end, I reserve a particular, custom-blended brand of Autoextremist ire for what’s going on at Mercedes-Benz. Steve Cannon, M-B USA’s chief, is absolutely convinced that chasing the fleeting whims and notions of the Nanosecond-Attention-Span Generation is The Answer. That if Mercedes keeps churning out “fresh” entries while chasing niches and even inventing niches that are Answers to the Questions No One was Asking, that the volume and profits will come and that they will reach The Promised Land of Automotive Divinity, as I said last week.

Cannon spent the entire Detroit Auto Show touting how great Mercedes is, how the pursuit of buyers heretofore unfamiliar with the brand with the new CLA is a sure sign that Mercedes has discovered the Golden Formula, and that Mercedes will continue to chase these “new” buyers because in the end, it will power M-B to greatness and untold riches.

Except that there’s a huge downside to Cannon’s plan. And the downside is that while chasing buyers with notoriously fleeting attention spans, Mercedes-Benz will cease being special. But then again, who am I really kidding here? Mercedes-Benz ceased being special years ago. The move to the marketing of Commoditized Luxury has reduced Mercedes to being Just Another Car Company, with all the negatives attached to that moniker. And the unfortunate thing is that they seem to be dragging BMW and Audi down the primrose path to commoditized luxury with them.

Creating CLAs and then not making enough of them in the hopes of bumping lookers up to the new C-Class is not a marketing strategy, instead it’s a long-term recipe for unmitigated disaster. Cannon and his German overlords are slowly but surely removing any reason to actually aspire to owning a Mercedes from the equation altogether. And one day they’re going to wake up from their journey to The Promised Land and ask themselves, ‘What the Hell were we thinking?”

Ah well, that’s the tone and tenor of this business right now. Chase niches while using smoke and mirrors to exploit them, and do it with as much cost efficiency under the skin that can be possibly mustered. The result will be huge profits and bonuses, and everyone will be fat and happy and look like heroes. And brand image? Well, image be damned, apparently.

The sad thing is that shortsightedness never actually recedes very far in this business, it’s just repackaged and presented as new thinking and “vision,” which is painfully pathetic when it comes right down to it.

I took some shots last week from readers who thought I was too harsh on the Detroit Auto Show, that I should give the automakers and their executives a break for trying hard and doing their best. I thought I was eminently fair, however.

As I’ve stated repeatedly from Day One of this publication, car companies and their executives don’t deserve a pass just for showing up. This just in: Mediocrity isn’t bliss in this business. It never has been and it never will be. I get the fact that standard operating procedure in this country nowadays dictates that kids get gold stars, trophies and group hugs just for dressing for a soccer game, but the last time I checked, that doesn’t pass muster in the car business.

Every time this business has succumbed to lowest-common-denominator thinking throughout its history – and wanting recognition for just showing up - it hasn’t ended well.

And I saw too much of it down at the Detroit Auto Show, unfortunately.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.