It's been a busy day:

For General Motors Corp., the question is no longer whether it will get a government loan or if Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner will be replaced. It’s whether anything can prevent the largest U.S. automaker from sliding into bankruptcy.

And, lest you think this only has to do with the US automakers:

GM and Chrysler have been stretching payables, which means that many auto parts suppliers are in dire cash flow straits. And if auto parts makers fail, it doesn't hurt just the Detroit car makers, but the foreign transplants as well.

Few people outside of the industrial Midwest really understand the astonishing breadth and terrifying importance of the auto industry, and the central role it played historically in generating the American middle class.

I still think this is a big mistake. Creating the vast infrastructure, human capital and technical expertise needed for even a mediocre automobile industry is no small feat. Take the Koreans, for example, who easily captured the global market for shipbuilding and high-rise construction. Despite billions of dollars in subsidies and decades of effort, the Korean automobile industry struggles to even meet the worst of US markers in quality, efficiency and overall design. The $25-50 billion in loans is cheap, in comparison to what it would cost to restart this industry from scratch—or drag an automaker out of bankruptcy.

Even from an environmental perspective, this decision seems shortsighted to me. If the US automakers are allowed to fail, the $18 billion or so spent every year on R&D won't come back, even in the rosiest scenarios in which foreign automakers set up more plants in the US. Out of those labs came catalytic converters, airbags and most of the technology that made hybrids possible. Commuting by car to and from sprawling suburbs cannot be made efficient; I still think GM's approaches to the problem are better than most anyone else.

But, I'm biased.

I grew up outside of Detroit. Since leaving Europe just before World War I, my family has lived in Detroit. My father assembled Thunderbirds to pay his way through school. My grandfather worked for Packard. My Great Grandfather worked at Ford's Rouge plant. In a strange twist of fate, I've become a dues paying member of the UAW—thanks to the unionization of University of Washington's graduate students. That's four generations in the UAW for my family. (As my dad put it, when he heard of the grad student unionization, "can't one of us not pay these assholes dues?")

About a year ago, I was asked to write a piece on the future of the automobile—combining my background in science and engineering with my family's intertwined history with the American auto industry.

I spent the year researching—going to auto shows, reading scientific and technical reports, as well as histories. Thanks to the totally collapsed publishing market, the piece is unlikely to ever be printed.

Today seemed as good as anyway to at least post excerpts from it. Perhaps someday the full version will find its way into print.

Chicago’s slaughterhouses in the late Nineteenth Century—drawing deeply from the largess of the tamed American plains—gave birth to the first moving disassembly line. Pigs, cows, and chickens raced past meagerly trained workers, were steadily converted into interchangeable, commoditized, pieces. Pig, bacon. Pig, lard. Cow, chuck. Cow, steak. Chicken, drumstick. Before this innovation, butchering was completed in the same way Europeans built medieval churches—one piece at a time by a trained artisan. The moving assembly line, with interchangeable parts and workers, is just the process in reverse. Iron, steel. Axle, frame. Windshield, car. The Highland Park plant, in Detroit, was the first.

Before the moving assembly line, manufacturing a Model T took the Highland Park plant half of a day. After switching to the moving assembly line, it took only one and a half hours. Even in the most primitive form, this new way of making things was at least eight times as productive as anything before. Ford promptly undercut all the competition on cost and still ran a business that felt like printing money.

These original moving assembly lines, where my great grandfather found work for decades at the Ford Motor Company, bridged two eras. In one end entered the 19th Century, a century devoted to the categorizing, locating, dominating and refining the material wealth of the earth. Out the other end came the 20th Century, devoted to astonishing numbers inexpensive yet intricate machines. Eventually, almost every component of the model T was refined, forged and combined in Detroit’s Rouge River plant—red iron ore was turned into steel in the foundry, sand refined into glass, dyes prepared as black enamel, raw rubber into tires and undesired people (Jews from Europe, blacks from the South) into interchangeable labor. Ford created the industrial mass manufacturing society of today, all under one roof.

Factory work has never been pleasant. The moving assembly line made things far worse for the men (and later women) working—combining the body-wrenching heavy labor with unprecedented mental tedium. Listening to my dad describe his time in the paintshop of the Ford Wixom plant (assembling Thunderbirds) is like listening to an audiobook of Dante’s Inferno. Only excellent pay, or desperation, would keep you, or anyone, at the job.

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But how could one compete with Detroit? The industrial efficiency of these factories sucked all the air out of the room. The solution of most Western European countries was to slam a door shut, and use restrictive trade and currency policies to create protected markets for homegrown manufacturing. The Japanese were the first to figure out how to enter into the American market with success, using a protected home market to reimagine the factory itself.

By the middle of the 20th century, Detroit’s assembly lines were as intricate and unique as a handmade pocketwatch—devoted entirely to the manufacture of a single design of car, from start to finish. There is no cheaper way to pump out vast numbers of a given model of car. But, switching to a new kind of car, or even improving an existing model, required rebuilding the factory—at extreme cost and with a lengthy time penalty. Huge numbers of intermediate parts built up on the factory floor, typically made nearby or in the same building, slowing further any switch to a revised or new model.

The founders of Toyota had another idea. Why not think of a car as little more than an assembled collection of parts? Instead of making everything from scratch in house, cultivate a network of high-quality suppliers. The final assembly plant would be little more than a place where this deck of suppliers was shuffled and dealt out. While such a system might be a little less efficient (in total hours to complete a car) than a highly specialized plant, one made huge gains in flexibility. Switching models meant little more than switching the orders placed with your network of suppliers—rather than starting from the dirt, and building an entirely new factory. One could react nimbly to changing market conditions, and throw out an incrementally improved model each year with ease. What Toyota, and the other Japanese car manufacturers, changed wasn’t the car itself as much as how the car could be mass-produced. Saddled with vast networks of fixed plants, the US manufacturers were doomed during the two oil shocks of the 1970’s—unable to react as nimbly or quickly as the Japanese manufacturers to changing tastes.
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Below the main floor of Cobo Hall, below the marquee makes and models on display at Detroit’s 2008 North American International Auto Show, a modest but steady stream of visitors wound their way around an array of unfamiliarly familiar cars. Geely. BYD (Build Your Dreams) Auto. Liebro Motor. Changfeng Motor. For most of these Chinese auto manufacturers, this show is their first inside the United States.

The vehicles are slavish in every respect—engineering, design, styling and manufacture: If a Mercedes had an ill-advised affair with a Subaru, the Geely CK would pop out. Changfeng Motor boasts its Leibao Command vehicle—a rote copy of an older Land Rover—carried the People’s Liberation Army as it recaptured Macao. The influences of Toyota, Lexus, Mercedes, Honda, and BMW are all represented; none resemble any of the American brands.
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For decades now, we’ve been telling ourselves that perfect machines of nearly limitless efficiency will soon replace the current fleet of gas-guzzling cars. We’ve been lying to ourselves, pretending if we can just replace the fuel we place in the car, and the motor pushing the whole apparatus, we can remake the act of driving into something sustainable and environmentally sound. It’s blatantly false.

The operating efficiency of a car is determined by two big factors: aerodynamic drag and weight. Moving a car through the air at highway speeds is akin to shoving your hand through a block of Jell-O. Narrow, smooth and long (a train) slips through the air with much more ease than the car’s blunt, rough and short layout. Weight costs you with momentum. Remember Newton’s laws: objects at rest want to stay at rest; objects in motion want to stay in motion. It takes energy to start and stop and to go around curves. The heavier the car, the more energy it takes. The motor and fuel chosen does little to change any of this.
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The future of the automobile will not be fleets of environmentally pure cars, rolling down alabaster roads, beneath a brilliant blue sky. If we fail to change how we live and work, the future of the automobile is the sooty air of present-day Beijing, of sweatshops filled with near-slave labor and of an Earth scoured with increasing desperation for fuel—by stealing food from the mouths of the world’s hungry to create biofuels.