Quotes of the Day

"The American people made Ford Motor Company what it is. We have nothing the public did not give us. No surplus exists for personal benefit — every surplus is provided for future use. The future is here, and we are going to do our utmost — risk everything, if necessary — to use this surplus which the public, through its dealings with us, has provided, to see if we cannot make what the country needs most — work, jobs."
— Henry Ford, Feb. 11, 1932

This is the thanks you get for creating the middle class, Henry. In the throes of the biggest auto swoon since 1931, the headmen of Detroit go hat in hand to Washington to try to keep their once mighty industry upright for a couple of months and are treated as if they had invented the four-wheel-drive subprime mortgage. AIG torpedoes the entire economy and gets a $150 billion handout; Citigroup takes risks no sane manufacturing company would even contemplate and is rewarded with a $20 billion federal bailout. And the car guys?

The Detroit Three recently presented detailed restructuring plans to Congress — an application for loans and credit lines to tide them over until the economy rebounds. U.S. auto sales were down more than 30% in October — even Toyota wasn't spared. Detroit wants $34 billion to shelter 3 million jobs and $300 billion worth of business. The first time the companies came calling, on Nov. 19 and 20, Congress blew a radiator. "Even though all Americans want this industry to succeed, I cannot support a plan to spend taxpayer money to bail them out" is the way Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican on the Committee on Financial Services, got the House hearings going. The incoming Administration is not holding out much hope that Congress can find a solution in the coming weeks. Instead, it is looking at what options — and pots of money — will be available once Barack Obama takes office.

What the CEOs of the Big Three have discovered is a nation suffering Detroit fatigue. Americans may not know squat about collateralized debt obligations, but as a nation we have been defined by car worship. We are angry at our car gods — who for too many years made too many clunkers — because we have owned the Dodge Aries K cars, Mercury Montereys and Chevy Chev-ettes they produced. So the citizens and the pols are irked to have to throw these companies a lifeline, even though they probably should do it for the good of the economy. An out-of-business GM (or even a bankrupt, reorganized one) is more than just a dead factory here and there. "There are real risks of cascading bankruptcy and then supply-side seizures," Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs warned Congress, meaning that the ability of all car companies simply to make cars would be in jeopardy. The negative feedback in the supply chain would hurt partsmakers and dealers and even extend to retailers, restaurants and banks. But others argue that bankruptcy is exactly what GM needs, despite the dislocations.

GM, which is burning $2 billion a month, requested $18 billion in loans and credit lines — $4 billion for December. For that money, it will slash the number of plants it runs, the number of brands it makes and the number of dealers who sell them. It proposed cutting its hourly manufacturing costs in half. CEO Rick Wagoner agreed to work for $1 a year. GM's business is going down fast because consumers are already shying away from a potentially bankrupt company — which is part of GM's argument for immediate funding.

Ford, which is in much better fiscal shape, asked for a standby credit line of $9 billion. The privately held Chrysler is going to need a $7 billion bridge loan, and it's willing to give equity to the government.

Importantly, all three companies promised to make money by 2012, even in a worst-case scenario of selling just 12 million cars and light trucks annually — 4 million fewer than in 2007. The key is a revamped portfolio more heavily weighted to smaller cars and crossovers, as well as to hybrids and electrics that are far more efficient than the current fleet. That's crucial because Detroit currently loses money making cars in North America. You see the problem.

Most of these plans were on the drawing board before the global financial collapse made the situation more dire. This, in essence, is a last-chance opportunity. If Congress provides cover, the Detroit Three can try to rescale their manufacturing capacity to their respective market shares — or even below. GM, for instance, has lost 7 market-share points, falling to 22%, in the past 10 years. It plans to slash costs by an additional $7 billion by 2012. "It's all about survival," says Van Conway of Conway MacKenzie & Dunleavy, a crisis-management and turnaround firm in Birmingham, Mich.

(See the 50 Worst Cars of All-Time here.)

(See TIME's Pictures of the Week.)

Resizing the business will alter the number of nameplates that the Detroit Three market and the number of dealers that sell them. GM will sell or close Saturn. Pontiac and Saab could end up joining Oldsmobile and Plymouth in the hood-ornament graveyard because the cost of supporting a brand with a small market share doesn't make sense, nor does maintaining a dealership network created for an era when Chevy and Buick could support separate distribution systems. GM plans to reduce its dealer count 27%, to 4,700. "Certainly, having seven or eight brands for 25% of the market is far more than you need," says Ron Harbour, the partner in charge of consultancy Oliver Wyman's North American automotive practice.

The Detroit Three, in fact, may have to shrink to two. Chrysler, which burned through $3 billion in cash in its last quarter and has $6.1 billion left, is looking for more partners like Nissan, which is already contracted to build a small car for the company. Chrysler's owner — Cerberus Capital Management, a New York City private-equity firm — got a lemon when it bought 80% of the company from Daimler for $7.2 billion last year. A merger could be a way out.

End of an Era
No matter what congress or President Obama does, there is one aspect of the industry that is beyond rescue. The Detroit of the American Dream, the Benevolent Manufacturing State — the big-metal, Big Labor, big-brother, bigger-than-its-britches Detroit — is deader than Studebaker.

The Benevolent Manufacturing State was the self-funded, full-employment, womb-to-tomb society — for autoworkers, auto executives, their families and their communities — that Henry Ford began in 1914 when he hiked the prevailing $3-a-day wage to $5. "Fordism" outraged capitalists; Ford viewed it as a way to make cars affordable to working people. His people. The industry sputtered during the Depression, an era that gave rise to the unions, but was revived by wartime production as Detroit's manufacturing capacity became a vital weapon in the Allies' arsenal. Detroit reshaped America, spurring a great migration from the South with the prospect of fair employment for blacks.

The Benevolent Manufacturing State achieved its full glory in the postwar period, a largely supply-driven era when Detroit could sell almost everything it made and could afford to give the United Auto Workers (UAW) most of what it wanted. From Linden, N.J., to Lorain, Ohio, to Long Beach, Calif., to be an autoworker was to have it made; to be an auto executive was to have made it. Detroit, says John Plant, the thoughtful CEO of partsmaker TRW, was about more than just industry: "It's the largest experiment of social re-engineering that any country has ever undertaken."

The death throes of the Benevolent Manufacturing State, however, have been costly. GM alone has paid out $103 billion in pension and retiree-health-care costs over the past 15 years. "The legacy costs were designed in an era when people retired at 65 and died at 66. We weren't wrong to give it to them 30 years ago. Now they retire early and live longer," says Conway.

What is particularly ironic about the Big Three's situation is that the companies are now as near to their long-sought goal of parity with the Japanese firms Honda and Toyota as they are to collapse. In the past couple of years, Detroit has closed the quality gap. Its cars are competitive on engines and drivetrains and fits and finishes. Some top-class products score well with car rater J.D. Power, such as the Cadillac CTS and Ford's new F-150. "What exposes us to failure now is not our product lineup or business plan or our long-term strategy," GM's Wagoner told Congress. "What exposes us to failure now is the global financial crisis."

Next year, workers at Ford plants will earn an average $53 an hour with benefits, the result of a breakthrough industry agreement worked out with the UAW in 2007. That's close to the $49 an hour that workers at the transplants average and far below the $71 an hour with benefits that was the old UAW wage, and that was cited by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby as a reason to oppose any bailout. And the cost differential on enginemaking between Detroit and the transplants will narrow to a couple of dollars by 2011. "You want to just choke these guys [in Congress] and take them through the 60 plants that I've been through and see what I've seen," says Harbour.

But timing is everything. So why did it take Detroit 30 years to catch up? "Either the crisis isn't big enough or the vision isn't persuasive enough," says John MacDuffie, a manufacturing expert at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. Instead, during those years, the domestic auto industry has been a slow leak, skidding from one restructuring to the next, chasing its declining market share as its costs have inflated.

(See the 50 Worst Cars of All-Time here.)

(See TIME's Pictures of the Week.)

How the Big Three Blew It
Of all Detroit's failures — the failure to master small cars, failure to cut costs, failure to get tough with the UAW, failure to improve fuel efficiency — the failure to learn, says MacDuffie, is perhaps its worst sin.

Experts point to GM's interaction with Toyota at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) plant in Fremont, Calif., as emblematic of the industry's learning disability. NUMMI was established in 1984 as a joint venture between the two companies, using GM's plant, the Toyota production system and the UAW workers who were already there. The plant had been one of GM's worst; the Toyota system made it one of GM's best.

Detroiters made the pilgrimage to Fremont en masse to see the miracle of NUMMI. Some dismissed what should have become a model for the entire industry. True, the technology wasn't that innovative. But Toyota had made the workforce integral to improving the system. Workers were not mere labor inputs. GM had no problem understanding the just-in-time inventory system Toyota used, but executing it required a buy-in from the shop floor so that everyone was dedicated to improvement. The Toyota system, says MacDuffie, "relies on contributions from employees. It feels vulnerable, but your willingness to be open to that vulnerability is what helps you make it work." In the 1980s and part of the '90s, the top-down culture of the Big Three could not absorb that kind of deep trust.

MIT senior lecturer Steven Spear, a lean-manufacturing specialist who has worked on production lines at both a Detroit Three and a Toyota plant, says the problem worsened over the years as products and manufacturing inevitably got more sophisticated. Merely upgrading a Toyota, he says, requires 300 man-years of engineering. No single manager can ever understand it. "Figuring out products, markets, customers, designs, systems — what's inherent about anything complex is that it becomes impossible. You can't design it perfectly," he says. What matters, he argues, is swarming problems from every direction to create high-speed, low-cost discovery and learning. And when you extend that open approach to suppliers, the path to lower-cost, better-functioning parts becomes easier too.

Management in a Mess
Detroit's corporate culture is obviously complicit in the industry's deterioration, just as it was guilty of creating an unparalleled manufacturing system decades earlier. The Detroit approach has been plan-command-control, stemming from that original control freak, Henry Ford. At GM, a management hierarchy that had been created by GM's master planner, Alfred P. Sloan, in the '20s — GM's first and most successful restructuring — was still functioning in the '80s. Management's job was to create the products, design the production system and provide solutions if there were problems. Everyone else followed orders.

Failing to cure themselves of the Not Invented Here disease, Detroit's bosses resorted to Hail Mary attempts to fix what were long-term issues. "They were constantly looking at buy, sell, hire, fire, looking to be rescued from their predicament," says Spear. On the buy side, GM CEO Roger Smith acquired Hughes Aircraft, EDS and a 50% stake in Saab. His successors bought the Hummer, 20% of Korea-owned Suzuki and 20% of Fiat with the obligation to buy it or pay to get rid of it. (The latter course was chosen, at a cost of $2 billion.)

Ford's owners have always had a difficult relationship with the hired help. Henry Ford II fired everybody, says Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan's business school — including Lee Iacocca. Jacques Nasser, named CEO in 1999 to reinvent Ford, bought Volvo and Land Rover to create a luxury portfolio; he saw Ford as more than an auto company and tried to overhaul the culture. He was ousted in 2001 by Bill Ford Jr. — great-grandson of Henry — who took back the wheel for a couple of years.

The price of halfway restructurings was steep. In 1985, GM aped Japan's practice of building global cars — the idea was to share chassis and parts across brands, a strategy that made sense at the engineering level. At the consumer level, it was a disaster. Internal clashes for control removed imagination from design, resulting in look-alike Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs. Sales declined; cue another restructuring. The Germans, who have their own auto culture, were no match for Chrysler after they bought the company in 1998. No wonder they gave it back.

(See the 50 Worst Cars of All-Time here.)

(See TIME's Pictures of the Week.)

Yet there were the occasional hits that demonstrated Detroit's deep pedigree in engineering and design. Chrysler, desperately surviving on a government-guaranteed loan, created the minivan in 1984. That same year, it launched the first modern sport-utility vehicle, the Jeep Cherokee. Throughout it all, Detroit kept its dominance of the hugely important pickup-truck market — and does so to this day.

But overall, if you build the cars you can make rather than the cars the public truly desires, you have to price them that way and use rebates to move the metal off the lots. "They are building cars that they don't want to build. They have to build them because they have a fixed cost structure to amortize," says Nick Gidwani, a former auto-industry investment banker with Sankaty Advisors and now head of the startup auto-sales website CarZen. Particularly after the post-9/11 sales slump, Detroit got addicted to this strategy and used it to move plenty of SUVs.

The ensuing rise in gas prices and drop in sales underscored another weakness. Although gas-eating SUVs found a sweet spot in the U.S., for Detroit to assume a world in which gas prices would remain below $2 a gal. was asinine. In Europe, gas had long sold for more than $5 a gal., and tax policy ensured that it would stay there; the growing BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — were driving up demand. Detroit's response was to lobby furiously against increasing fuel-economy standards instead of building more-efficient SUVs.

What's Next
The irony about being called on the carpet in Washington is that Detroit actually has a fairly clear idea of where it's going. Ford, for instance, under the leadership of Alan Mulally, has rationalized the company, dumping Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover and some of its stake in Mazda. Volvo may be next. "We have streamlined all of the brands to focus on Ford," he says. Ford wants to be able to create small- and medium-size cars around the world from a single global blueprint. The initial product of the One Ford strategy is the much anticipated Fiesta. It was designed in Europe and is due to arrive in the U.S. in late 2009 substantially unchanged. "Ford can win market share in small cars again," says Harbour. There's also a new Fusion and a new Taurus, long overdue, and upgrades to other models. As part of its 2006 strategy, called "The Way Forward," the company has already closed 17 plants and shucked 51,000 workers.

Chrysler is a bit of a mystery. CEO Robert Nardelli has been somewhat scant on details for new products other than announcing an electric-vehicle platform that has so far not impressed anybody. No one would be surprised if Cerberus, Chrysler's owner, announced some kind of partnership or merger before the year is out.

As for GM, its current crop of autos, including the revived Malibu, is the strongest of the Detroit Three's fleets in North America, but it is still truck-heavy. Globally, GM is expanding in Russia and China; it is a solid performer in Europe and South America. With the advent of the Chevy Volt in 2010, the company will be in a position to lead the industry into hybrid-electric and then fully electric vehicles. "There's enough good product in the pipeline," says MacDuffie. "Judged against the past, it's really impressive."

The most important issue is cutting Detroit's output to an appropriate level. "What we would tell a client who went from 30% to 20% [share] and they say, 'We're modeling now at 20%,' I'd say, 'Let's model it at 16%,'" says Conway. Scaling below capacity doesn't mean you give up on 20% or even 22% share — you can add shifts, for instance, to boost output.

Reducing capacity could also go a long way toward solving Detroit's revenue problem. Between Detroit and the transplants, there are around 17 million units of manufacturing capacity in the U.S. In 2007 vehicle sales hit 16 million, but about 2 million of those were driven by the combination of easy credit and discount pricing. In a normal economy, the true size of the business may be closer to 15 million units. The Detroit Three simply have to generate more revenue per car and, not incidentally, a profit. Right now, the revenue gap per car is $4,000 vs. Toyota.

The competition hasn't stood still, of course. Japanese and German makers continue to improve their products, and the U.S. customers they have won over will be hard for the home team to get back. Even as the Big Three have closed the distance over manufacturing, drivetrain and other engineering issues, another has opened up. The transplants have moved on to the sensual: the quality of materials, the look and touch of dashboard knobs, the sound a door makes, the feel of seats. Craftsmanship is the new point of difference. "The Japanese have figured out, How do we reduce friction?" notes Gidwani. "Now they are going to have to catch them in a new area."

The real catch, though, is whether American taxpayers are willing to give the Big Three the chance.

(See the 50 Worst Cars of All-Time here.)

(See TIME's Pictures of the Week.)

• Bill Saporito
• After 30 years of poor cars and worse management, the Big Three want Uncle Sam's help. Does that make sense?