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Most such changes take considerable time. The gap between clay model and assembly line can be as long as three years. The earliest that any design change made this week could turn up on the showroom floor is 1976; a completely new car could not appear until 1978 or 1979. Meanwhile there is a considerable difference of opinion about where the auto industry is headed. "I think there will be further growth of the smaller car, but I can't see it taking over the market," says GM Chairman Gerstenberg. "We think that in the next three or four years, small cars' share of the market will go up to a little beyond 50%." However, some Wall Street automotive analysts guess that the figure may rise to as much as 60% or 70%.
Whoever is right, small cars are inherently less profitable than the big jobs, largely because they take about as many high-cost man-hours of work to produce but return a smaller selling price.
That means that even if automakers next year equal this year's record 11.2 million assemblies, total revenues and profits will be lower. If, as many outside analysts expect, the total drops to about 10 million cars, the reduction could be sharp. In anticipation of that drop, Wall Streeters have bid down the prices of car companies' stocks. General Motors shares this month have sold at an eleven-year low of less than $45, down from a 1973 high of almost $85.
Seventh Worker. Lower auto output and smaller cars would mean reduced sales and fewer jobs in a host of other industries. Automakers consume 8% of the aluminum made in the U.S., 16% of the steel, 29% of the tin, 36% of the glass, 41% of the malleable iron and 73% of the rubber. One out of every seven workers in the country is employed in the manufacture, sale or maintenance of autos, or in thousands of auto-dependent businesses, from motor oil to motels. More than a tenth of the gross national product is spent by individuals to purchase, fuel, maintain, park, clean or insure autos or to build roads for them.
The changes in popular thought and action that the auto has brought are harder to measure but even more profound than the impact of the industry on the economy. When Charles and Frank Duryea rigged a one-cylinder gasoline engine on a $70 secondhand carriage in 1893, the car began life as a simple means of getting from Point A to Point B. Right from the start there were warnings of trouble. In 1895, when there were only four gasoline-powered vehicles in the country, two of them managed to collide in St. Louis, injuring both drivers. That crash was the ancestor of the traffic accidents that today take 60,000 American lives a year (a rate that seems to be dropping with the advent of gasless Sundays, one of the good effects of the energy crisis).
Yet almost from the beginning the car seized the popular imagination as a symbol of speed, power and luxury. In 1908, the year that Henry Ford launched the auto age in earnest by rolling out the first Model T, Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows was already describing the auto frenzy. Toad, bowled over by a car whose horn went "Poop-poop," picks himself up and soliloquizes: "All those wasted years that lie behind me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now—but now that I