Hudson's Blog

Oct 29, 2007 - The Ultimate Car Dream...Part C

In past blogs, I've discussed having the dream of manufacturing your own car. This is different than BUILDING your own car, a dream that many car nuts have accomplished, and they should be proud. But when it comes to building a series of vehicles for other people to buy, very few people have done this successfully. People like Benz, Olds, Buick, Peugeot, Citroen, Ford, and Honda have all done it and succeeded.

There's a video blog on CarSpace where a guy discusses the car he wants to produce. He's naive about this dream, and I'm jealous.

Every couple of years, I revive my version of this dream. When I was younger, I sketched potential designs for my car; I've got hundreds of them. As I got older, the business of a car company became more important to me. Currently, I'm in the stage of learning from the mistakes of others.

There are books and movies that cover many of these failed attempts. Most famously is the Francis Ford Coppola movie "Tucker: The Man and His Dream" starring Jeff Bridges. This movie glamourized the attempts of Preston Tucker to compete against the major automakers just after World War II. The movie is quite entertaining (I purchased it on LaserDisc many years ago), but some things must be noted.

First was Coppola's attachment to the concept. Apparently, he had wanted to make this movie as far back as 1976, but nothing came of it. The idea popped up again before George Lucas decided to finance the project in the mid 1980s. Coppola was interested in the story because his father had been one of the early investors in the company and Coppola always admired Tucker's idea and inventiveness.

Second George Lucas (producer of the film) and Francis Ford Coppola (director) each, at the time, owned two Tuckers. Between the two of them, they had a large portion of the total run! So it can be said, they were not the greatest objective minds for covering this story properly.

Back this whole story up a few years to an issue of Special Interest Autos dated December 1972/January 1973. The great automotive historian Michael Lamm interviewed a number of people about the legend of the Tucker, only 25 years after its infamous production run. People like Ed Cole (force behind the Chevrolet small block design) and Road & Track editor John Bond and automotive historian Karl Ludvigsen and even Tucker's own designer Alex Tremulis. Lamm's "drive report" on the 1948 Tucker was titled "Hoax!?" and the side bars that included the interviews carried the headline "Was the Tucker really a hoax?" Lamm's conclusion was not that it had been a hoax but more that it had been "a small time promoter" who "was out of his pond."

And now I'm reading a thirty-year old book about the demise of Bricklin. The authors of this book, like Coppola and Lucas, have a story to tell, but theirs isn't as positive. H.A. Fredricks and Allan Chambers were telling the side of the Canadians who lost tens of millions in the Bricklin deal.

The book "Bricklin" covers all of the negatives of Malcolm Bricklin, his staff and employees, and even the various Canadian government departments. But if focuses primarily on the lack of knowledge within the Bricklin camp. The authors make him out to be a Preston Tucker with a better working knowledge of sales and probably less inherent abilities when it comes to organization and production. While Tucker died only eight years after his ail-fated car company, Bricklin has gone on for three decades using the same methods to take money from investor after investor leaving dead companies in his wake.

Tucker and Bricklin were great talkers. But there have been dozens of stories like theirs over the decades. People with big dreams and the ability to talk people out of money don't make good automakers. It takes skill and knowledge and an ability to find and manage the right people. Tucker and Bricklin both accidentally stumbled upon a few of the right people but did not have the ability to manage them properly. These are among the lessons to be learned here.

My dream is still alive but my maturity keeps getting in the way. If only I had the naiveté that I enjoyed when I was younger. Back when finding $100 million was my ONLY barrier to success in reaching my dream. Back when I just assumed that I knew the type of vehicle that would have buyers lining up around the block even if companies dedicated for decades to do just that can't consistently generate demand.

As they say, youth is wasted on the young.

4:50 am | Categories: bricklin, malcolm bricklin, tucker, preston tucker, manufacturing, francis ford coppola, george lucas, dreams Comments (0) | Permalink | Alert Administrator

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Sep 3, 2007 - The Ultimate Car Dream!

Surfing through CarSpace the other day, I ran across this guy who is discussing his dream of starting a car company. He video blog addresses the people who have pointed him in different directions to design is production car. I admire his dedication to his dream and I wish him all the luck in the world. Because he'll need it.

I've been a car person since I could express my fanaticism around age two. I started designing cars around age six. And I started designing my first car company when I was 10 or 12. Yes, I share the ultimate dream of many car fans. And I still have it today.

But I have become realistic about my dream.

Since I first developed the germ of an idea to build a car company, my car company has changed many times. Sometimes it changed because of sudden pangs of Henry Fordism where I wanted to build the car for the masses. Sometimes it changed because I wanted to build a better sports car than anyone else and put my name up there alongside Enzo and Ferruccio and the Brothers Maserati.

(By the way, "Hudson" is just a pseudonym. I know there was a car with that name.)

A few years ago, I was about to be in-between jobs. My employer was eliminating my office and I was going to need a new means of support. Having spent some time in the publishing field, I thought I'd start my own car magazine. I found the niche I wanted to cover and I was sure that I had access to some great writers. I was missing many parts of this puzzle and quite a bit of the knowledge that I knew I'd need, so I asked for help. After a few calls, I had David E. Davis on the phone.

Mr. Davis launched Automobile magazine back in 1986. It will probably be the last successful mainstream car magazine launched in print form. He seemed like the best person to ask about this publishing attempt. And, besides, he was about to be "in between jobs" as well and maybe he'd be interested.

Our discussion started with my idea. I wanted to launch an upscale car magazine; a sort of coffee table magazine like Architectural Digest or Cigar Afficianado for car fans. Something that would make Automobile look plebian, no offense to Mr. Davis' magazine.

Mr. Davis continued by telling me just how much his magazine cost to launch. In 1986, Automobile cost $11 million to start. ELEVEN MILLION DOLLARS?!?! I figured I'd rather start a car company with that money.

And so it went. I planned out a car company that I could launch for far less than that $11 million price tag. I mentally designed a car. Ran spreadsheets to show the cost and projected sales of the company. In a perfect world, the company would be profitable in six years and would be debt free in ten.

Alas, life got in the way and I moved the "company" to the back burner again. And it's not the only one back there. I have two or three other, ranging to $1 billion, companies sitting on that back burner. I'm counting on a Powerball win to move them to the front burners.

But I was born in the wrong era. Had I been born 100 years earlier, I could have started a car company. Today, however, it's nearly impossible.

A century ago, it was the wild west. There were no rules and anyone with the ability to tinker could put together a car or truck and get it into production. In the US alone, there were three or four thousand vehicle manufacturers prior to World War II. And nearly every concept was put into those vehicles.

Radial engines, sleeve-valve designs, electric power, steam power, and various other engine designs hit the market. Three-wheelers, four-wheelers, six-wheelers, and even eight-wheelers were put into the field. Today, the car industry consists of simply internal combustion engines (diesel or gas) placed in the front (for the most part) of the car and driving (typically) two wheels. Nothing radical there.

Sure, there are oddities like McLaren's highly exotic F1 which sat three with the driver in the middle. Mazda has their rotary (unlike radial) engine in the RX8. And a limited number of hybrid powertrains which use the tried-and-true gasoline engine as their primary motive force.

But all of this homogenization is a necessary after effect of the world of vehicle regulations. In 1900, there were very few laws stating what could or could not be put into a car. Today, the car is rigidly defined and must conform to regluations that differ from country to country and even from state to state. Many of these regulations are improvements that I could not imagine a car not having. They also prevent the "small guy" from entering the industry.

In the past 40 years, regulations have required seatbelts and air bags and crumple zones to protect us. Lighting and steering and braking improvements have made it much easier to drive safely. Emissions controls have literally removed 99% of the pollution from exhaust gases. And Europe is even working on protecting pedestrians from impacts. All of this comes at a cost.

Two generations ago, car manufacturers radically changed their products each year. You could tell a 1955 Chevrolet from a 1956 Chevrolet from a 1957 or 1958 model because each one was quite distinct. Today, manufacturers need four to five years to get their money out of their investment. You can still tell differences in many cars by the detail changes, but, for the most part, the first year of a model is very similar to the fifth year of that model.

And if multi-billion-dollar, multi-national corporations can't afford to change a million-unit vehicle more often than every five years, what makes you think that a start-up company could even afford to build ONE model? This is why it is generally believed that the automotive world will soon consolidate to six car companies.

As he was preparing to leave Chrysler, Bob Lutz was talking over dinner to a bunch of journalists. He said that technology is improving to the point that automotive start-ups could work. I was quite skeptical but a year later, he outlined his "virtual" car company when he announced his plan to revive the Cunningham. I read all of the articles and I believe he's right and it is possible, even if Lutz abandoned the idea and went back to the big corporate automakers.

All of these positive ideas followed by negative results has made me a skeptic. It has been my job to follow the goings-on in the industry so when someone would announce that they planned to launch a new automaker, I'd look into them.

I've been given business plans for amateur attempts to lauch new car companies over the years. Some are basic, some are laughable. Oddly enough, the laughable ones are from the more experienced of these entrepreneurs. And then there are the companies that actually build a concept or prototype.

There have been obvious flops along the way. The American Vector company was doomed when it took 15 years to get their first car produced, but the surprising part was that it took another decade for the company to fully collapse. A revival of the Packard nameplate seemed to be quite ambitious and ended with a failed auction of all the company's assets on Ebay. Romano Artioli's attempt to revive Bugatti was even more ambitious but also collapsed under the weight of all that hype. But the best ones are the ones who aim to change the world.

The most memorable of this type was called Build-to-Order. Talk about hype, this company was going to do everything different. From building cars within days of an order to eliminating traditional dealerships, BTO was going to be the wave of the future.

As a car nut and a fan of the underdog, I want these guys to win. But when you look into them, any reasonable mind will say that it's just not going to happen. BTO was this way...and has become a minor footnote in history. And I've got a list of dozens more in just the past 30 years. This doesn't count the hundreds or thousands of companies that American Cars Since 1775 called "cars that never turned a wheel" over the last 120 years or more.

It's a great dream to have. I hope that some of them make it to the prototype stage. And that one of them actually makes it into production. This industry will always have conglomerates like Hyundai who decide to go into the automotive business, but I'm always rooting for another Lotus or Porsche who turns their automotive expertise into a road-going product that car fans can desire...and perhaps even drive.

One day, maybe, I'll sit down with a multi-multi millionaire who likes cars and we'll discuss some of my concepts. And then, just maybe, my dream can come true. And maybe one of these blogs will win a Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps I'll find a cure for cancer. And then onto world hunger and world peace and intergalactic...

3:40 pm | Categories: dreams, manufacturing, vector, packard, bugatti, porsche, lotus, bob lutz, chevrolet, mclaren, mazda, david e. davis Comments (2) | Permalink | Alert Administrator

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