cts | Volt a Day | Touring Detroit with a Jackass September 17, 2010

No discussion of the Chevy Volt is complete without a little mention of the city of Detroit. GM has a bunch of manufacturing plants but will build the Volt right there in Motor City.

There is a lot of what we call "media attention" on the decline of Detroit. At it's peak, Detroit was a bustling city, home to the top three automobile manufacturers in the world. All stuck not just on a single continent, single country, or even single state, but in a single city. That seems crazy. And it was crazy: crazy beautiful. If the concentration of all that industry, creativity, innovation and vigor did nothing more than birth Motown Records and its sound, we as a culture should be ever grateful. But, of course, the city did much more, including parent the automobile industry from its infancy, up through the years of World War II and into the boom of the fifties and beyond.

And, eventually, the automobile industry needed to spread. Spread around the country and around the globe. There's nothing to say that a single industry should remain concentrated in a single city, with all of the reins in the hands of a few people there. So it is in Japan, Korea, Sweden, Germany... it is all over the world now.

So Detroit has shrunk. And it is difficult to shrink a city. When the industry needs fewer people, those who can move elsewhere to find work. That slows the economic engine of the entire city. And it leaves holes in the neighborhoods. In Detroit there are whole neighborhoods which are holes. But that is to be expected.

Susquehanna, Pennsylvania was a railroad town. They did the maintenance on Pullman cars that came through on the Susquehanna Line. The shops were big enough that they starting doing more. It was a bustling city of ten thousand people. There was a strike. The town itself sided with the railroad workers and when the strike was over, although the railroad kept on a lot of the striking workers, they decided to move the work somewhere else. In five years Susquehanna shrunk to 1,500 people, about the population it still has a hundred years later. There are still the scars of large industry left, wider streets than are necessary, a huge open space along the railroad tracks where the shops once stood, but the city has become a town and that's okay.

Detroit is headed toward being a small city. A small city is a great place for young people. There are fewer people, which means less enforcement of rules, and more freedom leads to more creativity. If GM is smart, they will somehow tap into this new creative spirit and it will start showing up in their cars.

There is an excellent set of short films about the current state of Detroit. They feature Johnny Knoxville, of Jackass fame, touring the city in a huge Cadillac.