Even though many old fashioned Detroit auto execs frown on what's being fleshed out here...all this newly surfacing material will end up being extremely positive for GM as well as helping free the rest of the American auto scene to rise up again. The Los Angeles Times newspaper stories featured below provide more exculpatory evidence detailing a broad level of misguided incompetence by various members of the American automobile world during the last forty years. Let's face the facts, throughout this time period Detroit's Big 3 have lost half the market share pie they once had in 1959! Did the import car companies gain everything we lost? Yes. Have the key players of this giant Detroit fiasco ever been implicated? Not a chance. Did they have deep pockets allowing them to completely cover up everything so the media and the American public were never exposed to the big ugly train wreck they caused the American auto scene to suffer? You bet ya. Is the central universe of this story focused around tearing down one of GM's and Detroit's greatest modern leaders and or auto pioneers? Yep. Were the new players leading Detroit's auto world forward beginning in the 1960s using all-new subversive tactics to gain power and notoriety in an industry that was once dominated by leaders who followed a more harmonic drumbeat which was not geared towards primarily advancing their own narrow self-interests? Right again. Are there any giant auto pioneer's working in Detroit today who are truly guided by a vision and or conviction to keep America's auto industry strong long into the future? No, there is not a one. 

What makes this story so delicious to a general audience is they finally get to see what went really went wrong. The side of the story that has cleverly been held back all this time has to do with GM's leaders never wishing to allow Detroit's greatest modern automotive pioneer, Harley Earl, to receive his credit due in American history. Naturally, the heart of the matter behind something this perverted can be traced back to a few extremely crooked and weaker participating players who followed in this giant Auto-Innovator's wake. What they started, changed the American auto world for ever. The highlighted areas below point out the exact methodology Mr. Earl had just invented exclusively for all of GM's leaders to use in the auto business starting back in the 1950s. Of course this paradigm was aimed to successfully lure millions of car buyers year-in-and-year-out, long into the future to buy GM's products. So why then did Harley Earl's successor, Bill Mitchell, along with GM's other top leaders completely stop building dream cars from 1975-1980? Did they somehow think that the paradigm had served its purpose and it wasn't important any longer to find out what Americans thought of their products? Or was it on account of how expensive all these motoramic masterpieces were to build, for making automotive artistry does not come cheap, or was it because GM's "dream cars" being built at the end of Bill Mitchell's career - head of GM's worldwide designs - were so inferior to the ones his predecessor, Harley Earl, had originally introduced back in the 1950s?

The truth of the matter is that it was a combination of these things, but perhaps the most important reason had to do with what was going on inside GM right before Mr. Mitchell's mandatory retirement of his turning 65 years old in 1977. Other factions of traditional GM engineers and stodgy old financial treasury office administrators saw a wonderful opportunity to carve up and strip more power from the once prevailing GM Styling/Design...and essentially go back to following the old school Detroit philosophy of building cars like Henry Ford did. This was all on account of Bill Mitchell weakening the "automobile design" position throughout his long rein as head of this organization (right before Harley Earl's retirement in the end of 1958, everyone in Detroit knew that the Styling Section of General Motors was the nucleolus and or ivory tower of this corporation). Essentially, GM Design took a huge hit under Bill Mitchell's watch...

The Real Pioneer

The dream car phenomenon is just another one of the "styling leadership" business paradigm laws created by Harley Earl for GM to use in perpetuity, and, it was never meant to be derailed. But, that's exactly what ended up happening at GM, for all this company's leaders got on the wrong track which led up to the lone wolf Roger Smith going on to wreck part of this company.

What's the bottom line? 

If GM's leaders today were to simply follow the more harmonic path of how this company's former president Harlow Curtice put it in the above story, "We want to make what the American public desires" ...then, this auto loving nation of car and truck buyers would just go out and purchase millions more products made (and designed) in Detroit at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Really, it's that simple. Basically, most Americans wouldn't then feel the need to buy some foreign maker's products! 

Put another way...if an auto maker styles, builds and then markets some kind of good product-design vehicle – generally known in the industry as a "hot car" – it's a widely accepted principle of this business that hundreds of thousands (even millions) of consumers will then go out and buy the product. For example, a recent article in the July 5, 2004 issue of AutoWeek put it this way regarding this observable fact, "To get a Toyota Prius from a dealer, you'd get in line (more than 20,000 orders pending) and pay a markup, which The Wall Street Journal says is typically $5,000 to $6,500 over MSRP. 

Naturally, we're referring to the high volume car selling market place, not some low volume "niche car" production area of this giant manufacturing game of auto building. Today, every Detroit industry insider, along with all the people working at thousands of dealerships selling GM's products, know this company hasn't built a high volume "hot car" in decades of time! This is a giant oversight that needs to be fleshed out and exposed, not swept under the rug. Why? Because this is the democratic way to do things properly. 

So, it's time to finally talk about the emperor's new cloths...what the heck is really going on behind-the-scenes these days in Detroit? If you want to find out what Harley Earl would think and say if he were to some how come back to judge GM's cars and trucks today, (starting w/ the mind blowing  2004 Pontiac GTO which the American public are staying away in droves from buying this dull designed vehicle) then click the link directly below:

If you read the first paragraph of the "In the Pits" story directly above, you'll realize that many auto minded people back in 1954 knew that GM was doing something about quelling the import car craze going on. And, the champion behind firing up and creating these race cars which would take "Detroit into the sportster field with a vengeance" was none other than Harley Earl, a.k.a. Detroit's Dream Car King! 

On account of a complete collision of opposites...a new breed of GM leader would go on to bury and or entirely gloss over significant parts of this company's illustrious history. Zora's story is a wonderful testament to how easy it is to cook the history books when your sitting behind the helm of the largest corporation in the world.

Or, click the story below if you want to read more on one of the cornerstone figures behind NASCAR...of course GM hasn't let this story out yet either.

Conclusion: This story uncovers essential truths about a cast of characters - ranging all the way back to the early 1960s - who exploited the nation's largest corporation of the last half of the twentieth century for personal gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price. Think about it, only an un-American group could be behind continuously sending trillions of dollars (the lost revenues of Detroit's auto world over decades of time) abroad to stoke the furnaces of import car companies. These controversial men made the playing ground of our nation's auto industry all crooked. Confusing and or subverting the pure essences behind Harley Earl's modern storytelling piece of the auto world pie was a necessary part of these swindler's plan. 

After all, GM's newest leaders starting in the '60s had to cover up the facts they had no intentions of following Harley Earl's expensive dreams he had promised millions of American's he would deliver them in the future. Throwing out or largely dumbing-down this man's modern business paradigm, GM's new prototypical leaders went in the opposite direction of H.J. Earl's chairman of change ideology. They didn't give a damn about what this man, and others like him, had really done risking their reputations on the belief that a car not only could be, but should be a public declaration of personal style and visual prestige.

So, the sooner the whole story is exposed on the crooked players who turned GM and Detroit in the wrong direction (this whole thing has turned into a curse or an outright plague hanging over Detroit now for decades of time) the quicker things can heal up and this vital industry and Detroit City can finally turn around and start going back up again. What's going to happen if the status quote remains intact? The ailing American auto industry will stay on a jinxed path continuing to spiral downward.