Richard Langworth stopped by to respond to our story, “Langworth and Norbye made excuses for General Motors’ big-car fixation.” What follows is his full missive:
It’s nice to be remembered, even critically, for something we wrote nearly 40 years ago, but I’m left perplexed by the accusation of “diatribes” and “making excuses” for Detroit’s long postwar fetish with big cars. And I can assure the writer that my late friend Jan Norbye and I were not responding to something Brock Yates said. (If Brock actually wrote that car sizes were dictated by “Grosse Pointe myopians,” he was just stirring the pot, something at which he was a master.)
I remember our great Automobile Quarterly editor Don Vorderman remarking to Italian designer Giorgio Giugiaro (1973) that Americans generally bought the biggest car they could afford, while Europeans bought the best they could afford. “Giorgetto just sadly shook his head,” Don said. “Perhaps we should, too.” Of course, that was a long time ago, and we know more now. But it’s always good to look back and benefit from past foolishness.
You state: “U.S. automakers ignored the growth of imports until they introduced decontented compacts in 1970.” Er, no. When late-50s Rambler sales soared and the compact Lark temporarily saved Studebaker, the Big Three rushed out the Corvair, Falcon and Valiant — in 1960. Almost immediately, market forces dictated the arrival of larger “intermediates.” (Reader Bill McCoskey’s comment above is very succinct on the several reasons for this.)
You state: “The compact Rambler sold well enough that it single-handedly saved Nash…while the sales of its big cars slowed to a trickle,” and that we failed to acknowledge that AMC sales fell off when the company began pushing big cars again. Both statements are true: The Rambler surge was almost wholly due to public demand for more economical cars during the late Fifties recession. George Romney recognized this, gave buyers what they wanted, and Rambler sales took off. When his successor George Abernethy opted to turn AMC from a niche manufacturer into a full-line company, he ran into the Big Three’s dominant products .and AMC’s market share collapsed.
You say we were “disingenuous” to state that the public kept demanding larger cars than the original compacts. Yet your own graph shows Dodge-Plymouth sales bottoming when they replaced big models with what Virgil Exner called the 1962 “plucked chickens,” and you say yourself that the 1961-63 Buick-Olds-Pontiac Y-Body compacts “did not sell nearly as well as their mid-sized successors introduced in 1964.” Bingo.
Your take, you say, is “more subtle”—that as the economy improved in the early-60s, “a growing proportion of car buyers gravitated to larger and fancier cars.” Which is nothing more than we not-so-subtly wrote in our book. No argument!
In the heyday of Detroit, companies spent fortunes trying to understand what buyers wanted — and acted accordingly. It wasn’t a case of “Grosse Point myopians” dictating their preferences. Almost every notable failure — from the Henry J and Aero-Willys to the Edsel to the longer-wide-faster AMC 60s — was an example of product planners getting it wrong: misreading market forces. And every notable success, from the early Rambler to the ponycar to the musclecar, was an example of getting it right — or stumbling into reality. For whatever they built (and they built some pretty bad cars), as we said back in 1986: Don’t blame Detroit. Blame us.
Best wishes, Richard Langworth
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Thank you for stopping by, Richard. Here are some further thoughts:
— I noted in my story that the passage in your book “presumably” responded to Brock Yates because you used similar language as he did. And, yes, Yates did refer to “Grosse Pointe myopians,” which you can read about if you follow the link I provided.
— Suggesting that I was ignorant of the first wave of compacts is a silly “gotcha” move. The sentence you are referring to was focused on U.S. automakers’ response to the rebounding of import sales in the second half of the 1960s. Elsewhere in the essay I discussed the Rambler and Chevy II, included a graph that shows total compact output from 1960-78, and included a link to another Indie Auto article that provides a more in-depth discussion of compacts.
— I find it odd that you point to how the 1962 downsized Dodge and Plymouth didn’t sell as well as previous big cars but ignored my main point – that once these cars were reskinned in 1963-64 that their sales compared quite favorably to their big-car predecessors and successors.
Toward the end of your missive you seem to want to wrap yourself in the flag of subtlety. Yet you end by stating, “Don’t blame Detroit. Blame us.”
That’s an awfully white/black argument. In my essay I pointed to reasons why you didn’t make your case. With all due respect, I don’t think your above missive does either. One reason why is that you left unchallenged a meaningful portion of my essay.
For example, what evidence you can provide that the public demanded that the standard-sized Chevrolet grow 19 inches from 1954 and 1969?
I also suggested that intermediates catching up with low-priced big cars in output during the late-60s “could be seen as a rejection of the big car.” Do you agree or disagree with that?
Now let’s go back to the downsized Dodge. If you think it was such a disaster, how come both the 1963 and 1964 models out-produced their full-sized successors from 1965 onward? Why did Chevrolet’s compacts tend to keep up with intermediate sales in the 1960s? And why did the original compact Comet tend to sell better than Mercury’s mid-sized cars during the 1960s?
Just to be clear: I agree that the public often shifted to bigger, fancier cars as the 1960s progressed. However, the situation was much less white/black than you present in both your book and the above comment.
I think that you are one of the best U.S. automotive historians around. Thus, I am surprised that you appear to hold an overly simplistic stance on a topic that is crucial to understanding the U.S. auto industry in the 1960s.
Steve, thanks for the kind words, always hard to come by. To answer two points: (1) What evidence that the public wanted ever larger Chevys between 1954 and 1969? The same evidence that they wanted bigger Cadillacs, and those big Chevys sold like hotcakes. (2) As I recall, only the higher priced Polara was a “full-size” Dodge in 1963–so of course the other models, all cheaper, outsold it. Norbye’s and my point was mainly that the public determined what Detroit built, not the other way round. When Detroit guessed right on the public mood, they profited; when they guessed wrong we got the Hudson Jet and the Edsel. Thanks for an interesting website.
I find no need to argue with/for sales numbers, but I find the last line of the column interesting. True, if not enough. Can we not blame the whole system of status and market on this alleged failure?
First, the 61-62 Mopars were rather “unuique” in styling. Also, Dodge rushed a badge engineered Chrysler into production to get a true full sized Dodge in the showroom. Pontiac did a similar ill advised downsizing 20 years later leaving them without a full sized product. The howls from their dealers were heard all the way to Detroit, who hurriedly imported badge engineered Impalas from Canada. The dumb stuff the industry does makes me wonder at the executives seven figure salary. Follow the leader and “we always did it this way” and you can’t go wrong, at least if you are in the big 3.
Kim, the full-sized Dodge 880 rushed into production sold relatively few cars — around 18,000 un 1962, 28,000 in 1963 and 32,000 in 1964. Perhaps Dodge thought they were worth it because they eased the panic of some dealers and generated relatively high profit margins. However, the 880 was about as minor of a player as you could be during those years. BTW, my discussion about the downsized Dodge’s 1963-64 production does not include the 880.
I have argued that the downsized Dodge/Plymouth was actually a prescient idea that was undercut by weird styling in 1962. Go here, here and here for further discussion.
Steve, recall also that the Chrysler-based 880 was an attempt to capture the market vacated by dropping DeSoto, and as such sold better than the last DeSotos! (Ironically, before its demise, there were clay models of the proposed 1962 DeSoto, with styling similar to Ex’s “plucked chicken” Plymouths and Dodges—fortunately, that mistake was avoided.)
You were right to emphasize the factor of imports, although I don’t think Detroit paid much attention until their market share rose over 10%. VW was a unique threat because unlike its rivals, the company insisted on exclusive dealerships with adequate parts stocks and mechanic training. In addition to its high quality and ability to be driven flat-out all day, this gave the Bug a leg up that Renault, Fiat, Austin, etc. didn’t have.
Richard, that’s a good point about DeSoto. So Dodge dealers took a double hit — and arguably a triple hit if you include the deteriorating styling of early-60s Dodges. It’s still unclear to me how specifically the S-series was killed, but most of the proposed designs were utter disasters (even arguably worse than the “plucked chicken” downsized Dodge and Plymouth).
So once the downsizing occurred, Dodge dealers didn’t have the advantage of Plymouth dealers of being able to sell full-sized Chryslers. I suppose it makes sense that management responded to their call for a full-sized Dodge, but this also showed the weakness of the new dual dealer network structure. As you discuss in your Chrysler-Imperial book, badge engineering would soon proliferate . . . which in the long run did Chrysler no good.
Remember the first VW dealership in Green Bay. The head mechanic was German and trained in Germany. 1960s poured concrete Mies van der Rohe type building. The only other import dealer in town was Studebaker’s MB annex and maybe Opel or Vauxhall at the GM dealers? Damn, that VW dealer even had a gift shop.
A bit ironic is the 1962 plucked chicken Dodge was sold as a DeSoto Diplomat in South Africa and 1st-generation Valiant was renamed DeSoto Rebel. https://www.flickr.com/photos/45904802@N08/5850635211
https://www.stltoday.com/brandavestudios/the-desoto-automobile-wasn-t-dead-just-yet/article_20e51efa-51ca-11eb-a814-ef5813c41b91.html
Still, I wonder how Dodge, Plymouth and DeSoto would have done if they have chosen another path as shown in this clay model then Don Kopka once imagined for the 1962 DeSoto.
The front end looked a bit like the 1963-64 full-size Mercury which might be not a coincidence since Don Kopka moved later to Ford.
Steve, thanks for the correction. If I recall right, those 62 880s were obvious 1962 Chryslers with a 1961 Dodge front clip.