Road show

At the century's last new-car expo, an industry's eyes are firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror

by Stephen Heuser

Illustrations by Kevin Banks

DORCHESTER -- It is clear, walking across the floor of the Bayside Expo Center's 1999 New England International Auto Show, circulating among the salesmen and the spokesmodels, through the video displays and the exposed transmissions and the hundreds of gleaming hoods polished by a silent army of cleaners -- it is clear that we that we live in a very weird time to buy a car.

Today, fundamentally, the car is a relic: a huge hulk of metal, plastic, and glass dedicated to moving meat around. Fifty years ago the car represented the future. With every new model, Detroit jetted its customers into brave new worlds with giant fenders, sweeping chrome, and outré missile fins. Now, when we think of the future, we think of something very different: the wafer, the chip, the optic fiber; something miniature and silent. The car, a loud machine weighing thousands of pounds, belongs indisputably to the industrial past.

But cars do move forward -- in fact, car design is more ambitious, sleek, and unpredictable than it has been for decades. If anything, new materials have smoothed the car into something that at least looks futuristic. And cars are changing in a broader sense: in the '90s an entire market has sprung up between the old categories of car and truck. For whatever reason (cheap gas, suburban anomie, high profit margins), the sport-utility vehicle is where the action is in the car business. So a new-car show in 1999 -- the place where car companies annually vie to capture the public imagination -- dispenses with the old certainties, becoming largely about inventive ways to blur lines.

If you listen to the manufacturers talk, if you watch car commercials, if you read the motor press, this development tends to be painted rather rosily -- as a new diversity, a new explosion of consumer choice. Up close, the impression is altogether different. After spending two days at the Bayside Expo Center, you begin to think of it as something else. You could call it the New Confusion.

---

Anyone who has never been to a new-car show is missing a really wonderful American ritual. For decades, the car show has been the way America's greatest consumer product has met its public. Every city gets one major show per year; American car makers introduced their year 2000 models in Detroit last January and have spent the year circulating them through convention centers around the country. The public pays $8 a person to look at them, plus parking.

The New England International Auto Show takes up the largest exhibit space in Greater Boston, and its organizers tell me it would take twice the space if it were available. You can't actually buy anything at a car show; this is a purely a marketing exercise, a chance for cars to show their plumage.

When you walk into the show, the first thing you notice is the gleam. The five and a half acres of the Bayside Expo Center are filled with cars that are being polished constantly, all day, by a Walkman-wearing army of cleaners. There are 504 vehicles here, and every vehicle is cleaner than any car you will ever drive. They are floodlit, and every floodlight is reflected back from the finish; the shine makes it hard to focus at first. The immediate impression is one of looking at a field of glowing bubbles.

The second impression is more concrete: a sleek black car on a round platform right inside the main door. This is the 2000 Mercury Sable. The Ford Motor Company is putting a lot of energy into resuscitating its Mercury line, and they've positioned the Sable so it's the first car you see upon entering.

At 10:05 a.m. on Saturday, five minutes into the first day of the show, the Sable comes to life. Its platform begins to rotate, slowly spinning the car and the spokesmodel who stands next to it. She is dressed in black, her name is Liang, and when she opens her mouth she speaks, like nearly everyone working at the show, in the flat vowels of the northern Midwest. "Ladies and gentlemen," she begins, but something is wrong. There are no ladies and gentlemen. No one is there at all; the handful of people already at the show have walked past the Sable to ogle more-interesting cars. "The 2000 Sable's suspension system . . . now, here's a system that really thinks for itself." Liang continues to discuss the Sable with an empty room, as she is rotated, alone with her car, once every 40 seconds.

This routine is repeated at intervals by every company at the show. It can happen just as you're walking by: a microphone clicks on, and you accidentally become the audience as some well-scrubbed model begins hosting an imaginary show about the car she's standing next to. Although we're past the age of bikini-clad babes at car shows, these spokesmodels -- er, "product specialists" -- are mostly women recruited from modeling agencies in Detroit who still call themselves, in unguarded moments, "Dodge girls," or "Ford girls."

Snippets of their presentations weave together like something from a Don DeLillo novel. "Of course, the heart of the Le Sabre driving experience is the 3800 Series H V6 205-horsepower engine." " . . . And we're proud to tell you that the Impala meets the government's 2003 head-injury standards today." "Well, have I got a truck for you." "A quick adjustment and it's a floor protector, another adjustment and your groceries can be hung conveniently on the hooks." " . . . A special glow-in-the-dark handle that allows you to open the trunk from inside."

People tune out the hype, of course. This is what Americans have learned to do. What people come for is the cars.

---

Part of the reason the Sable is being ignored is that people are buying their tickets and marching straight to the Ford Excursion. They stand in its shadow like villagers gazing at Jumbo. The just-introduced Excursion occupies a place of honor in the car world: it is the biggest thing any private citizen would ever think of as being a car. The Ford Motor Company designed this specifically to be larger than the previous biggest thing, the Chevy Suburban. The Excursion is almost 20 feet long and nearly seven feet wide, with three rows of seats and a curb weight of 7190 pounds. Its gas mileage is conveniently omitted from the standard vehicle information stuck in the window.

Normally at a show, people wait quietly in line to sit in each car's driver's seat, gingerly feeling the steering wheel and testing the parking brake, imagining themselves on the road. People behave differently around the Excursion. They treat it like a piece of playground equipment: people climb in, out, up, over, through. They combine and recombine in the front and back seats of the cavernous passenger compartment. It is the only car at the Expo that you might find yourself occupying with a group of total strangers.

Still, there is something predictable about the Excursion; it's just a normal SUV blown up to goofy proportions. The really compelling vehicles are the ones around it, a crazy collection of car-truck . . . uh . . . things. It is clear that manufacturers, caught off guard by the sudden public enthusiasm for SUVs, don't really know how far they should go in marrying the car and the truck; basically they are throwing noodles at the wall and seeing what sticks. Imagine what the '60s would have been like if the El Camino had taken over the market. Amazing! This is where you really start to sense the New Confusion. You can feel it in the new breed of four-door family pick-up trucks. And in the sport-utility pick-up, a hybrid of a hybrid that looks like the front of a Ford Explorer with a stubby little truck bed on the back. You feel it in the four-wheel-drive mini-vans, the German four-wheelers that go 150 miles per hour, and in something called the "tall car," a new kind of compact sedan that apes the headroom and high suspension of an SUV.

But the mixed-message Oscar goes to the Lincoln Blackwood, also made by Ford. Its manufacturer calls this an "ultimate utility vehicle," but most people call it a luxury pick-up. It is a looming black four-door truck that manages, with African hardwood trim and leather seats and its waterfall Lincoln grille, to subvert every bit of downscale chic that a pick-up truck could possibly confer on its owner. Reportedly, the public loves it.

The Blackwood will probably hit the market soon, but technically it's still a concept car. "Concepts" are prototype vehicles, not yet scheduled for production, and they are the really fun part of car shows. The Oldsmobile Signia, which looks like a European sedan with a terrarium for a trunk, is a concept car. So is the Isuzu Zaccar, a gussied-up SUV with a lurid purple shag-wagon interior. The most radical concept on display is probably the Mitsubishi SSU, a crazy sci-fi hybrid of roadster and 4x4, with looming front fenders and a long, flat roof and garish chrome wheels. It cost Mitsubishi $1.6 million to build. Apparently it has an Internet hook-up. It's promoted, in very self-consciously hip terms, as an "extreme sports vehicle." (A display card reads: "Think of it as a rally car for five people and all their equipment for a weekend of extreme sports.")

The Mitsubishi SSU is awkward and freaky, but it's also fairly forward-looking, and it generates the back-to-childhood excitement of seeing a really cool Hot Wheels car. This is the fun of a prototype: the peek into an imagined future. What's surprising this year is that to Detroit in the year 1999, the future apparently looks a lot like 1955. Many, perhaps most, of the American concept cars here are profoundly retro. Volkswagen's success in cloning its classic Beetle has not gone unnoticed. The Dodge Power Wagon, for instance, is an audacious silver pick-up whose shape -- and name -- are borrowed straight from a 1940s Dodge truck originally built for the Army. The Ford Thunderbird, discontinued a couple years ago, has re-appeared as a cartoony cream-yellow pastiche of its original 1954 design, porthole windows and all. Jeep's big statement is a four-wheel-drive off-roadster that looks like a squashed bug; its name, the "Jeepster," is simply what the original Jeeps were called.

Even as it lurches forward into new car/truck breeding experiments, Detroit is being raked with nostalgia for its moment of greatness. It's hard not to get the impression that the American auto industry is entering the next century looking squarely backward.

---

The most emblematic car is probably the one on a stage in the Chrysler area. It's called the PT Cruiser, and it looks for all the world like a very aggressive egg. Designwise, the thing is New Confusion at its finest: there's no way to tell if it's a station wagon or a hatchback, a car or a mini-van. Like a lot of new cars, it uses modern materials (molded body panels, flush glass) but lifts its look wholesale from another era -- in this case, the late '30s.

But the New Confusion here runs deeper. Although the PT Cruiser is built on the chassis of a Plymouth Neon, a compact car built by Chrysler, and although a salesman describes it as "a little sedan with a hatchback," the PT Cruiser -- which goes on sale in Massachusetts in February -- is technically classified by its manufacturer as a truck. Which means it only has to meet truck emissions standards.

This is important for a car manufacturer, because as pick-up trucks and SUVs get bigger, they use more and more gas. The swanky Lincoln Navigator gets 12 miles per gallon in the city, 17 on the highway. The Ford Excursion's mileage is worse. A manufacturer's cars have to average 27 miles per gallon, its trucks 20. Labeling the PT Cruiser a truck gives Chrysler that much more leeway with its real trucks, its big-ass Durangos and Ram 2500s.

For all the cosmetic shifts in the car industry, and for all the fundamental-seeming changes in what consumers are buying, the most fundamental thing about cars has never really changed. Since the gasoline-burning engine began to dominate the market in the early part of the century, there has been no meaningful alternative, and no real sustained demand for one. No wonder: a gasoline engine is powerful, it makes the nice throaty sound we associate with cars, and the fuel is cheap -- in real terms, gas costs roughly half what it did 20 years ago.

Which is why the most radical vehicle on display is a little car not on a platform at all: the Toyota e*com, which sounds like a Web site but is in fact a little podlike two-person vehicle. The design is sort of jokey -- you half-expect to see Big Bird climb out of it and teach a lesson on pollution -- but the technology is real: it goes about 60 miles on each charge of its nickel-metal hydride battery. You don't put gas in it at all.

The e*com is radical for another reason: it does exactly what people need a car to do, and no more. It moves humans from one place to another over short distances. If you live in the suburbs, you need a car for all the mundane tasks of life: buying milk, getting to school, commuting to work. But cars, even the smallest of them, are designed for much more than that: holding luggage, carrying groups, traveling off-road.

Skeptics tend to mock owners of SUVs as suburban fantasists, people who drive around cleanly paved streets in a vehicle built for exploring the desert. But that's a cheap shot; you could just as easily mock people wearing Levi's for not being real cowboys. Like clothing, cars are a language for our aspirations and fantasies; they are a way to signal what we'd rather be doing when we're not doing what we're doing now.

The problem is, there are consequences to driving an inappropriate car. Cars have a byproduct, and the bigger the car, the greater the byproduct. And it's not just an abstraction: if you asked every one of the Ford girls to turn the ignition on their cars -- in other words, if you asked them to demonstrate what their cars do -- the Bayside Expo Center would be empty of people in 10 minutes.

You do not want to think about this at the car show, and that's the whole point: under floodlights, on a platform, a car can still be a sleek and exciting thing -- the product of years of design work; an alluring totem of who we might want to be. But like all marketing exercises, the show is as important for what it omits as for what it displays. We want fun without responsibility, and much like the cars themselves, the show sells us our own dreams of escape at $8 a pop.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.