In a move that would have once been inconceivable, GM now offers back rubs, flextime, Silicon Valley digs and funky offices — the whole Net shebang. And GM promises this is just the beginning. The makeover, which has begun at e-GM, the company’s Internet division, will eventually reach all 400,000 of GM’s blue-collar and navy-suited employees.

Mark Hogan, head of e-GM, says the carmaker has given itself three years to change, a task he likens to breaking down Pentagon bureaucracy. (Remember, this is the place Michael Moore vilified as the corporate antichrist in his documentary “Roger and Me.”) “I would be less than straightforward if I said everyone likes the idea,” Hogan admits. “But the Internet isn’t going away. The new order has to emerge.”

Don’t expect the auto giant’s buttoned-down hierarchy to crumble overnight — according to one analyst, GM is still an “entrenched bureaucracy.” But at e-GM, which was created in August to handle everything from the growing e-commerce operations to the OnStar dashboard communications service, signs are evident that Dad’s Buick LeSabre has unfastened at least one button on its starched upholstery.

Consider the evidence: Some 200 young employees at e-GM dine on gourmet meals, courtesy of papa GM. They traipse into work in boot-cut jeans, clunky black shoes, snakeskin pants, whatever. Time punching has gone by the wayside; employees are encouraged to work from wherever is convenient — at the office, at home, at the local cafe. Flexible schedules are OK. Employees no longer have to endure searches of their backpacks or laptop carriers. This standard security policy “isn’t consistent with new employment values,” says Sheryl Owens, e-GM’s human resources director.

E-GM’s Detroit headquarters boasts a comfy “family room” with plush couches and a TV. Lactating mothers can come here to breast-feed without disapproving stares from higher-ups, Owens says. The company is toying with on-site day care so Mom and Dad can bring up baby while plugging away on their iMacs.

E-GM has a bright orange office floor — a (slightly forced) attempt at architectural irreverence. The aforementioned massages may be a commonplace perk in the Web world, but they could someday lead to the unlikely sight of UAW workers receiving shiatsu on the assembly line.

Then there’s the “concierge” service. “They’re assistants that essentially serve as wives for hire,” Owens says. “They’ll do your laundry or wait at your home if a repair person is coming.” Employees must pay for the service, but Hogan offers this as proof of GM’s new employee-friendly M.O. “If you came to visit us,” he says, “you’d have to pinch yourself that you weren’t in the Bay Area.”

Just in case you’re not convinced, e-GM plans to open a San Francisco office to tap into Silicon Valley’s technological talent. With Detroit’s reputation as yesterday’s city, GM believes it will better attract young candidates with a West Coast face. The company has actually benefited from recent struggles in the start-up sector. Hogan’s quick to brag about his latest coup: six MIT MBAs.

It’s an exciting time, Hogan insists. He describes the new-and-improved GM as “a company that will know no barriers — a company that’s fast, bold and a risk taker.”

Sounds like a good ad campaign. GM’s financial state, however, suggests a far grimmer tale.

A cursory glance gives the impression that GM is financially in tune. Last year, it reported income of $5.58 billion on $177 billion in revenue, compared with $3.05 billion in profits in strike-impacted 1998. (Its first-quarter profits this year reached $1.78 billion.) Fine numbers, but keep in mind that — thanks to the strong economy — 1999 was a record year for the auto industry.

A good chunk of GM’s profits comes from Hughes Electronics, its successful satellite TV business. In its core auto business, GM has lower profit margins than its primary competitors and has steadily lost market share in the United States. (Last year, GM controlled 29 percent of the U.S. market — the first nonstrike year since the 1920s that it has fallen below 30 percent.)

Last week, GM also reported that its U.S. auto sales fell 5.8 percent in May; Buick sales sank 18 percent and Cadillacs were down 16 percent. The Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes have put pressure on the entire auto sector, which means carmakers must find other ways to make money.

This is clearly why GM has moved so aggressively on the Internet. It plans to trim costs by moving purchasing orders online, ultimately selling far more products and services through its network of e-commerce sites, and through collaborative efforts with Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler.

GM chairman Jack Smith expects the Web to generate 50,000 to 100,000 more vehicle sales in the United States this year. GM’s OnStar venture — debuting this fall — could revolutionize the industry by allowing drivers to surf the Web through a voice-activated system. By charging for this service, GM could add hundreds of millions of dollars each year in revenue.

New CEO Rick Wagoner, who assumed the job June 1, reconfirmed that building Web business is one of his main priorities. Wagoner sees the Internet as something more than integral to GM’s growth — he believes it’s part of the company’s very survival.

Generally, analysts like GM’s attitude. Still, some critics say the company’s strategy — especially its personality makeover — glosses over its core problem. For the naysayers, these changes represent a simple chemical peel when what’s really needed is radical plastic surgery.

“Lots of makeup and a nice dress still doesn’t make an ugly girl beautiful,” says Ron Harbour, president of Harbour & Associates in Detroit, which tracks the auto industry. “What’s going to make them a more leading-edge, hipper company are product changes, not superficial changes.”

Fellow auto analyst David Healy of Burnham Securities agrees that GM’s troubles run deeper. “There are three reasons why their market share is declining: product, product and product,” he says. “They’re gradually losing their older buyers and they keep coming out with dull cars.”

While Ford has attracted the lucrative young market with its sharp, moderate-priced Focus, and Chrysler has inspired wows with its new PT Cruiser, analysts say GM still hasn’t done much to excite young, professional buyers. “People think of GM as what their fathers or grandfathers owned, and they can’t imagine ever owning a GM car themselves,” Harbour explains.

Healy says he can’t think of one car coming down the pipeline that could create a splash with younger buyers. And he also believes that GM’s depiction of itself as a Web company is just talk. “I’m not confident the transformation will happen anytime soon,” he says.

Hogan admits the company has a long way to go before becoming Detroit’s answer to Yahoo. For one thing, he quips, GM sill lacks a cappuccino machine, and its orange floor can’t compete with Yahoo’s glaring purple and yellow dicor.

Nevertheless, as GM puts up a good e-face, you can bet everybody will be watching. That the stolid carmaker is even considering an image change is emblematic of the New Economy’s grip on the global marketplace. No longer can companies rely on the good old ways. And most would agree that if fuddy-duddy GM has come to this conclusion, the power of the Web has truly been driven home.

More about the film

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century — the Great Migration of African-Americans escaping Jim Crow, the rise of manufacturing and the middle class, the love affair with automobiles, the flowering of the American dream, and now the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, “Detropia” sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. As houses are demolished by the thousands, automobile-company wages plummet, institutions crumble, and tourists gawk at the “charming decay,” the film’s vibrant, gutsy characters glow and erupt like flames from the ashes. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. Their grit and pluck embody the spirit of the Motor City as it struggles to survive postindustrial America and begins to envision a radically different future. (Caroline Libresco, 2012 Sundance Film Festival)

Links:
Kickstarter
Official Website
Detropia on Facebook
Detropia on Twitter
Loki Films

Among domestic auto manufacturers Chrysler led the way, with sales surging 44 percent from a year ago. GM dipped 6 percent — but that was actually less than analysts expected, since GM’s numbers a year ago were boosted by big discounts and other incentives. Ford’s sales rose 7 percent.

Further underlining the good news, Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne announced that, as a reward for the company’s first profitable year since 2005, all hourly workers would be receiving a $1,500 bonus. Meanwhile, GM announced plans to invest $200 million in a new stamping plant in Arlington, Texas. Oh, and Michigan’s unemployment rate declined again in December, to its lowest point in more than two years.

Chrysler’s numbers are particularly noteworthy, because without the Obama administration’s combination bailout/managed bankruptcy, Chrysler almost assuredly would not exist. Indeed, on Tuesday, while Florida Republicans were smacking Newt Gingrich around, Obama attended the Washington Auto Show and delivered a none-too-subtle jab at his likely Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

“It’s good to remember the fact that there were some folks who were willing to let this industry die,” said Obama.

The president was clearly referring to the infamous New York Times Op-Ed piece written by Mitt Romney in Novmber 2008, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

That’s a headline that Romney probably would like to take back, in light of the success of Obama’s auto rescue, as well as the electoral importance of Michigan, a key swing state. You could argue that it sounds, you know, a little callous, along the lines of “I like firing people” or “I’m not concerned with the very poor.”

But this is Mitt Romney we are talking about, an absolute master at the facile reinvention of his own history. In fact, he’s been arguing ever since it became obvious that the White House strategy was working that what he had really been advocating in his Op-Ed was exactly the kind of managed bankruptcy approach that the Obama administration ended up pursuing.

Romney’s revisionist history, strictly speaking, doesn’t hold up. Romney wanted Chrysler and GM to go through a bankruptcy process that was organized out-of-court, by the private sector, and involved no new federal loans. The most he was willing to entertain, as far as government intervention was concerned, was a federal pledge to guarantee the debt of any new equity investors who might be willing to pump fresh cash into the troubled car companies. His criticism of the Obama strategy throughout 2009 was unremitting. As he wrote in the National Review’s The Corner blog, “What is proposed is even worse than bankruptcy – it would make GM the living dead.”

The problem, however, was that at the time, in the spring of 2009, credit markets were effectively frozen. There were no prospective new investors willing to take any risks at all, even with a government backstop. Instead, hovering over the quickly decaying corpses of the two automakers were a flock of GM and Chrysler bondholders and creditors all desperate to grab whatever cash they could from what would have been a very, very messy liquidation. And the downstream impact of liquidation on the automotive supply chain and Midwestern Rust Belt state economies would have been a catastrophe.

Without federal loans the automakers would not have survived. As Chrysler’s Marchionne told CNN when questioned about Romney’s critique:

Whoever told you that is smoking illegal material. That market had become absolutely dysfunctional in 2008 and 2009. There were attempts made by a variety of people to find strategic alliances with other car makers on a global scale and the government stepped in, as the actor of last resort. It had to do it because the consequences would have been just too large to deal with.”

It’ll be fun to see how all this plays out as Obama and Romney make their visits to Michigan in upcoming months. Obama will point, with justice, to his own record. Romney will try to pretend that Obama actually was following Romney’s advice. Voters will have to decide whom to trust: A president who took enormous political heat for saving the auto industry, or a former private equity wheeler and dealer who said government should have just let the market work its destructive magic.

Romney considers himself a “favorite son” in Michigan — his father was governor and the president of an auto manufacturer. But his position seems like a tough sell.

From Business Week November 28, 1959

My relationship with the Edsel started in 1968 when my dad made a film called, “Because That’s Why.” In this short film, there’s a sequence where two men stalk and hunt a pink 1959 Edsel. They end up “killing” the automobile and triumphantly pose with it strung up like one would with a Great White Shark. At 12 years old, I think I felt sorry for the beast, and it became a dream of mine to someday own an Edsel of my own. That never happened, but I was able to gather a lot of material on the car and actually used it in as a basis for papers I wrote in high school and college…

Shot from Joe Sedelmaier's short film "Because That's Why" 1968

In the annals of automobile history there are few sagas so fraught with failure as the Edsel. Ford spent $250 million to develop the car and lost another $200 million during the three-year existence of the car. Soon after its launch, unflattering nicknames like “Oldsmobile sucking a lemon” followed. Developed over a period of almost 10 years, the Edsel was Ford Motor Company’s answer to the mid-priced slot. In the 1950s, the closest that Ford came to a medium-priced car was its Mercury. Problem was, when it came time for Ford owners to upgrade, they sidestepped the Mercury and hopped up to a GM car like an Oldsmobile, Pontiac or Buick, and to a lesser extent a Chrysler product. Ford’s strategy was to develop a new line that would inspire loyalty to the parent company. A “Special Products Division” was developed by Ford to research what would be the perfect automobile to effectively fill this void. The “E-Car” (for experimental) program grew out of this.

Roy Brown, Edsel's designer (p18 "Edsel - The Motor Industry's Titanic" Robert Daines)

One of the approaches the Ford Motor Company took when preparing for the Edsel’s launch was an extensive campaign to recruit and hire dealerships that would sell the Edsel exclusively – NOT in tandem with other Ford, Mercury, or Lincoln models. This ultimately involved training schools for sales and service personnel – even the most experienced journeymen found themselves required to participate and learn how Ford wanted their new line sold and serviced.

Announcement's opening with picture of Edsel Ford and a letter to stockholders from Henry Ford II.

Edsel dealer sales agreement 1957

First issue of the Edsel “Service Beacon” provided to service departments to keep them updated on product issues and how to deal with them.

Pre-launch "Edsel Marketeer" dealership magazine, with select pages included below.

First post-launch "Edsel Marketeer" with entire issue below.

Leave behind 1957 residential door-hanger card.

1957 scale model offer - these don't go for cheap on eBay !

1957 Edsel paint color chip wheel.

The Edsel’s pre-launch promotional campaign was so extensive that the eventual unveiling couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. The following are some examples of what was produced, and demonstrates how extensive the project really was. Viewmaster even issued a set of 3-D slide discs featuring the Edsel line of cars. It’s also a reminder of how much of a role illustration used to play in automobile advertising. Hardly the case now  … For those of you interested in the advertising end of the story, Foote Cone & Belding (now part of DraftFCB) was contracted to handle the Edsel advertising campaign for Ford. (First Edsel Ad, Edsel Demo Ad)

Pre-launch Edsel ad showing shrouded car. (www.oldcaradvertising.com)

Official FoMoCo press release shots. Ford was nice enough to send these to me for free in 1970.

Premium 1957 Edsel Sales Brochure with complete scans below.

1st Edsel Owner's Manual.

1957 Edsel Features booklet with complete scans below.

A 1959 Edsel.

1960 Edsel sales booklet.

In terms of its distinctive front-grille styling, it’s interesting to see the centered “horse-collar” grille element reduce in size and prominence during the three-year genesis. By the time its last model year arrived in 1960 all that was left was a small inches-high logo shield. It would take another decade with the introduction of the 1968 Pontiac Bonneville, before an American car resurrected this vertical design treatment.

1959 Edsel

1968 Pontiac

Magazines featuring Edsel launch stories 1957. (That's the Sept 1957 issue of Fortune Magazine at the top)

A big event associated with the Edsel’s unveiling was “The Edsel Show” on CBS. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney starred in a special live broadcast celebrating the car’s arrival.

Another televised reference to the car’s “distinctive” styling was a 1961 episode (Season 3/Episode 12) of “The Dick Van Dyke Show. ““The Sound of the Trumpets of Conscience Falls Deafly on a Brain That Holds Its Ears … Or Something Like That!” Rob Petrie witnesses a jewel robbery but can’t seem to remember any details about the crime. He later lets it slip  that the crooks were driving a fire-engine red Edsel – needless to say, it breaks the case. http://www.hulu.com/watch/113989/the-dick-van-dyke-show-the-sound-of-the-trumpets-of-conscience-falls-deafly-on-a-brain-that-holds-its-earsor-something-like-that#s-p17-so-i0

For a VERY brief time it was cool to be seen in an Edsel. From a late 1950's magazine on driving behavior for high school students.

Richard Nixon riding through Peru in an Edsel. (Intro page from "Edsel - The Motor Industry's Titanic" Robert Daines)

To learn more of the details behind the Edsel’s “colorful” history, here are several books I’ve found helpful and interesting:

“The Edsel Affair” – C. Gayle Warnock (1980)

“The Fate Of The Edsel & Other Business Adventures” – John Brooks (1963)

“Disaster In Dearborn” – Thomas E. Bonsall (2002)

“Selling The People’s Cadillac” – Jan G. Deutsch (1976)

“Edsel-The Motor Industry’s Titanic” Robert Daines (1994)

My Edsel Owners Club membership card circa 1971.

Thanks as usual go to Corrie Lebens here at JJSP for compiling all this material !

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

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Even in writing about Paine’s first film for Salon five years ago, I got several angry letters from impassioned defenders of the internal combustion engine, who assured me that electric motors were for golf carts, and that the automotive future, like the past, belonged to petroleum. As we now know, the death of the EV1 was hardly the end of the story. Within a few months of releasing “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” Paine found himself watching legendary auto executive Bob Lutz, then G.M.’s vice chairman, drive a prototype of the Chevrolet Volt onto the floor of Detroit’s annual auto show. The widespread electrification of the passenger car, Lutz told him, was “a foregone conclusion.”

A cigar-smoking climate-change denier who’s long been seen as the car enthusiast’s car enthusiast, Lutz was about the last person in the world you expected to start shilling for electric vehicles. Then again, you wouldn’t have expected Chris Paine to make an insider documentary about auto industry competition. His fascinating and highly entertaining new movie, “Revenge of the Electric Car,” is almost like his first one turned upside down, with unprecedented access to the inner workings of G.M., Nissan and Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors as they battle to get new electric cars into production. His irresistible cast of characters range from Lutz, the crusty Detroit veteran, to Carlos Ghosn, the globetrotting, ultra-smooth Renault-Nissan CEO, to Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, who burned through his entire PayPal fortune launching his company, to Greg “Gadget” Abbott, a DIY Los Angeles engineer who has rebuilt vintage Porsches and Triumphs as all-electric vehicles.

Visionary entrepreneurs like Musk and Abbott, although they operate on vastly different scales, have been pursuing the electric-car dream for years. But as Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Neil explains in the film, guys like Ghosn and Lutz saw the light very suddenly in the late 2000s, when gas prices began to rise and the global economy slid into the crapper. The business case for building electric cars went from intriguing to compelling to irresistible, and the question rapidly became who was going to get it right and reap the eventual worldwide windfall. Paine seems delighted to root for all three companies and essentially declares a three-way tie, which may be fine for the moment: Both the Chevy Volt — a plug-in hybrid rather than a true electric car — and the all-electric Nissan Leaf have sold encouragingly, although both are very new to the market, and against all odds Musk has kept Tesla alive and hopes to start mass production of his $60,000 Model S sedan next year.

Those who are legitimately concerned about the environmental costs and potential drawbacks of electric vehicles — from the (so far) prohibitive pricing to the dirty electric grid to the limited battery range — will notice that Paine continues to skirt those issues. He’s a crusading journalist when he wants to be, but when it comes to large-scale questions about whether electric cars can really replace the ones we drive today, he’s more like a cheerleader. In “Who Killed the Electric Car?” he suggested that hydrogen-fuel technology, which is also being explored by the auto manufacturers and oil companies, is essentially a scam designed to ensure their long-term supremacy, but he does not revisit any of that here. (My 7-year-old son, who knows more about this issue than I do, forcefully disagrees with Paine on that one.) For whatever it’s worth, Dan Neil, the Journal’s astute (and always entertaining) auto columnist, is on board; he’s been “saying farewell” to a long career of owning and driving gasoline cars over the last few years, he says, and will never buy one again.

“Revenge of the Electric Car” is now playing at the Sunshine Cinema in New York, the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, N.Y., and the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles. It opens Oct. 28 in Nashville; Nov. 4 in Boston, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Santa Fe, N.M; Nov. 11 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Calif., San Diego, Santa Rosa, Calif., and Seattle; Nov. 18 in Philadelphia; Nov. 23 in St. Louis; Nov. 25 in Denver and Washington; and Dec. 2 in Atlanta, with more cities to follow.

The second type of commercial will be full of hip, attractive people extoling the sleek virtues of the fast, sexy automobile. Since young people aren’t really the demographic for purchasing automobiles, these ads market to those suffering from too much money and Peter Pan syndrome.

The fact that these narratives are the two standards for car marketing is what makes the new Toyota Venza ads so appealing. Conceived by creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA, the spots feature aimless twenty-somethings snarking on their parents’ lame, boring lives. These monologues are juxtoposed with shots of older people (presumably the parents) driving around, mountain-biking, and generally partying it up while their progeny stay inside, checking their Facebook stats and rolling their eyes.

The message is shockingly subversive: young is no longer cool. Cool is no longer cool. “You know what’s cool?” says these ads, “Being a grownup.” “The Venza campaign goes directly against how marketers usually talk to boomers,” said Margaret Keene, Executive Creative Director, Saatchi & Saatchi LA.” We wanted to talk to them in a way that was relevant and honest.”

Considering the average age of a new car buyer is 43, the most interesting fact about this “revolutionary” campaign is how long it came for someone to come up with that concept.