Read Motorworld for Free Online

flabbergasted to answer. You can buy T-shirts elsewhere in the States which say things like ‘Don’t Mess With Me. I Have Friends In Detroit’ or ‘DETROIT – Where The Weak Are Killed And Eaten’.
    That’s strange because, just 30 years ago, Detroit was the most vibrant city America had ever seen. The people were rich. The factories were humming. You could hear the buzz all round the world. So what turned the motor capital of the world into the murder capital of the world?
    Well, way back at the dawn of automotive time, and seemingly quite by chance, a number of individuals setup shop in and around De Troit (it used to be French) making cars. A great many covered wagons had been built there and the city simply added the newfangled internal combustion engine.
    This city was home base to Lincoln, Cadillac, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Ford, Mercury, Chrysler, Hudson, Plymouth, Buick, Dodge, Packard and Oldsmobile. It was The Motor City.
    There were more car-makers than people and, to attract workers from elsewhere in the States, the pay was high. By the late fifties, the average industrial wage rate in America was $1.50 an hour but in Detroit they were getting $3.
    You could start work in one factory on a Monday morning and, if you didn’t like it, catch the afternoon shift in another later that day.
    Demand was phenomenal, too. These were the US boom years, before the oil crisis, Vietnam and Watergate, and everyone wanted a car: a big one with a V8 engine from Detroit. In the fifties and sixties, 97 per cent of all cars sold in America were made in America.
    No car sums up the times better than the original 1964 Mustang. This two-door saloon was an adventurous departure, not only for Ford but for the whole car industry.
    Until the Mustang came along, every car had a specific engine and a specific level of luxury. There was no choice. But with the ‘pony car’, as it became known, customers could choose what motor they wanted and even what body style – two-door saloon or convertible.
    And there was an options list. You could go for bucketseats, for instance, or a limited slip differential or a rev counter. It could be a 6-cylinder shopping car or a V8 wind-in-the-hair tyre-shredder.
    Ford guessed they were on to something with this new idea and reckoned they’d sell 100,000 Mustangs in the first twelve months. In fact, they sold 680,000 making it the fastest-selling car of all time – a record that’s never been beaten.
    But today, the only records being made are crime statistics.
    So what went wrong? Well, most importantly, there was the oil crisis which made people slightly less willing to run a V8 with its Oliver-Reedesque thirst. They wanted smaller engines and turned their attention to the newfangled Japanese offerings.
    And hey, these cars never broke down, so even when the oil problem went away many stuck with Honda and Datsun and Toyota.
    Then there was assembly-line automation, which was bad enough, but cheap land prices didn’t help either.
    When the car company wanted to update a factory, it didn’t simply put in a robot here and a conveyor belt there. No, it shut up shop completely and built a new plant, usually out of town where land was cheaper.
    Detroit might have been able to cope with all these things but unfortunately there was economic trouble in the South and thousands of black workers were heading to Detroit in a fruitless search for work. They’d heard about the promise of three bucks an hour but when they got there, the cupboard was bare.
    Social unrest was inevitable. In 1967, the African-Americans took to the streets and had themselves the riot to end all riots.
    Bob Seger, who at the time was an up-and-coming rock and roller from Detroit, remembers coming home from a gig one night to find tanks on the streets. ‘I just couldn’t believe it. This was Detroit and the whole place was on fire. There were police everywhere. They’d got the national guard out. It was like a war zone. It was worse