The Coalmine.” What was the General Motors executive talking about? Then I understood. He was describing the interiors of his own new cars. Uniformly gray. Uniformly cheap. Uniformly awful. Get into a GM car yourself. Don't you think coalmine?
Maybe GM interior designers should be designing furniture for those shlock stores in poor neighborhoods. “Welfare mothers welcome. No money down. No credit check.”
You think I'm nasty. We can't afford to be nice anymore; we're talking life or death.
At a GM press show they held an old car rally with lots of cars from the '50s. There wasn't a vehicle there that didn't have a more exciting interior than any of the 2003 cars.
The dash on Bob Lutz's old Cunningham would cause a sensation in a luxury car today. The dash on an old Chevy pickup was gorgeous. But my favorite dash has always been the post-war Chrysler Town and Country Convertible. Why don't we have this kind of excitement today?
It's not just GM. At Chrysler they think a white odometer is razzmatazz. Ford? Ford never saw an old dash that it couldn't jam into an otherwise beautiful new car to save a buck. Look at the T'Bird with that Lincoln LS instrumentation. Shame on them.
Yes, I know all the GM interiors aren't black/gray. There is beige, too.
The great battles are to be fought in auto interiors. No one spends an hour or two a day walking around the outside of his car, looking at it. But he spends that time inside, looking at it.
Today the best interiors are Audi. Any argument? But matching or copying Audi isn't enough. When behind, copying the winner isn't winning. So here is the advice:
Glitz is good. Chrome is our favorite color. Go back to the future.
Dash boards (instrument panels). Forget that understated look. Forget the German brushed metal (good, but they've done it). Go to color and chrome. Borrow Bob's Cunningham. Look at that Town and Country. Give us glitz.
Seats, sides and carpets: When I was a boy the red cars had red seats and carpets and sides. The blue cars had blue interiors, the green cars had green. You could go to Dearborn assembly and watch them all come together, the red seat dropping into the red car. And they didn't have a computer. What is so tough? Let's put the color back inside. Banish gray, banish beige.
When I was a boy, we had two-tone paint jobs from the factory. We even had three-tones and a few four-tones. But let's start small. Two-tones. Why not? If you don't have new sheetmetal, work with the paint. Imagine a Jaguar S Type two-toned. Mercedes, BMW and Lexus haven't done it yet.
Once more: Detroit is losing the war. Understated anything won't do. Flaunt it. And Flaunt it inside.
Get out of the coalmine and into the light.
Jerry Flint is a columnist for and former senior editor of Forbes magazine
