They went into the house, mixed drinks, and took them to the kitchen where Erica made fried egg sandwiches for them all, and coffee. Adam left the other two briefly—to make a telephone call, and, tired as he was, to collect files he must work on tonight in preparation for the morning. When he returned, Erica was listening attentively to a discourse on auto racing—an extension, apparently, to Pierre’s remarks to the group around him at the cottage.
Pierre had a sheet of paper spread out on which he had drawn the layout of a speedway track. “… so heading in to the mainstretch in front of the stands, you want the straightest line possible. At two hundred miles an hour, if you let the car wander you lose time bad. Wind’s usually across the track, so you stay close to the wall, hug that old wall tight as you can …”
“I’ve seen drivers do it,” Erica said. “It always frightens me. If you ever hit the wall at a speed like that …”
“If you do, you’re safer hitting flat, Mrs. Trenton. I’ve been in a few walls …”
“Call me Erica,” Erica said. “Have you really?”
Adam, listening, was amused. He had taken Erica to auto races, but had never known her to show this much concern. He thought: perhaps it was because she and Pierre liked each other instinctively. The fact that they did was obvious, and the young race driver was glowing, responding boyishly to Erica’s interest. Adam felt grateful for the chance to regain his own composure without being the focus of his wife’s attention. Despite his return home, thoughts of Rowena were still strong in Adam’s mind.
“Every track you race on, Erica,” Pierre was saying, “a driver has to learn to handle it like it was a …” He hesitated for a simile, then added, “like a violin.”
“Or a woman,” Erica said. They both laughed.
“You have to know where every bump is in that old track, the low spots, what the surface gets like with a real hot sun, or after a sprinkle of rain. So you practice and practice, driving and driving, ’til you find the best way, the fastest line around.”
Seated across the room, his files now beside him, Adam threw in, “Sounds a lot like life.”
The other two seemed not to have heard. Obviously, Adam decided, they would not mind if he got on with some work.
“When you’re in a long race, say five hundred miles,” Erica said, “does your mind wander? Do you ever think of something else?”
Pierre gave his boyish grin. “God, no! Not if you figure to win, or even walk away instead of being carried out”. He explained, “You’ve a lot to keep checking and remember. How others in the race are doing, your plans for passing guys ahead, or how not to let guys past you. Or maybe there’s trouble, like if you scuff a tire it’ll take a tenth of a second off your speed. So you feel it happen, you remember, you do sums in your head, figure everything, then decide when to pit for a tire change, which can win a race or lose it. You watch oil pressure fifty yards before entering every corner, then, on the backstretch, check all gauges, and you keep both ears tuned to the way the engine sings. Then there’s signals from the pit crew to look out for. Some days you could use a secretary …”
Adam, concentrating on memo reading, screened the voices of Pierre and Erica out.
“I never knew all that,” Erica said. “It will seem different watching now. I’ll feel like an insider.”
“I’d like to have you see me race, Erica.” Pierre glanced across the room, then back. He lowered his voice slightly. “Adam said you’d be at the Talladega 500, but there’s other races before that.”
“Where?”
“North Carolina, for one. Maybe you could come.” He looked at her directly and she was aware, for the first time, of a touch of arrogance, the star syndrome, the knowledge that he was a hero to the crowd. She supposed a lot of women had come Pierre’s way.
“North Carolina’s not so far.” Erica smiled. “It’s something to think about, isn’t it?”
Some time later, the fact that Pierre Flodenhale was standing penetrated Adam’s consciousness.
“I guess I’ll be moving on, Adam,” Pierre said. “Thanks a lot for the ride and having me in.”
Adam returned a folder to his briefcase—a ten-year population shift estimate, prepared for study in conjunction with consumer car preference trends. He apologized, “I haven’t been much of a host. I hope my wife made up for me.”
“Sure did.”
“You can take my car.” He reached in his pocket for keys. “If you’ll phone my secretary tomorrow, tell her where it is, she’ll have it picked up.”
Pierre hesitated. “Thanks, but Erica said …”
Erica bustled into the living room, pulling a light car coat over her pajamas. “I’ll drive Pierre home.”
Adam started to say, “There’s no need …”
“It’s a nice night,” she insisted. “And I feel like some air.”
Moments later, outside, car doors slammed, an engine revved and receded. The house was silent.
Adam worked a half hour more, then went upstairs. He was climbing into bed when he heard the car return and Erica come in, but was asleep by the time she reached the bedroom.
He dreamed of Rowena.
Erica dreamed of Pierre.
17
A belief among automobile product planners is that the most successful ideas for new cars are conceived suddenly, like unannounced star shell bursts, during informal, feet on desk bull sessions in the dead of night.
There are precedents proving this true. Ford’s Mustang—most startling Detroit trend setter after World War II, and forerunner to an entire generation of Ford, GM, Chrysler, and American Motors products afterward—had its origins that way, and so, less spectacularly, have others. This is the reason why product teams sometimes linger in offices when others are abed, letting their smoke and conversation drift, and hoping—like prospicient Cinderellas—that magic in some form will touch their minds.
On a night in early June—two weeks after Hank Kreisel’s cottage party—Adam Trenton and Brett DeLosanto nurtured the same kind of wish.
Because the Orion, also, was begun at night, they and others hoped that a muse for Farstar—next major project ahead—might be wooed the same way. Over several months past, innumerable think sessions had been held—some involving large groups, others small, and still more composed of duos like Adam and Brett—but from none of them yet had anything emerged to confirm a direction which must be decided on soon. The basement block work (as Brett DeLosanto called it) had been done. Projection papers were assembled which asked and answered, more or less: Where are we today? Who’s selling to whom? What are we doing right? Wrong? What do people think they want in a car? What do they really want? Where will they, and we, be five years from now? Politically? Socially? Intellectually? Sexually? What’ll populations be? Tastes? Fashions? What new issues, controversies, will evolve? How will age groups shape up? And who’ll be rich? Poor? In between? Where? Why? All these, and a myriad other questions, facts, statistics, had sped in and out of computers. Now what was needed was something no computer could simulate: a gut feeling, a hunch, a shaft of insight, a touch of genius.
One problem was: to determine the shape of Farstar, they ought to know how Orion would fare. But the Orion’s introduction was still four months away; even then, its impact could not be judged fully until half a year after that. So what the planners must do was what the auto industry had always done because of long lead times required for new models—guess.
Tonight’s session, for Adam and Brett, began in the company tear-down room.
The teardown room was more than a room; it was a department occupying a closely guarded building—a storehouse of secrets which few outsiders penetrated. Those who did, however, found it a source of unwaveringly honest information, for the teardown room’s function was to dissect company products and competitors’, then compare them objectively with each other. All big three auto companies had tear-down rooms of their own, or comparable systems.
In the teard
own environment, if a competitor’s car or component was sturdier, lighter, more economical, assembled better, or superior in any other way, the analysts said so. No local loyalties ever swayed a judgment.
Company engineers and designers who had boobed were sometimes embarrassed by teardown room revelations, though they would be even more embarrassed if word leaked out to press or public. It rarely did. Nor did other companies release adverse reports about defects in competitors’ cars; they knew it was a tactic which could boomerang tomorrow. In any case, objectives of the teardown room were positive—to police the company’s products and designs, and to learn from others.
Adam and Brett had come to study three small cars in their torn-down state—the company’s own minicompact, a Volkswagen, and another import, Japanese.
A technician, working late at Adam’s request, admitted them through locked outer doors to a lighted lobby, then through more doors to a large high-ceilinged room, lined with recessed racks extending from floor to ceiling.
“Sorry to spoil your evening, Neil,” Adam said. “We couldn’t make it sooner.”
“No sweat, Mr. Trenton. I’m on overtime.” The elderly technician, a skilled mechanic who had once worked on assembly lines and now helped take cars apart, led the way to a section of racks, some of which had been pulled out “Everything’s ready that you asked for.”
Brett DeLosanto looked around him. Though he had been here many times before, the teardown operation never failed to fascinate him.
The department bought cars the way the public did—through dealers. Purchases were in names of individuals, so no dealer ever knew a car that he was selling was for detailed study instead of normal use. The precaution ensured that all cars received were routine production models.
As soon as a car arrived, it was driven to the basement and taken apart. This did not mean merely separating the car’s components, but involved total disassembly. As it was done, each item was numbered, listed, described, its weight recorded. Oily, greasy parts were cleaned.
It took four men between ten days and two weeks to reduce a normal car to ordered fragments, mounted on display boards.
A story—no one really knew how true—was sometimes told about a teardown crew which, as a practical joke, worked in spare time to disassemble a car belonging to one of their number who was holidaying in Europe. When the vacationer returned, the car was in his garage, undamaged, but in several thousand separate parts. He was a competent mechanic who had learned a good deal as a teardown man, and he determinedly put it together again. It took a year.
Techniques of total disassembly were so specialized that unique tools had been devised—some like a plumber’s nightmare.
The display boards containing the torn-down vehicles were housed in sliding racks. Thus, like dissected corpses, the industry’s current cars were available for private viewing and comparison.
A company engineer might be brought here and told: “Look at the competition’s headlamp cans! They’re an integrated part of the radiator support instead of separate, complex pieces. Their method is cheaper and better. Let’s get with it!”
It was called value engineering, and it saved money because each single cent of cost lopped from a car design represented thousands of dollars in eventual profit. Once, during the 1960s, Ford saved a mammoth twenty-five cents per car by changing its brake system master cylinder, after studying the master cylinder of General Motors.
Others, like Adam and Brett at this moment, did their viewing to keep abreast of design changes and to seek inspiration.
The Volkswagen on the display boards which the technician had pulled out had been a new one. He reported, with a touch of glumness, “Been taking VWs apart for years. Every damn time it’s the same-quality good as ever.”
Brett nodded agreement. “Wish we could say the same of ours.”
“So do I, Mr. DeLosanto. But we can’t. Leastways, not here.”
At the display boards showing the company’s own minicompact, the custodian said, “Mind you, ours has come out pretty well this time. If it wasn’t for that German bug, we’d look good.”
“That’s because American small car assembly’s getting more automated,” Adam commented. “The Vega started a big change with the new Lordstown plant. And the more automation we have, with fewer people, the higher everybody’s quality will go.”
“Wherever it’s going,” the technician said, “it ain’t gone to Japan—at least not to the plant that produced this clunker. For God’s sake, Mr. Trenton! Look at that!”
They examined some of the parts of the Japanese import, the third car they had come to review.
“String and baling wire,” Brett pronounced.
“I’ll tell you one thing, sir. I wouldn’t want anybody I cared about to be riding around in one of those. It’s a motorbike on four wheels, and a poor one at that.”
They remained at the teardown racks, studying the three cars in detail. Later, the elderly technician let them out.
At the doorway he asked, “What’s coming up next, gentlemen? For us, I mean.”
“Glad you reminded me,” Brett said. “We came over here to ask you.”
It would be some kind of small car; that much they all knew. The key question was: What kind?
Later, back at staff headquarters, Adam observed, “For a long time, right up to 1970, a lot of people in this business thought the small car was a fad.”
“I was one,” Elroy Braithwaite, the Product Development vice-president admitted. The Silver Fox had joined them shortly after Adam’s and Brett’s return from the teardown room. Now, a group of five—Adam, Brett, Braithwaite, two others from product planning staff—was sprawled around Adam’s office suite, ostensibly doing little more than shoot the breeze, but in reality hoping, through channeled conversation, to awaken ideas in each other. Discarded coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays littered tables and window ledges. It was after midnight.
“I thought the small car fever wouldn’t last,” Braithwaite went on. He put a hand through his silver-gray mane, disordered tonight, which was unusual. “I was in some pretty high-powered company, too, but we’ve all been wrong. As far as I can see, this industry will be small-car oriented, with muscle cars on the outs, for a long time to come.”
“Perhaps forever,” one of the other product planners said. He was a bright young Negro with large spectacles, named Castaldy, who had been recruited from Yale a year earlier.
“Nothing’s forever,” Brett DeLosanto objected. “Hemlines or hair styles or hip language or cars. Right now, though, I agree with Elroy—a small car’s the status symbol, and it looks like staying.”
“There are some,” Adam said, “who believe a small car is a non-symbol. They say people simply don’t care about status any more.”
Brett retorted, “You don’t believe that, any more than I do.”
“I don’t either,” the Silver Fox said. “A good many things have changed these past few years, but not basic human nature. Sure, there’s a ‘reverse status’ syndrome, which is popular, but it adds up to what it always did—an individual trying to be different or superior. Even a dropout who doesn’t wash is a status seeker of a kind.”
“So maybe,” Adam prompted, “we need a car which will appeal strongly to the reverse-status seeker.”
The Silver Fox shook his head. “Not entirely. We still have to consider the squares—that big, solid backlog of buyers.”
Castaldy pointed out, “But most squares don’t like to think of themselves that way. That’s why bank presidents wear sideburns.”
“Don’t we all?” Braithwaite fingered his own.
Above the mild laughter, Adam injected, “Maybe that’s not so funny. Maybe it points the way to the kind of car we don’t want. That is—anything looking like a conventional car produced until now.”
“A mighty big order,” the Silver Fox said.
Brett ruminated. “But not impossible.”
Castaldy, the young Yale man,
reminded them, “Today’s environment is part of reverse-status—if we’re calling it that. I mean public opinion, dissent, minorities, economic pressures, all the rest.”
“True,” Adam said, then added, “I know we’ve been over this a lot of times, but let’s list environmental factors again.”
Castaldy looked at some notes. “Air pollution: people want to do something.”
“Correction,” Brett said. “They want other people to do something. No one wants to give up personal transportation, riding in his own car. All our surveys say so.”
“Whether that’s true or not,” Adam said, “the car makers are doing something about pollution and there isn’t a lot individuals can do.”
“Just the same,” young Castaldy persisted, “a good many are convinced that a small car pollutes less than a big one, so they think they can contribute that way. Our surveys show that, too.” He glanced back at his notes. “May I go on?”
“I’ll try not to heckle,” Brett said. “But I won’t guarantee it”
“In economics,” Castaldy continued, “gas mileage isn’t as dominant as it used to be, but parking cost is.”
Adam nodded. “No arguing that. Street parking space gets harder to find, public and private parking costs more and more.”
“But parking lots in a good many cities are charging less for small cars, and the idea’s spreading.”
The Silver Fox said irritably, “We know all about that. And we’ve already agreed we’re going the small car route.”
Behind his glasses, Castaldy appeared hurt.
“Elroy,” Brett DeLosanto said, “the kid’s helping us think. So if that’s what you want, quit pulling rank.”
“My God!” the Silver Fox complained. “You birds are sensitive. I was just being myself.”
“Pretend to be a nice guy,” Brett urged. “Instead of a vice-president.”