Detroit is for Losers
Henry Ford, Henry Leland, Billy Durant and the other winners of the competition to build a successful car company are huge figures, but in their way, they’re freaks. They succeeded where almost no one else did. In HCC #88, we featured a St. Louis automobile, from one of about 100 car companies based there. How many are there today? For several years, I’ve been mapping the locations of America’s car factories and if you look at Detroit, you see layer upon layer of failure—an E.M.F. plant will be in an old Briggs Detroiter factory, which Studebaker then sold to REO, then acquired by Willys and later used to stamp Chrysler Imperial bodies. Henry Ford II’s Renaissance Center became GM’s white elephant and has under its foundations the factories of half-a-dozen makes. Pick the nearest town of 20,000 or more people—odds are that someone built a car there. Of the hundreds of makes started in England, the largest surviving English-owned car company is Morgan, a manufacturer that doesn’t bui...