The Reckoning [antikvár]

1. MAXWELL'S WARNING There had been plenty of warnings. Some experts had pointed out that the sources of oil were not limitless, that consumption was rising faster than production. Some noted that certain of the oil-producing countries were politically unstable and hostile to the United States. The men of the auto industry had never heeded the warnings. They dismissed them as veiled criticisms of the cars they were making. In June 1973, a young man named Charley Maxwell flew from New York to Detroit to talk to the top executives of the three main auto companies. A decade later astute observers would mark that particular time, mid-1973, as the last moment of the old order in the industrialized world. It was a time when energy was still remarkably cheap and in steady supply, a time when the great business captains could still make their annual forecasts with some degree of certainty. Detroit was still Detroit in those heady days. It regularly sold eight million cars a year, and in a good year, a boomer's year, the kind loved by everyone in the business from the president of a company to the lowliest dealer, it sold ten or eleven million. More, these were precisely the kind and size of cars Detroit wanted to sell—big, heavy cars loaded with expensive options. In those days no one talked about energy conservation except a few scholarly types. The average American car got about thirteen miles per gallon then, a figure far below that expected of cars in most other modem countries. Detroit's cars were large, weighty, and powerful. Comfort and power, rather than economy, seemed important in the marketplace. Americans were a big people, and they liked to drive long distances. If the cars were no longer of quite the quality many of the company engineers and manufacturing men wanted, this was deemed a matter of no great consequence, for they still sold. Anyone who complained about the quality of the cars was a quibbler, more than likely an egghead who subscribed to Consumer Reports. After all, a car need last no more than the three years before the owner turned it in for a brand-new model, which would be equally large, or, given the American presumption of rising social status, even larger. As the new car reflected the owner's climb, so the old car now began its