GM Parochialism

Michael Barone, one of the brightest observers of American politics and culture, has a fascinating article on the insularity of General Motors executives. An excerpt:

I grew up in the Detroit area and at the boys' schools I attended had some exposure to the sons of auto executives. One thing I noticed fairly early on was the parochialism of the Big Three auto execs. They assumed that everyone in America was like them—a family man who needed a big car to take the family up north every summer. That's the way most people in Michigan—auto execs or UAW members—lived. And in the two decades after 1945, in an America characterized by great cultural homogeneity, a baby boom, conformism, this parochialism was not a liability. You basically had to build one kind of car, with price gradations based on engine size, interior décor, and chrome, and people would buy it.

But there were problems even then. One of the problems was the auto clocks. As I remember my parents' GM cars from the 1950s and early 1960s, they were equipped with automatically self-correcting clocks. Since the automakers had evidently not mastered the technology of keeping electric clocks operating accurately in vehicles in which the electricity was not on at all times, the clocks were engineered to adjust when you reset them to the correct time. Reset them 20 or 30 or 60 minutes later, and they would run faster. Reset them 20 or 30 or 60 minutes earlier, and they would run slower.

This worked fine in Michigan, which between 1945 and 1966 was one of the small number of states without daylight-saving time. But in states with DST, if you reset the clock when local time changed, it would never keep correct time again. The Detroit auto execs took a long time to figure this out. They thought everyone lived in a state like Michigan.

Read it here.