General Motors, Ford and Chrysler met with Nancy Pelosi on Thursday to beg for a second $25-billion loan package from Congress, arguing that they're too big to fail and that Michigan voted for Barack Obama. GM, after getting turned down by the Bush administration, is already planning to ask the next Treasury secretary for $10 billion to buy Chrysler. I'll let other people waste their time examining GM's debt load or Chrysler's union contracts; I decided to figure out whether the government should bail these companies out by testing their products. I'd wanted to run this same experiment on Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch but got bogged down when I couldn't figure out what either of them did. I am, however, certain that U.S. taxpayers should not save Bennigan's.
Taking Detroit for a spin
Shortly after getting to the Glendale Dodge dealership, I realized that evaluating cars was going to be more difficult than I'd anticipated, because the only thing I know about cars is that, after 19, women don't want to have sex in them. While waiting for a salesperson, I also realized that Phil Collins wrote many more songs than I remembered. Luckily, my method of car evaluation is exactly the same as most car buyers: Does it look cool and hook up to my iPod? So I got salesman John Martin to let me drive the brand new Challenger, which is a noisy, gas-munching, "Starsky and Hutch"-worthy, retro muscle car with giant wheels and side stripes. I slid into the driver's seat and felt my hair get shorter in the front and grow in the back. Martin knew how to make me fall in love with it. "When we sell these vehicles," he said, "we tell people how dangerous they are."
After I left small bits of rubber all over Brand Avenue, Martin introduced me to the new Ram 1500, which is a very large truck. I've never driven a truck, or even held a conversation about trucks, yet I instinctively knew to ask, "What's the payload on this one?" I was not sure if Martin would respond with a weight, a metric volume, a dollar amount, a comparison to horses or a high-five. He told me it carried 9,000 pounds, which sounded like a stupid amount because it meant I'd somehow have to lift 9,000 pounds on and off the truck. Still, the large payload made me feel manly. "Yeah, you feel like building something," Martin said. Not really, I told him. "A cabinet, maybe," he offered. I explained I meant "manly" more in the vein of not putting sugar in my chai.
