Time Passage Lessenberry Ink

I

like restaurants that have photographs on the walls showing their towns in

times past. Last weekend, I was in one with a picture of people lined up to get

into the Bavarian Inn in Frankenmuth. Judging from their clothes and the cars,

it was from the late 1940s.







Another diner near me has a large photo of Cadillac

Square in what I am pretty sure is 1915. There are still some horse-drawn

buggies on the street, but not many. Mostly there are cars.







In another picture taken five years later, the horses

are all gone.  Progress and change are

sometime swift.  Henry Ford sped up the

total victory of the automotive era with the Model T and the assembly

line.  But it still took a while to put

the buggy whip boys out of business.







Now, both the North American International Auto Show,

and the auto industry itself, are changing. 

I knew that, of course, but it was newly impressed upon me yesterday

afternoon by a couple of friends who grew up in Detroit but now live in

Washington, and who flew back to take in the auto show. They weren’t very

impressed by this year’s show itself.







Oh, they did find some pockets of cool.  But they noticed many European manufacturers

skipped the show this year.  Other out-of-town

journalists who came told me that by and large there seemed something a bit

tired about this auto show.







But what amazed my Washington friends, one who whom

worked downtown in the 1980s, was the progress in the city. They couldn’t stop

talking about the revitalized downtown, and despite the cold, spent time after

the show walking around and staring.







They aren’t naïve; they are trained journalists who

work for national publications. Yes, they know many of the neighborhoods are

still grim, though at least they now have streetlights. But while we who have

been living here tend to see the remaining flaws in the city’s comeback, those

who have been gone awhile see amazing things in a city the world gave up as

dead.







Detroit may get more of a boost in the summer of 2020,

when the North American International Auto Show moves to June. Detroit in

January is usually horrible, as note Monday’s cold and today’s freezing

rain.  Detroit in early summer is usually

wonderful.







I have no idea what the auto show will be like then,

but the organizers are almost certain to put some of it outside, and will

hopefully stage some events on the glittering riverfront.







The auto industry is changing dramatically, but then,

it always has.  The dealer network we

take for granted today was once new; so were other exciting developments like

automatic transmissions and four-wheel drive and cars with radios.







Nobody really knows much will change and how fast

things will change in this industry, but I think two things are clear.  First, automobiles, trucks and SUVs and anything

people use to get around, are now extremely complex machines, and getting more

so.







Second, having an automobile, being on the open road

free to determine where you will go is as alluring now as it was to the masses

who bought Model Ts a century ago.







Millennials may be less willing to fight traffic jams

to get to work. Fewer may be crazy about cars. But one survey showed 84 percent

of them feel they can’t live without access to one. The decline of the auto

industry, like that of Detroit, may have been considerably exaggerated.