Iacocca, Dreams and Stark Reality

I have been having dreams about Lee Iacocca. They have not been pleasant.

In the dream, Iacocca, the chairman of Chrysler, comes into my house and starts looking around. “Is that a Sony TV?” he sneers. “Whatsa matter? American TVs not good enough for you?”

I start to mumble something about how you can’t hardly find TVs that are really made in America, but he goes over and kicks in the picture tube.

Then he takes a baseball bat to my Yamaha stereo and forces my Toshiba computer printer down the garbage disposal, which is, thank God, made by Sears.

“OK,” Iacocca says, sitting down at my kitchen table. “What’s for dinner?”

And before I can stop myself, I say: “Sushi.”

Iacocca takes out a Colt .45 automatic--still made in America --and shoots me. Then I wake up.

I know why I have been having these dreams. They started right after I saw Iacocca’s new TV commercial for Chrysler.

I’m sure you have seen it: Iacocca stalks into a luxurious boardroom and stands before his senior executives. The commercial is very realistic. By this I mean that only Iacocca gets to speak and the executives look scared to death.

“I think America is getting an inferiority complex about Japan,” Iacocca says. And then he says sarcastically: “Everything from Japan is great and everything from America is lousy.” He says this has got to stop, etc., etc.

Some have said this commercial is going to start a new round of Japan bashing in this country. But I think that misses the point. Iacocca is not bashing Japan; he is bashing the American consumer.

He is complaining about us. He is complaining that the American consumer thinks Japanese cars are better than American cars.

But you have to ask yourself--as Iacocca does not--why.

You have to ask yourself why, for the first time in history, a Japanese car, a Honda, is the No. 1 selling car in America.

Is it because Americans like the Japanese so much? I doubt it.

In fact, in the decades after World War II, Japanese auto makers had to overcome a pretty widespread dislike for Asians in this country.

But they did it. And they didn’t do it with slick commercials. They did it by building very good cars.

They also did it at a time when the Detroit auto makers, run by men like Iacocca, were building bad cars. Cars that were designed to break down and need trading-in after only a few years. It was called “planned obsolescence.” Detroit loved it, and the American consumer was stuck with it. Until the Japanese came along and offered us a choice.

Some signs now point to improvement in American cars. We’re better than the Japanese, Iacocca crows in his new commercial.

But, like a lot of people, I look through the Consumer Reports magazine auto issue before I buy a car. I look in the back, where the magazine measures the “Trouble Index” for all cars.

And in that listing I find every Honda model rated “much better than average” for 1988, for instance, while the Chrysler models are rated “much worse than average,” “worse than average” and “average” for 1988.

There are exceptions, but when comparing Japanese cars to American cars, the Japanese cars simply do better on the whole.

So it’s not an inferiority complex that American consumers have; it’s a reality complex.

Why hasn’t America been building better cars all these years? Because American management was greedy and shortsighted and figured they could bamboozle the American public with fancy commercials and big tail fins instead of quality.

They were wrong. But here comes Lee Iacocca to tell us that it’s time to trust Detroit again. Maybe he is right. But I think Detroit is going to have to show us something more than Iacocca charging around his corporate boardroom. I think it’s going to have to show us some American cars that do better in the ratings than foreign cars.

And it’s going to have to do something else. It’s going to have to change its attitude toward us, the consumer.

I’ll give you an example. It doesn’t have anything to do with cars, but it has a lot to do with what I’m talking about.

For years, I have filled out those little evaluation cards in hotel rooms. I tell the hotel management what is good or bad about its hotel.

I have filled them out in Hyatts and Hiltons and Marriotts. And I have never gotten a reply.

OK, big deal. Who cares? Why should they bother?

But a few months ago, I went to Chicago. I stayed at the Nikko Hotel, which is owned by Japan Airlines. I didn’t stay there because it was a luxury hotel in a good location. I stayed there because it was offering a weekend rate of $79.50 a night.

And when I left, I filled out an evaluation card. I said it was a very nice hotel with great prices, but I also listed a few minor problems.

I stuck the card in a mailbox and forgot about it. A few weeks ago my phone rang at home.

The caller identified himself as Matthew Kondo of the Nikko Hotel in Chicago. He said he wanted to apologize for the problems I had when I stayed at his hotel.

I was a little embarrassed. After all, I had paid only $79.50 a night. So what was I complaining about? I told Kondo to forget about the minor problems because they were, well, minor.

“Oh, no,” he said. “We want it to be perfect. We want our hotel to be perfect.”

I told him that nothing was perfect and he ran a very nice hotel.

“But we wish to be a perfect hotel,” he said. “It is our goal.”

He then promised he would direct his full attention to correcting the problems I had at his hotel. He did not know, by the way, that I worked for a newspaper. He was simply calling me because that is what he did when any customer had a problem with his product. A product he wanted to make perfect.

I am not saying there are no great American-owned hotels in America. There are. I stay in them all the time.

But not one of them has ever bothered to respond to me when I filled out one of their evaluation cards. It took a Japanese-owned hotel to do that.

There is a lesson here. A lesson Lee Iacocca could learn:

Not until American management spends its time on consumers instead of commercials will American products be No. 1 again.