Auto Makers Plead for Relief From Regulation : Transportation: The Big 3 and UAW host 40 members of Congress during a two-day meeting in Detroit to explain the grim realities facing the auto industry.

Hosted by the financially floundering Big Three auto makers and the United Auto Workers, 40 members of Congress listened to grim news and pleas for help as they toured the industry’s home base Thursday and Friday.

Lawmakers said they were especially dismayed at Chrysler Chairman Lee A. Iacocca’s disclosure that the Big Three had probably lost $4.2 billion in their North American auto operations in the first quarter.

“The numbers are frightening in terms of the direction that we are headed,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).

Battered by sluggish sales, an anticipated second-straight quarterly loss and stiff foreign competition, the Big Three and its workers have repeatedly over the past few months petitioned the U.S. government for relief.

The trip was organized by the Michigan Delegation and the Congressional Competitiveness Caucus. Organizers believed that members of Congress might need a crash course on the industry’s importance to the American economy and the seriousness of its current malaise. They are hoping to influence upcoming legislation.

“In Washington, the auto industry is most of all an abstraction,” said Rep. Sander Levin, a Democrat from Michigan who helped organize the trip.

The high costs of fuel efficiency, safety and environmental regulations for the struggling industry topped the list of subjects discussed, Levin said. The three companies and the union each had private meetings with the delegation.

Anxious to shed their reputation for arrogance and extravagance--stemming from the record profits they made in the second half of the 1980s--the Big Three tried to keep the tenor of the trip in line with its message of austerity. Although the lawmakers were flown into Ford Motor Co.’s private hangar at Detroit’s Metro Airport on the No. 2 auto maker’s charter jets, they had to pay their own way home, an official from the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Assn. said.

Chrysler Corp. picked up the tab for dinner Thursday night, but the company chose to serve the meal cafeteria-style in its inner-city Highland Park, Mich., headquarters, instead of showing off its $1-billion technical center now under construction in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills.

Sitting in front of a large American flag pinned to the drapes at General Motors’ Hamtramack assembly plant on Friday before they departed for home, several legislators professed a new conviction that Washington needs to take an active role in ensuring the industry’s survival.

“The domestic auto industry is very, very important to America’s well-being and the citizenry as a whole,” said Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the industry’s staunchest ally in Washington. “Not only from an economic standpoint, but for the security of the entire country and our way of life.”

Though dominated by industry friends such as Levin and Dingell, the delegation included some lawmakers who said their minds were changed by their up-close examination of the Big Three’s plight.

Frank Riggs, a California Republican who represents parts of Sonoma and Marin counties, said he had previously been in favor of increasing fuel efficiency standards because of a desire to protect his district from offshore oil drilling. But after listening to the Big Three, Riggs said he realized that his environmental concerns needed to be balanced with the need to revive the American auto industry and retain jobs.

“It’s been a real eye-opener for me. My constituents would like to see greater fuel efficiency standards. But I think that needs to be tempered based on what I saw and heard in Detroit,” Riggs said.

The lawmakers, the auto makers and the UAW seemed unanimous in their calls for a “level playing field” on which the U.S. auto industry could slug it out fair and square with its Japanese competition, and all sides expressed appreciation for the others’ participation in the tour as the delegation left for Washington. But whether the meeting managed to foster the sort of heightened understanding that would result in more favorable economic, trade and regulatory policies remains to be seen.