Car sales are heart of auto industry

Neal Rubin

They had a sales meeting at Bruce Campbell Dodge on Friday morning, four days after the whole darned car company was sold, and it was the boss who finally raised the subject.

Brian Campbell says he was ready to be reassuring, to tell everyone that the cars are good and sales are solid and things are just fine.

"They all kind of looked at me," Campbell says, "like it didn't affect them." And mostly, it didn't.

Few of us will ever spend $7.4 billion for 80 percent of an auto company, the way Cerberus Capital Management did a week ago when it struck a deal to buy Chrysler. Nearly all of us will buy a car, or most likely lots of them.

That's the automobile business: Not rich guys in tailored suits shuffling bank drafts across an ocean, but salespeople and customers, talking about miles per gallon and leather-wrapped steering wheels across a desk.

Products are moving

Paul Sancya / Associated Press

The loss of automobile industry jobs is a concern for dealership owners, as many of their customers work for the auto industry. See full image

Bruce Campbell Dodge has two showrooms and a sprawling lot on Telegraph Road, just below Five Mile in Redford Township.

In the new car showroom Friday, a man in a rust-colored golf shirt was strapping a baby seat into the second row of a Ram 1500 Big Horn 4x4, checking the fit. Close by, a woman had her head down on a conference table, catching a nap while the man she was with struck a deal. Out on the pavement, an extended family debated: Used, or new?

Brian Campbell, 34, is the store's vice president and general manager. He was 10 when his dad founded the dealership, and his first job there was hosing down K cars.

Now he's moving the Caliber, a compact crossover that gets 30 mpg, and sedans with throwback names and styling like the Challenger and Avenger, and minivans that combine with their Chrysler sisters to dominate their segment.

"These products are a lot easier to sell," he says, even if the ways he sells them keep changing.

Since January, he's had an Internet department with a director of E-Commerce and three staffers whose only job is to turn online leads into revenue. Something is working: sales are up 10 percent for the year, he says, and Thursday was huge -- 29 new cars and 12 used ones out the door, on a lot where 150 new cars makes for a pretty good month.

It could be that buyers were waiting for the corporation to make its move. Or maybe they just came to the showroom and liked the cars.

A deeper concern

Chrysler says it's closing a factory this year and cutting 13,000 jobs. The toll is worse at GM and Ford.

The men and women who built cars used to get credit for building America's middle class. Now they get told they're ruining the country with their pensions and health care.

That's a deeper concern in the showroom than whether Cerberus or DaimlerChrysler hires the million-dollar executives the salespeople never see. An oddity in Detroit is that so many buyers walk in the door with some manner of employee discount, or even discounts.

Gary Lanier of Plymouth was the shopper with the child seat. He's an engineer with Detroit Diesel, a DaimlerChrysler affiliate. His father-in-law retired from Ford.

The lease on Lanier's Ford Freestyle expires this month, so his wife will take his Chrysler Town & Country and he'll bring home an all-wheel-drive pickup to tow their snowmobiles and ATVs. But which one?

There's more room for the protective seat, he says, in Ford's F-150. But the Ram has a longer bed. He's torn, and the clock is ticking.

In Stuttgart, Germany, and wherever the heck Cerberus lurks, they're carefully placing commas in contracts. That's commerce. But the automobile business is here, with two salesmen and one customer and his truck.

Link: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070521/OPINION03/705210309/1003/METRO