Looking Toward Spring

Winter cannot end too soon to suit the nation's automakers. New-car sales, merely sluggish before Christmas, dropped to a four-year low during the first two months of 1967. Will spring bring any relief? Last week Detroit answered with a hopeful yes.

Shovels & Shoe Leather. If nothing else, the industry's guarded optimism reflects the feeling that things can hardly get much worse. Showrooms are clogged with nearly 1.5 million unsold new cars--a 68-day backlog at the rate cars have been selling so far. The sales slowdown is attributable not only to the general economic lag but also to the unusually severe snowstorms that all but smothered large parts of the U.S. Laments Ford Division Chief Donald N. Frey: "You can't interest a customer in a new car when he can't even shovel the old one out of the driveway."

Labor difficulties have complicated matters. Last month a fractious United Auto Workers local at General Motors' key Mansfield, Ohio, body-parts plant staged an eight-day wildcat walkout that affected 100 other G.M. plants, put more than 200,000 company workers off the job. Just as G.M. returned to full production last week, the Mansfield local resumed its unauthorized strike. Walter Reuther's U.A.W. promptly took over the local, and G.M. announced plans to reduce its reliance on the plant. More worrisome still, all the automakers face new contract negotiations with the U.A.W. this fall. Even as he chastised the Mansfield workers, Reuther exhorted them to "save your shoe leather. You'll need it when we walk together."

No wonder Detroit is counting on mild spring weather and new promotion drives to perk up business. Not yet ready to write off the year, G.M. President James M. Roche predicts that sales, imports included, should amount to a more-than-respectable 8.3 million cars. Even ailing American Motors is expressing renewed confidence, largely because of its decision to pare prices. In the last ten days of February, the company sold 3,018 Rambler Americans, almost as many as it did in the entire month of January.

Bigger Buckets? Beset by continued pressures on the safety front, the four major automakers last week notified the National Traffic Safety Agency that they could meet all but one of the 20 impending federal safety standards: a requirement that auto interiors be padded and that protruding parts be recessed so as to soften the impact of "second collisions." The agency will study the objections, is expected to issue its final standards for 1968-model cars within two weeks. As if to dispel the notion that automakers are unconcerned with safety, Ford meanwhile dedicated a new Automotive Safety Research Center in Dearborn, Mich. The ultramodern center will test everything from collision impact to anthropometry--a science concerned with such problems as whether bucket seats and passengers fit each other the way they should.

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