Homebred Mini-Models

After chasing each other around the track for years, Detroit's automakers and their foreign competition now appear to be coming full circle. The U.S. is about to undergo another compact-car race with a brand new generation of minimodels.

When small, low-priced imports took over a 10% share of the domestic auto market in the late 1950s, General Motors fought back with the Corvair, Ford with the Falcon, and Chrysler with the Valiant. So successful were these com pacts that by 1962 the foreign share of the market had dropped to under 5%. Figuring that the battle was over, the Big Three made the mistake of allowing their compacts to grow in both size and price. The result has been a new upsurge in the popularity of imports, which grabbed 9.4% of U.S. sales in 1967 and are back over the 10% mark this year.

Now Detroit is preparing to meet the challenge with a new group of cars even smaller than the original compacts. More than half of all imports are accounted for by West Germany's low-cost ($1,699) Volkswagen, whose continuing success suggests that the import phenomenon is attributable less to beauty than to size and price. With many foreign cars, of course, there is also the desire for prestige. Until now, the Big Three have been trying to fill the size and price specifications with their own foreign-built cars, notably Ford's English-made Cortina, Chrysler's made-in-France Simca, and G.M.'s German-made Opel, the next best-selling import after Volkswagen.

Sawed-Off Mustang. Detroit's new cars, by contrast, will be manufactured entirely in the U.S. and Canada. Ford plans to have its minimodel on the market next April, and General Motors expects to introduce its version in the fall of 1969, at the same time dropping its slow-moving Corvair. American Motors also hopes to produce a small car next year, provided that it can hold down the tooling-up costs. The only automaker without a domestic minimodel in the works is Chrysler, which instead has decided to consider development of what it calls a "world car," a low-cost auto that would probably be manufactured in France and aim at acceptance in both the U.S. and European markets.

Farthest along in the development race is Ford, whose six-cylinder, 100-h.p. entry will resemble a sawed-off Mustang and have a semi-fastback roof-line that will make it sportier than the Volkswagen, Japan's Toyota, and other leading low-priced imports. The car is currently being test-run at the company's proving ground in suburban Dearborn. Code-named "the Delta," it is considerably longer (176 in. to 159 in.) than the Volkswagen, but does not stand quite as high (53 in. to 59 in,). It will get about 22 miles to a gallon of gasoline. Ford hopes to keep the cost under $2,000 by incorporating into its design as many parts from the Falcon as possible.

Detroit's move into the low-price field has come belatedly and grudgingly. Saddled with higher labor costs than their foreign competitors, U.S. automakers enjoy a far greater unit profit on bigger, jazzier cars than they could hope to on European-style ones. In order to make a go of it with low-priced cars, they must be certain that the volume is there. The upswing in import sales, which will account for a $2 billion chunk of business this year, has convinced them that it is.

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