New Horizons

Throughout a summer of sizzling sales, Detroit's auto executives kept revising upward their estimates of how Calendar Year 1968 would turn out. What kept them from getting really carried away was the nagging fear that the 1969 models, which would enter the showrooms by October and bear higher price tags but few major styling changes, might meet with buyer resistance. That fear has all but evaporated. As Ford Executive Vice President Lee lacocca put it, Calendar 1968 is a "lead-pipe cinch" to wind up as the best sales year in history, surpassing the 1965 record of 9,314,000 cars.

lacocca did not stop there. In a speech before the Philadelphia Mortgage Bankers Association last week, he predicted that by the late 1970s "we won't be showing any particular elation over a 13 million year. That kind of market will have become routine."

Beep Beep. The immediate reason for lacocca's optimism is the reception that the '69 models are getting. Last week Detroit reported that sales for Oct. 1-10, the first period during which all '69s were up for sale, were running at an average 34% a day ahead of the same period a year before. The biggest improvement was achieved by Ford, which increased sales by 180% over, last year, when a 49-day strike slowed its business to a crawl. The other three automakers also increased sales: General Motors by 11.7%, Chrysler by 7%, and American Motors by a slender .2%.

A single ten-day period, of course, is anything but conclusive. Nonetheless, the industry's early-October performance suggests that the 10% tax surcharge has done remarkably little to dampen consumer spending.* With Buick and Oldsmobile improving most, G.M. showed sizable gains in all divisions except Cadillac. Ford fared best with such full-size models as its new LTD, while Lincoln Mercury's biggest gainer was the Cougar, available for the first time in a convertible. Chrysler reported across-the-board gains, paced by Plymouth's ultra-sporty "Road Runner," so-called because of a "beep beep" horn that recalls the cartoon character of that name.

Peek at the Mirror. As gratifying as its own sales were, Detroit still peeked nervously in the rearview mirror at its foreign competitors, which have been accounting for about 10% of all U.S. sales. In fact, if it were not for a disturbing surge of imports, which will reach a sales level of well over 900,000 this year, a new auto-industry record would be merely an outside possibility rather than a virtual certainty. In any case, many of this year's buyers, whether they prefer U.S. or foreign models, plainly went into the market for the same reason: the time had come to trade in cars that they had bought during the previous record sales spree of three years ago.

* The continuing spending spree, reported the Commerce Department last week, swelled the nation's gross national product during the year's third quarter to a record annual rate of $870.8 billion, an 8% increase over the comparable quarter of last year.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.