Word: auto
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...before they do things," insists Dwayne of Atlanta, at 18 a seasoned criminal whose list of felony arrests includes armed robbery and assault. "It ain't like they stop to think, 'Now what they gonna do to me if I get caught?' " Nearby, 17-year-old DeMarcus (grand-theft auto, aggravated assault) sums up another problem: prison doesn't usually last forever, and life on the outside is an open invitation to go bad again. "They send you straight back into the same situation," he says. "The house is dirty when you left it, and it's dirty when...
...know about small American cars. Even as the U.S. auto industry pulled itself out of its '80s slough with its nifty minivans and reborn muscle cars, Detroit's compacts continued to deserve their reputation as cheap, homely, unreliable and, well, maybe a cut above Yugos and Trabants and the like, but not by much. Even their makers now admit that American compacts have been, for the most part, junk. Listen to Ford's Jerry Auth, a marketing executive: "Small cars built by Ford, GM and Chrysler were considered inferior -- and they were." Says Chrysler's Walter Battle, a planning manager...
...course, the reason auto executives are coming clean about their companies' shortcomings is not that they've suddenly decided it's the right thing to do. Rather, Detroit is owning up to its lemon-strewn past by way of touting its peachy present. Capping a year that has seen each of the Big Three earn record quarterly profits, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler are trumpeting a sweeping redesign of their smaller models. Now hitting showrooms % is a new type of compact, one that approximates the flowing, sculpted looks and sheer drivability usually found only in sports and luxury cars...
...larger (and more expensive) mid-size Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys. The strategy is to squeeze the popular mid-size Hondas and Toyotas between Detroit's hot compacts and its larger models, like Ford's Taurus, the top-selling car in the U.S. Says Chris Cedergren, who tracks auto-industry sales for AutoPacific: "The battle lines are really going to be drawn in the premium-compact market, where the Japanese get about 33% of their U.S. car sales. We think the Contour and the Mystique and the Chrysler models are going to put a lot of pressure on the Japanese...
...Japanese can do about it." Other industry experts wonder, though, if the pricing advantage will really boost Detroit's cause all that much. As long as so many consumers trust Japanese cars, they may be willing to pay a little more for them. Says David Andrea, who follows auto pricing for AutoPacific in Detroit: Buying Japanese "is almost like buying an insurance policy...