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✺ General motors’ vision of what it—and most Americans— wanted from the future was most clearly displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Four million people waited hours in line on switch-back ramps leading into a cleft in the large white façade of a building designed by America’s foremost industrial architect, Albert Kahn. Inside the building , visitors sat in one of six hundred upholstered chairs that carried them through the Futurama, designed by Norman Bel Geddes—a sixteen-minute tour above the United States of 1960, as it might be seen from a low-flying airplane. From a speaker embedded in the chair, viewers heard a confident narrator using the theories of urban planning and the principles of highway engineering to describe the future scene. The narrator told why each scene was important and likely to occur. At one point, viewers “flew” over a highway: “Looming ahead is a 1960 Motorway intersection. By means of ramped loops, cars may make right and left turns at rates of speed up to 50 miles per hour. The turning-off lanes are elevated and depressed. There is no interference from the straight ahead traffic in the higher speed lanes.” Near the end of the tour, the scale changed, giving the illusion of moving in closer on a large city. Visitors viewed in more detail a ninety-block area of the city, with seven-lane highways, express boulevards, feeder streets, elevated sidewalks, and “autogyros” landing decks atop skyscrapers. There were few buses, however, and no streetcars, subways, or smog. “On all express city thoroughfares the rights of way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slums whenever possible . . . . With fewer people in our central cities, and with the stores 183 [The goal of GM is] to create both consumer satisfaction and consumer desire, and at the same time. —GM president Alfred P. Sloan, 1923 7 From a Class-based Market . . . spreading out, property values in the center of town have decreased. . . . This has given us a chance to tear down buildings, widen streets, and turn our ‘blighted’ areas into more pleasant-looking places by letting in the light.”1 Visitors had the sense of moving in ever closer on the large city until they were in the midst of a single intersection at full scale. When they got out of their chairs, they found themselves actually walking on an elevated sidewalk of a 1960 city. As they left Futurama, each visitor received a blueand -white button that said i have seen the future. General Motors became the world’s largest manufacturer because it understood consumer preferences better than any other corporation, and it shaped and manipulated these preferences successfully for more than a half-century. This chapter examines how GM stimulated demand to replace older vehicles by marketing products that differed cosmetically from one year to the next, and from others offered in the same year. Following the dictum of GM president Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., “a car for every purse and purpose,” the company offered a variety of products, each attractive to a different social class. Consumers in the United States and other rich countries hold onto stoves and washing machines as long as they operate reliably, perhaps for decades, but dispose of perfectly serviceable motor vehicles every few years and replace them with others that perform not much differently. The decision to buy a new vehicle, as well as the selection of the model to purchase , is highly emotional. Figuring out complex consumer motivations and inclinations made GM the world’s most successful motor vehicle manufacturer for most of the twentieth century. The Ford Motor Company sold half of the vehicles in the United States and produced half of the entire world’s total during the 1910s because Henry Ford had listened to early customers. He knew intuitively what other industry pioneers did not: that demand for vehicle ownership was universal. Having recognized—and to a considerable extent stimulated— universal demand, Ford tinkered with his factory production system until his company could turn out large batches of identical, low-priced vehicles to satisfy this limitless demand. Ford Motor Company stumbled badly, however, when it failed to detect changes in consumer attitudes during the 1920s. Its market share slipped from one-half to one-fourth. Ford had sold most American families their first motor vehicle, but General Motors sold them their second, third, and subsequent vehicles. Selling Motor Vehicles ✺ 184 [3.22.181...

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