This did not mean merely separating the car's components, but involved total disassembly. As it was done, each item was numbered, listed, described, its weight recorded. Oily, greasy parts were cleaned.
It took four men between ten days and two weeks to reduce a normal car to ordered fragments, mounted on display boards.
A story - no one really knew how true - was sometimes told about a teardown crew which, as a practical joke, worked in spare time to disassemble a car belonging to one of their number who was holidaying in Europe. When the vacationer returned, the car was in his garage, undamaged, but in several thousand separate parts. He was a competent mechanic who had learned a good deal as a teardown man, and he determinedly put it together again. It took a year.
Techniques of total disassembly were so specialized that unique tools had been devised - some like a plumber's nightmare.
The display boards containing the torn-down vehicles were housed in sliding racks. Thus, like dissected corpses, the industry's current cars were available for private viewing and comparison.
A company engineer might be brought here and told: 'Look at the competition's headlamp cans! They're an integrated part of the radiator support instead of separate, complex pieces. Their method is cheaper and better. Let's get with it!'
It was called value engineering, and it saved money because each single cent of cost lopped from a car design represented thousands of dollars in eventual profit. Once, during the 1960s, Ford saved a mammoth twenty-five cents per car by changing its brake system master cylinder, after studying the master cylinder of General Motors.
Others, like Adam and Brett at this moment, did their viewing to keep abreast of design changes and to seek inspiration.
The Volkswagen on the display boards which the technician had pulled out had been a new one. He reported, with a touch of glumness, 'Been taking VWs apart for years. Every damn time it's the same - quality good as ever.'
Brett nodded agreement. 'Wish we could say the same of ours.'
'So do!, Mr. DeLosanto. But we can't. Leastways, not here.'
At the display boards showing the company's own minicompact, the custodian said, 'Mind you, ours has come out pretty well this time. If it wasn't for that German bug, we'd look good.'
'That's because American small car assembly's getting more automated,' Adam commented. 'The Vega started a big change with the new Lordstown plant. And the more automation we have, with fewer people, the higher everybody's quality will go.'
'Wherever it's going,' the technician said, 'it ain't gone to Japan - at least not to the plant that produced this clunker. For God's sake, Mr. Trenton! Look at that!'
They examined some of the parts of the Japanese import, the third car they had come to review.
'String and baling wire,' Brett pronounced.
'I'll tell you one thing, sir. I wouldn't want anybody I cared about to be riding around in one of those. It's a motorbike on four wheels, and a poor one at that.'
They remained at the teardown racks, studying the three cars in detail.
Later, the elderly technician let them out.
At the doorway he asked, 'What's coming up next, gentleman? For us, I mean.'
'Glad you reminded me,' Brett said. 'We came over here to ask you.'
It would be some kind of small car; that much they all knew. The key question was: What kind?
Later, back at staff headquarters, Adam observed, 'For a long time, right up to 1970, a lot of people in this business thought the small car was a fad.'
'I was one,' Elroy Braithwaite, the Product Development vice-president admitted. The Silver Fox had joined them shortly after Adam's and Brett's return from the teardown room. Now, a group of five - Adam, Brett, Braithwaite, two others from product planning staff - was sprawled around Adam's office suite, ostensibly doing little more than shoot the breeze, but in reality hoping, through channeled conversation, to awaken ideas in each other. Discarded coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays littered tables and window ledges. It was after midnight.
'I thought the small car fever wouldn't last,' Braithwaite went on. He put a hand through his silver-gray mane, disordered tonight, which was unusual. 'I was in some pretty high-powered company, too, but we've all been wrong. As far as I can see, this industry will be small-car oriented, with muscle cars on the outs, for a long time to come.'
'Perhaps forever,' one of the other product planners said. He was a bright young Negro with large spectacles, named Castaldy, who had been recruited from Yale a year earlier.
'Nothing's forever,' Brett DeLosanto objected. 'Hemlines or hair styles or hip language or cars. Right now, though, I agree with Elroy a small car's the status symbol, and it looks like staying.'
'There are some,' Adam said, 'who believe a small car is a nonsymbol. They say people simply don't care about status any more.'
Brett retorted, 'You don't believe that, any more than I do.'
'I don't either,' the Silver Fox said. 'A good many things have changed these past few years, but not basic human nature. Sure, there's a 'reverse status' syndrome, which is popular, but it adds up to what it always did - an individual trying to be different or superior. Even a dropout who doesn't wash is a status seeker of a kind.'
'So maybe,' Adam prompted, 'we need a car which will appeal strongly to the reverse-status seeker.'
The Silver Fox shook his head. 'Not entirely. We still have to consider the squares - that big, solid backlog of buyers.'
Castaldy pointed out, 'But most squares don't like to think of themselves that way. That's why bank presidents wear sideburns.'
'Don't we all?' Braithwaite fingered his own.
Above the mild laughter, Adam injected, 'Maybe that's not so funny. Maybe it points the way to the kind of car we don't want. That is-anything looking like a conventional car produced until now.'
'A mighty big order,' the Silver Fox said.
Brett ruminated. 'But not impossible.'
Castaldy, the young Yale man, reminded them, 'Today's environment is part of reverse-status - if we're calling it that. I mean public opinion, dissent, minorities, economic pressures, all the rest.'
'True,' Adam said, then added, 'I know we've been over this a lot of times, but let's list environmental factors again.'
Castaldy looked at some notes. 'Air pollution: people want to do something.'
'Correction,' Brett said. 'They want other people to do something. No one wants to give up personal transportation, riding in his own car. All our surveys say so.'
'Whether that's true or not,' Adam said, 'the car makers are doing something about pollution and there isn't a lot individuals can do.'
'Just the same,' young Castaldy persisted, 'a good many are convinced that a small car pollutes less than a big one, so they think they can contribute that way. Our surveys show that, too.' He glanced back at his notes. 'May I go on?'
'I'll try not to heckle,' Brett said. 'But I won't guarantee it.'
'In economics,' Castaldy continued, 'gas mileage isn't as dominant as it used to be, but parking cost is.'
Adam nodded. 'No arguing that. Street parking space gets harder to find, public and private parking costs more and more.'
'But parking lots in a good many cities are charging less for small cars, and the idea's spreading.'
The Silver Fox said irritably, 'We know all about that. And we've already agreed we're going the small car
