First, take three Cadillacs . . .

Last week I received a brochure from BMW of North America, inviting me to buy a BMW 3-series, the "entry-level" (meaning the cheapest) of its models.  I’ve never owned a BMW and I don’t know whether to feel flattered that the company’s computer thinks me worthy to be a patron, or offended that it doesn’t think I can afford the 5-series or the 7-series.

After I worked through this conundrum, I recalled a passage from the 2003 book Trading Up: The New American Luxury, by Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, describing the advances in the automobile industry.  Messrs. Silverstein and Fiske tell a remarkable story about Cadillac’s devotion to quality and exact manufacture:

[Cadillac prided itself] on advanced engineering and precision manufacture.  A British Cadillac distributor carried out a remarkable demonstration.  He disassembled three Cadillacs, scrambled their parts, and then reassembled them.  Everything fit together perfectly, and the three cars drove away — proof of Cadillac’s quality and ability to produce consistently interchangeable parts.

I should mention that the British distributor performed this demonstration in 1908.  Since then standards have changed, and although we might expect that in a similar demonstration today all three cars should be able to drive away if made by BMW or by Lexus, we would feel content — certainly General Motors would — if even one of the reassembled Cadillacs would start and run.

All of which is to say that our balance of payments problem isn’t that the Japanese and Germans don’t want to buy Cadillacs; it’s that Americans don’t want to.  I had suggested to Mrs. Laquedem that for my next car I might buy a Cadillac.  She thought it an amusingly retro idea, and possibly even stylish in an elderly sort of way, even as she mentally calculated how many times a month she would have to offer me a ride to work in her BMW.