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When my parents left Kentucky in the depths of the Great Depression, we came to Detroit. When I left Los Angeles and New York City, I came back to Detroit. I’ve always come back to Detroit, and I always will.

I’m deeply troubled by what’s happened to the automobile industry here in the United States. When I joined Road & Track in 1957 I had worked in four automobile factories and four automobile dealerships. And since 1962 I have been an automotive journalist, with time out to serve as a copywriter, then creative director and executive vice president at the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency, working on Chevrolet, Goodyear, and a number of GM’s Delco divisions.

Toward the end of my Campbell-Ewald experience I served on a panel that discussed the future of the domestic automobile business. Another panelist was the UAW’s Irving Bluestone, a man I greatly admired.

Mr. Bluestone said, “In the next three decades, the domestic automobile companies will streamline their manufacturing systems to become more efficient. This will cause a contraction in the automotive workforce.

“The imported car manufacturers will make ever-increasing inroads in this market, and their share-of-market will increase. That will cause a similar contraction.

“The domestic manufacturers, in their search for even greater efficiency, will reach out to second- and third-world countries for lower-cost component manufacturing, which will cause another contraction.

“My job is to see that the United Automobile Workers union remains relevant in that era.”

I was impressed by Mr. Bluestone and his thesis, and I remain impressed to this day, when every single thing he predicted has come to pass.

As an automotive journalist, I’ve often pondered the fact that the United States is the only country in the world where the automotive press does not support its national automobile industry.

American automotive journalists began cheering for the other team in the early 1950s, and we never stopped. I’m probably as guilty as any of my colleagues. Only Motor Trend stood fast as an American car magazine, but even Motor Trend finally had to face the business realities when imports began outselling domestic products in California. The only magazines that wholeheartedly support the domestic industry today are the traditional hot-rod books, and, to some degree, the off-road books.

Today, thousands of American automobile workers are jobless, dozens of American cities and towns have been gutted by the closing of local automobile factories, and the only car company that spends a lot of money promoting its American heritage is Toyota.

Michigan, my adopted home state, currently has one of the highest home foreclosure rates in the nation, and, instead of resuscitating the city of Detroit and making it once again one of the nation’s great business and manufacturing centers, seems to be hell-bent on following Detroit down into the abyss.

I’ve owned around sixty cars, pickups, and SUVs in my adult life, more than half of them American. This number becomes perhaps a bit more impressive when we take into account the fact that for most of that time I have also been driving magazine test cars on an almost daily basis.

The best car I have ever owned is my current daily driver, a 2003 Cadillac Escalade ESV. It is too big, it burns a lot of gasoline, but the taxes on all that gasoline I buy get plowed back into the economy, hopefully to benefit my fellow citizens. Despite these flaws I love it. It has never given me a bad moment. And remember, it was the Escalade that opened the door for the great success that other cars in the Cadillac line are now enjoying.

In a time when a large part of the car-buying public seems to have turned its back on the American car, it is worth noting that until quite recently huge numbers of Americans agreed with me and happily purchased American light trucks and SUVs. Americans still love American Mustangs and American Jeeps. The American Chevrolet Corvette is unquestionably the world’s absolute Best Buy in high-performance sports cars. The American Chevrolet Malibu and the Cadillac CTS coupe were the stars of Detroit’s recent international automobile show, deservedly so.

Despite all this evidence to the contrary, Americans are leery about buying American cars. The dreadful American cars of the ’70s and ’80s seem to have poisoned the well of consumer consideration for today’s domestic product. If the U.S. automobile industry is to survive, American car buyers’ perceptions must be changed.

We must bring the public’s perception closer to the domestic industry’s reality. American cars are far better today than they were five years ago, light-years better than they were twenty years ago, and they deserve serious consideration from the car-buying American public.

Some old friends and I want to create an advocacy group that could help change the conventional wisdom shared by far too many Americans regarding the American automobile industry. We want them to give American cars another chance. If your mind is made up and you are determined to have that BMW M6, or that Subaru Forester, God bless you. Buy it in good health. They’re both nice cars. All we ask is that you and thousands of prospective buyers like you reexamine the American product.

The North American automobile industry has created millions of jobs over the last century, and has changed the lives of workers and consumers alike. We are a better and stronger nation because of it.

America was the only country in the world where the factory workers who built the cars could actually buy the cars they built and take their place in the middle class, until rather recently.

Now, with this remarkable industry struggling, we want to kindle a movement that will help it to regain its health and its former strength.

It would be a complex multimedia effort doing everything from speeches to local service clubs and civic organizations to documentary films and television programs. A website would be fundamental to the whole shebang.

But we can only accomplish our goal of building bridges between the domestic industry and its potential customers if you, and people like you in every state of the Union, will seriously test-drive a couple of American cars the next time you’re ready to buy a new automobile.

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Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 34