Carmakers pamper well-off baby boomers

Roland Jones Business news editor • Profile • E-mail

Much has been written about the current disarray of the American auto industry, but if anyone has any doubt about where carmakers see the future of their business, a trip to this year’s New York International Auto Show will set them straight.

Continuing the theme of the Detroit Auto Show in January — when retro-styled muscle cars like the Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger concept were unveiled to admiring audiences — a great deal of the focus at the New York show is on vehicles designed to appeal to baby boomers, a generation of 78 million people that spends some $2 trillion annually and increasingly looks for cars that exude luxury and prestige, and remind them of their youth.

“This auto show is so much about the whole boomer generation, and that constituency is having a big impact on the auto market right now,” said Brian Chee, managing editor of Autobytel.com, a Web site for car information.

“These people are coming into money, and maybe their last kid has left home for college and they’ve got some discretionary income and want to buy a car they’ve been dreaming about,” Chee added. “That’s why we are seeing a leaning toward luxury models here, and in my opinion the reason automakers are really focused on giving baby boomers a lot of choices and lots of exciting alternatives.”

The 2006 New York Auto Show opens to the public Friday as both General Motors and Ford, the nation’s No. 1 and No. 2 automakers, are wrestling with painful restructuring plans, shrinking market share, billions of dollars in losses and a perception that their vehicles are bland and unreliable. At the same time, Asian automakers are seeing an unprecedented success in North America.

The rivals are locked in a pitched battle for U.S. consumers’ attention, and both are embracing the boomer market, realizing that sentimentality for great cars of the past and a desire for luxury are strong motivators when it comes to buying a car.

Indeed, opening the auto show for the media preview earlier this week, Carlos Ghosn, who runs both the French automaker Renault and its Japanese affiliate, Nissan, appealed to automakers to overcome the blandness of style that has pervaded the industry in recent years and return passion to cars and trucks — a strategy he said would help troubled automakers back to profitability and one he said helped him restore Nissan’s flagging fortunes in the early part of this decade.

Cars have become, in some cases, “just a commodity” instead of an “icon of passion,” Ghosn said. “We are all fighting over the 1 million car enthusiasts and missing the potential 16 million buyers out there,” he said.

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