(Johnathan Goodwin’s not) Sick Like Detroit

While I was on vacation this last weekend, a (new, awesome) friend gave me a copy of Fast Company.  It’s a magazine I’ve liked from afar for a while, but never really get around to reading.  So this one, I read every page of on the flight home.

Excellent magazine, overall.  Highly recommended.

What really blew me away, though — and the reason I asked to steal this particular back-issue — was the feature article on Johnathan Goodwin.  Amazingly enough, they’ve reprinted the entire article online so you can read it.  DO.  Seriously.  Not only is it interesting, but it’s big on details and points of view, something that it’s hard to get out of a magazine and lovely when you can get it.

Johnathan Goodwin is a guy without a high-school diploma who lives in Kansas and messes with cars.  He’s really good at messing with cars, but the most startling things he does aren’t PhD-level custom jobs:  They’re done with existing parts made by the Big Three and available for years now.

What can he do?  He can get 100MPG out of almost anything, including an old Lincoln.  He makes Hummers into zero-emissions miracles that can run on up to five different kinds of fuel.  Oh, and he usually at least doubles the horsepower of any vehicle he’s working on, not "in spite of" the amazing emissions and fuel work, but as a consequence of it.

His explanation?  It takes a little creative thinking to do this stuff, but it isn’t hard, mechanically speaking.  He’s even shown GM mechanics how to do it, and makes no secret of his methods.

And the rich, unsurprisingly, are already reaping the benefits — several celebrity cars sit in Johnathan Goodwin’s garage, ready to be turned into 800-horsepower, zero-emissions fry-oil burning paragons of awesomeness.  Yet, for all the years he’s been doing this, there seem to be no plans in Detroit, or elsewhere, to emulate his successes.

Yes, big companies are slow…but does that really explain the lack of more than passing, shrugging interest here?  Are the Big Three* willfully killing off Detroit, or trying to commit suicide?  Or do they think that, by holding fast to an outdated and harmful model, they can predatorily scrape as much money out of a failing industry before it all falls down, stranding the little guy while the execs pack their suitcases and head for Rio?

I think I’m a little too close to speculate even a little objectively.  But the next time you wonder why we "can’t" break our dependence on foreign oil, and why struggling families "have to" pay three bucks a gallon for gas, and why we just "have to" put up with smog and pollution, think again.

Also think again the next time you want to write this sickness off as Detroit’s.  Yes, we’re suffering in Michigan, but everybody’s being hurt by this, economically and otherwise.  The U.S. is sitting on a global goldmine in the form of Johnathan Goodwin and his ideas.  We’re willing to tear our natural resources to shreds looking for oil, but we can’t mine this intellectual resource that would make us all rich, and put us down in history as the kind of country we like to think we are?

*there really isn’t a Big Three anymore…but there still is a Detroit, and it’s still full of out-of-work skilled workers who got shitcanned by "pension reforms" and factories moved wholesale overseas….