In the 2000s, the car learned new tricks. Hybrids went mainstream, a Silicon Valley start-up built an electric sports car from thousands of small lithium-ion cells, and robot vehicles raced across the desert. Old names returned as the MINI and a new Rolls-Royce Phantom, while Oldsmobile and the classic Beetle took their final bows. Then came the crisis of 2008 and 2009. These stories follow the makes and models, the innovations, the people and the moments of the decade.
Every tile in a Cars of the 2000s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1The supercar named for a Le Mans winner
On the tile: Bugatti Veyron2005
Seven years after Volkswagen revived the Bugatti brand, it launched a supercar with a quad-turbocharged W16 engine making about 1,000 horsepower and a top speed of more than 400 km/h (248 mph). For its name, Bugatti reached back to Pierre Veyron, a development engineer and trusted test driver who worked closely with the company's teams in Molsheim. In June 1939, Veyron and Jean-Pierre Wimille won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Bugatti Type 57C, the last Le Mans before World War II. The new car even carried the old racer's distinctive radiator grille.
BMW bought the Rover Group, which included Land Rover, in 1994, and decided early that replacing the little Mini would be a priority. By 2000, facing considerable headwinds and an unfavorable exchange rate, BMW sold Rover to the Phoenix Consortium and Land Rover to Ford. It held on to the MINI brand and the old Cowley plant, renamed Plant Oxford, where cars had been built since 1913, plus a pressings factory at Swindon and a new engine plant at Hams Hall. The MINI of 2001 was larger and far more sophisticated than the original, and unlike the classic Mini, it beat its sales targets.
After complex wrangling over rights and trademarks between Volkswagen and BMW, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars began a new life under BMW ownership in a new home at Goodwood, England. Its only model at the start was the seventh-generation Phantom, built not on a monocoque but on an aluminum spaceframe of some 200 extruded sections, with a 6.75-liter V12, the traditional Rolls-Royce displacement. The first finished car was handed to its owner at one minute past midnight on January 1, 2003. Three months later it was shipped from Southampton to Perth, and its owner drove it about 4,500 miles across Australia, all the way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
"We always said the Chrysler PT Cruiser was 'too cool to categorize,'" said Chrysler executive Richard Schaum. The judges categorized it anyway. Motor Trend named the 2001 PT Cruiser its Car of the Year, and it won the 2001 North American Car of the Year award over two hybrids, the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius. Yet the federal government's fuel economy guide puts the 2001 PT Cruiser in the size class "Sport Utility Vehicle - 2WD." Demand ran so high that Chrysler prepared a second production site, in Graz, Austria.
Volkswagen built its luxury Phaeton, starting in 2002, at a showpiece plant in the center of Dresden, Germany, called the Transparent Factory. Parts arrived on CarGoTrams, 60-meter electric freight trains that used the city's public streetcar system for an 18-minute trip from a logistics center. Inside, the cars rode on floor conveyors clad in light-colored maple, and Volkswagen said the scene, with its parquet flooring, resembled a Formula 1 workshop more than an assembly line. Buyers could even collect their new Phaetons in person at the factory.
In the 2007 film Transformers, the robot Bumblebee turned into a Chevrolet Camaro that nobody could buy. Director Michael Bay, who had long directed GM's commercials, talked the company into casting a concept version of the fifth-generation Camaro, which would not reach dealerships for two more years. The movie car used body panels from the molds of the 2006 Camaro concept, fitted to a Holden Monaro. The film earned nearly $710 million worldwide and interest in the Camaro skyrocketed, but GM could not cash in until 2009.
In 2002, Michael Schumacher won the Formula 1 drivers' championship after only 11 Grands Prix. To celebrate and to pay homage to its founder, Ferrari launched the same year a limited-edition road car called the Enzo, packed with technology from Formula 1, including a carbon-fiber and Nomex honeycomb monocoque and carbon-ceramic brakes. Ferrari says only 399 were developed for road use. The shape came from Pininfarina, and the man who drew it, Ken Okuyama, later left Turin for his native Japan and set up his own design studio.
On April 7, 2004, Ford drove its new Escape Hybrid 576 miles through Manhattan traffic on a single tank of gas, averaging more than 38 miles per gallon. Forbes called it the first American-made hybrid, and since it was based on the regular Escape SUV, it looked like a normal vehicle. Ford estimated 35 mpg in the city and 30 on the highway, an unusual order that came from the engine cutting out when the vehicle slowed or stopped. The Escape Hybrid went on to be named 2005 North American Truck of the Year.
9From 120,000 hybrids to a million in under five years
On the tile: Toyota Prius2003-2008
Toyota launched the Prius in Japan in 1997 as the world's first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid, and began selling it in Europe and North America in 2000. When the second-generation Prius arrived in 2003, cumulative sales stood at a little over 120,000. The new car won 2004 North American Car of the Year. On May 15, 2008, Toyota announced that worldwide Prius sales had passed 1 million, with about 1,028,000 sold by the end of April in more than 40 countries and regions.
Tesla Motors first promised to deliver its Roadster in June 2007, but the first car did not reach a customer until February 2008. Each began as a "glider," a body and chassis without a powertrain, partly built by Lotus in Hethel, England; Tesla did final assembly of U.S. cars in Menlo Park, California. The battery held 6,831 lithium-ion cells, each 18 millimeters wide and 65 millimeters long, the kind used for years in laptops. It reached 60 mph in 3.9 seconds and went 236 miles on a charge. By the end of 2009, Tesla had sold 937.
Surveys cited by Volvo found that 75 percent of reported collisions happen at speeds up to 19 mph, and in half of them the driver has not braked at all, mainly because of distraction. Volvo's answer came as standard equipment on the new XC60 in 2008. City Safety used a laser sensor at the top of the windshield to watch up to 13 feet ahead, and if a crash looked likely and the driver did nothing, the car braked by itself. A later study of Swedish insurance claims found a 23 percent lower rate of rear-end collisions for these XC60s than for other Volvos.
When a car begins to spin out at the rear or plow straight ahead at the front, an average driver in a panic is unlikely to countersteer correctly. Electronic stability control helps by braking individual wheels automatically. In April 2007, federal regulators made it mandatory, phased in from September 2008 and required on all new light vehicles by model year 2012. The agency estimated it would prevent 84 percent of SUV rollovers in single-vehicle crashes and called it potentially the greatest safety benefit from any device since seat belts.
The U.S. military had used infrared vision for years before General Motors put it on the 2000 Cadillac DeVille, becoming the first automaker to bring extended night vision to drivers. Night Vision, based on technology developed by Raytheon, used a camera in the grille to sense heat from people, animals and other cars. A head-up display projected the picture, which looked like a black-and-white photo negative, near the front edge of the hood. At 60 mph, headlights give a driver about 3.5 seconds to react to an object ahead; Night Vision gave up to 15.
In January 2007, giant video images of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Ford's chief executive announced Sync, in a presentation linked between the Detroit auto show and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Sync connected Bluetooth phones and music players such as iPods and Zunes to the car's audio system. By pressing steering-wheel buttons or simply speaking, a driver could make a call, hear a text message read aloud or find a song by artist or genre. The voice system needed no training and understood French and Spanish as well as English.
A car that hits a wall at 50 km/h (31 mph) stops in about a tenth of a second, so seat belts and airbags must work within milliseconds. Mercedes-Benz decided to use the seconds before a crash instead. PRE-SAFE, introduced on the S-Class in 2002, could tighten the front seat belts, move the power passenger seat to a better position and close the optional sunroof when a collision looked likely. The breakthrough, Mercedes said, was accepting that certainty of a crash is probably never attainable, so the system acts on probability, using measures that can be reversed.
When Toyota announced the second-generation Prius on September 1, 2003, its list of features included several world firsts, by Toyota's count. One was Intelligent Parking Assist, an option on cars fitted with DVD navigation. Using the car's electric power steering and a backup guide monitor, it guided the steering during curbside parking and when reversing into a parking space.
In June 2008, Honda began building the FCX Clarity at what it called the world's first dedicated fuel cell vehicle factory, in Japan. The car ran on an electric motor powered by electricity from a hydrogen fuel cell, and its only emission was water. Honda picked its first customers partly by how close they lived to hydrogen refueling stations. On July 25, 2008, a Santa Monica film producer took delivery of the first one, the first of about 200 to be leased over three years, mostly in Southern California. EPA estimates put its range at up to 280 miles.
The dashboard light that warns of a soft tire traces back to a law with a long name: the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation Act, or TREAD, enacted on November 1, 2000. It called for a warning when a tire was significantly under-inflated. After a federal appeals court ruled in 2003 that the system must catch low pressure in any combination of tires, up to all four, regulators issued a new rule in 2005. By September 1, 2007, every new light vehicle had to warn when a tire fell 25 percent or more below its recommended pressure.
Danica Patrick started sixth in the Indy Japan 300 at Twin Ring Motegi on April 20, 2008, her 50th IndyCar Series race. She did not have the fastest car, but she had the right strategy. With about 50 laps left in the 200-lap race, she slowed to save fuel, dropping as low as ninth, while the cars ahead ran short or had to pit. Helio Castroneves inherited the lead with four laps to go; on the next lap, Patrick passed him on the backstretch. She won by 5.86 seconds, the first woman to win an IndyCar race.
Sébastien Loeb followed his father, a former gymnastics champion, into the sport at age 3, and became a four-time champion of Alsace and fifth in the French championship. He trained as a construction electrician and spent his wages on a Renault 5 GT Turbo. At 21 he scraped together the 100-franc entry fee for a program that scouted young drivers. With co-driver Daniel Elena, he went on to dominate the World Rally Championship. In October 2009 he reached the season's last round, Rally Great Britain, one point behind Mikko Hirvonen, then won the rally and a record sixth straight title.
Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show and an avid car collector, dreamed up the EcoJet with Bernard Juchli, the chief mechanic of his collection, then turned to General Motors' design chief for help. "A couple of paper napkins later," Leno said, the car was taking shape, and GM designers began a two-week sketching frenzy, working after hours. Introduced at the 2006 SEMA show, the EcoJet put a 650-horsepower Honeywell LT-101 turbine engine, running on biodiesel, into a modified Corvette Z06 frame, under a body of carbon fiber over Kevlar.
Going into the 2009 season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Jimmie Johnson needed only to finish 25th or better. He came home fifth in his No. 48 Chevrolet and did what no driver had done in NASCAR's 61-year history: win a fourth consecutive championship. "History, boys, no one ever, ever," he told his crew over the radio. In December, the Associated Press named him its Male Athlete of the Year, the first racing driver to win the award in its 78-year history, ahead of Roger Federer and Usain Bolt.
Bob Lutz, General Motors' car czar, proposed a new electric car inside GM in 2003, and the idea bombed. GM's engineers insisted a plug-in could not run on lithium-ion batteries. Then Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley start-up, announced in 2006 that it would build a speedy electric sports car with those same laptop batteries. "That tore it for me," Lutz said. "If some Silicon Valley start-up can solve this equation, no one is going to tell me anymore that it's unfeasible." His skunkworks team built the Chevy Volt concept, star of the 2007 Detroit Auto Show.
6He asked GM how to design cars, and GM wrote back
On the tile: Ed Welburn2003
Ed Welburn was 8 when his parents took him to the 1959 Philadelphia Auto Show, where a finned Cadillac Cyclone concept settled his future. At 11 he wrote to GM Design asking what courses he should take, and the company wrote back. In the 1970s and 1980s he sculpted Pontiacs, Buicks and Oldsmobiles, including the Aerotech that A.J. Foyt drove to world speed records. In 2003 he took charge of GM's North American design, and from 2005 its design worldwide: the first GM designer with global responsibility, the company's first African American design chief, and only its sixth design chief.
In June 2009, a deal sealed with a contract and a wire transfer from the federal government let a leaner Chrysler emerge from bankruptcy. Italy's Fiat received a 20 percent stake that could grow to 35 percent, yet it put no money into the deal; instead it would give Chrysler billions of dollars' worth of small-car and engine technology. Fiat's chief executive, Sergio Marchionne, was named to lead the new company. He rarely dressed like a Detroit executive: one reporter saw him in a tie exactly once, and otherwise in a black or blue sweater and jeans.
When Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning formed Tesla Motors in July 2003, almost no electric cars had been sold in the United States, and carmakers blamed batteries that had barely evolved in a century. The founders, both from consumer electronics, saw it differently. After looking at hydrogen and ethanol, they chose batteries, which were getting cheaper and more powerful every year, and decided to use off-the-shelf cells rather than develop a special battery. Existing electric cars, Tarpenning said, were "designed by people who hated the idea of driving."
In June 2009, Toyota shareholders approved a new president: Akio Toyoda, 53, grandson of founder Kiichiro Toyoda and son of former president Shoichiro Toyoda. The company hoped that reaching back to its family roots would help steer it out of its worst crisis. Toyota had just lost 436.9 billion yen, about $4.6 billion, in the fiscal year through March 2009, its worst loss since its founding in 1937, and it expected an even larger loss the following year. At the shareholders' meeting, Toyoda spoke only once.
In November 2008, the chief executives of GM, Ford and Chrysler flew to Washington in separate corporate jets to tell Congress their companies needed $25 billion in federal loans. ABC News estimated that GM chief Rick Wagoner's round trip cost about $20,000, when a first-class ticket from Detroit cost $837. Lawmakers harangued them for the excess. When they returned in early December, they drove: Ford's Alan Mulally in an Escape Hybrid and Wagoner in a hybrid Chevrolet Malibu, a 520-mile trip of roughly nine hours. Ford also said it would sell its five corporate jets.
In summer 2009, the Car Allowance Rebate System, better known as Cash for Clunkers, paid up to $4,500 toward a new vehicle for trading in an old one rated 18 mpg or less. Its first $1 billion was gone by July 30. Congress added $2 billion, and the program still ended on August 24, more than two months early, after nearly 700,000 trade-ins. Every clunker's engine had to be destroyed. The government's method: drain the oil, pour in about two quarts of sodium silicate solution costing under $7, and run the engine until it seized.
By 1988, the classic Volkswagen Beetle was sold only in Mexico, where it was called the vocho and Mexico City cab drivers pulled out the front passenger seat so riders could use the back. Competition from other cheap compacts and a Mexican decision to phase out two-door taxis finally ended it. On July 30, 2003, the last one rolled off the line at Volkswagen's plant in Puebla, Beetle number 21,529,464 since World War II. The baby-blue car, one of a 3,000-car final edition, went to a museum in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Ransom E. Olds founded his car company in Lansing, Michigan, in 1897, and more than 35 million Oldsmobiles later, the brand ended in the same city. General Motors announced in 2000 that it would drop Oldsmobile after the 2004 models. On April 29, 2004, the last one left the Lansing Car Assembly plant: an Alero sedan that factory workers signed before it went on display at the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum. The last 500 Aleros wore "Final 500" emblems and dark metallic cherry red paint. America's oldest car brand was gone.
To show how far crash safety had come in the 50 years since insurers organized it in 1959, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed two Chevrolets into each other on September 9, 2009: a 1959 Bel Air and a 2009 Malibu, in a 40 mph offset crash. The Malibu's occupant compartment stayed intact. The Bel Air's collapsed. "It was night and day, the difference in occupant protection," said Institute president Adrian Lund. "What this test shows is that automakers don't build cars like they used to. They build them better."
In 2009, recession kept American buyers away from showrooms, and U.S. sales of cars and light trucks plunged 21 percent to 10.4 million. China went the other way. Beijing cut sales taxes on smaller, fuel-efficient cars and spent $730 million on subsidies for buyers of SUVs, pickups and minivans, and Chinese vehicle sales grew about 45 percent, to an estimated 13.6 million. It was the first time any country bought more cars than Americans did.
In 2000, BMW sold Land Rover to Ford. Eight years later, Ford sold it again, together with Jaguar, to a buyer from India. On June 2, 2008, Tata Motors completed its purchase of Jaguar Land Rover for a net $2.3 billion in an all-cash deal, and Ford contributed about $600 million to the brands' pension plans. The Tata group had produced India's first fully indigenous car, the Indica, only ten years earlier, in 1998. Now Jaguar and Land Rover both belonged to Tata.
In 1998, Daimler-Benz paid $36 billion for Chrysler, and chief executive Jürgen Schrempp called the deal "a marriage made in heaven." It did not last a decade. On May 14, 2007, DaimlerChrysler announced it would sell 80.1 percent of Chrysler to Cerberus, a New York private equity firm, for $7.4 billion, keeping 19.9 percent. But Daimler also agreed to put slightly more than that sum back in to cover Chrysler's debt and restructuring. "Daimler actually paid a dowry to unload Chrysler," said Garel Rhys, a professor of motor industry economics at Cardiff University.
In the first week of January 2008, a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States averaged $3.109, according to the Energy Information Administration. It kept climbing through the spring, passed $4 in June, and in the week of July 7 reached an average of $4.114. Then the price fell week after week through the autumn. By the week of December 29, the average was $1.613, less than 40 percent of the summer peak, and the lowest weekly average since January 2004.