For that matter, when has the U.S. auto industry been in such a public tizzy? With some observers predicting a sales decline of 10% this year, Detroit has gone skidding from joint ventures to stock buy-backs. Cadillac sales have stalled out in recent years, largely due, industry analysts say, to poor styling decisions: the cars are too small and tend to look like cheaper GM models. They point out that it's hard to tell the difference between, say, a Seville and a Pontiac Grand AM -- except for the whopping price differential. "If a consumer spends the bucks on an Eldorado, he wants to feel like people are looking at it and thinking how wonderful and special it is and he must be," says Philip Fricke, auto analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co. "Instead, they've come to look very mundane."
No wonder, amidst all the confusion from boardroom to showroom, that Cadillac dealers are among the hardest-working people in showroom business. For Sewell Village general sales manager Jerry Griffin, service is a key that puts the customer into the car. Griffin, a onetime All-Conference linebacker at Southern Methodist University and a 16-year veteran of the showroom floor, likens car sales to football. He set the Cadillac division yardage record by getting 735 new cars signed for and out the door in 1979; by comparison, the average Caddy dealership sold fewer than 200 cars that year. In 1974, at the height of the oil crisis, Griffin sold 400 large guzzlers.
OK, this was Dallas, and yes, there is always a market for luxury cars in Big D. But still. In 1984, three years after gambling on a move to a bigger location, Sewell Village sold 3,050 Cadillacs, the third-highest volume in the nation. Even today, with its new-car volumn idling at around 2,500 units per year, Sewell offers no rebates, no incentives, and virtually no advertising that makes direct reference to the various models themselves. Car prices are "competitive," but most Cadillac customers don't split hairs over $50 in the first place. At Sewell Village, it seems, they not only take the car out of the deal, they take the mystery out of the particulars.
"I bet three-quarters of our customers walk out of here not understanding their warranty," says Griffin. "A lot of them have owned five or six Cadillacs, and most of them don't keep a car six years or 60,000 miles to begin with. They want the car, but above all else, they want to be treated right. And nobody in this business treats them better than we do."
Now, we have heard this kind of talk before. "C'mon Down to Carl Sewell Caddy, He'll Fix You Up 'Cuz He Wants to Be Yur Friend." Yet what sounds suspiciously like Texas-size hype is borne out by a curious phenomenon: on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, visitors from all over the business spectrum troop through Sewell Village Cadillac, poking into the parts department and examining the charts on the wall. Most of these visitors approach the dealership as if its main inventory were management tips, not Fleetwoods and Eldorados. And just who are these wide-eyed tourists? Some come from rival auto companies -- a Ford Motor Co. official has been through -- but many do not. Lennox Industries Inc., a Texas air-conditioning manufacturer, for instance, has checked Sewell out. So have representatives from Procter & Gamble and the Dallas Department of Transportation. Stew Leonard Jr., president of an $80-million retail grocery store in Norwalk, Conn., took a tour last October with his father and with Tom Peters, of Excellence fame. No stranger to first-class service he, Leonard was impressed. So impressed he wishes he could have his car serviced there.
"Our company is fanatical about focusing on the customer," he explains, "and so is Sewell. I mean, he has great people working there. They love what they're doing. You can't fake a positive attitude like the one they have. I even saw it in the guy who was sweeping the floor. Take little things like that, plus their ferocious appetite to make the customer happy, and you quickly see what drives Carl Sewell's business."
Fine, but besides smiles on the faces of employees, what do the faithful really come to see? They come to see the service bays, which Peters, one of Sewell's most passionate champions, says "are so clean you could happily eat off the floor." And a computer system that tracks everything from available work hours to the status and location of each work order to the number of seconds it takes a finished car to be delivered to the main entrance.
If they happen to wander back through the service area, they see something else: a plate bearing the inscription "Bob Templin Memorial Wing." It hangs over the 18 stalls built especially for major engine work. Who is Bob Templin, and why is Sewell Village singling him out for immortality?
"Templin is the Cadillac engineer who oversaw the design of General Motors's V-8-6-4 engine," explains customer-services manager Boyne McHargue. "When that engine first came out, in '81, it caused so many repair orders we had to widen the engine shop. So the guys back here decided to honor him."
Templin, says McHargue, seems a dubious hero -- and a potent symbol. For years, Carl Sewell Jr., president of Sewell Village and son of its late founder, Carl Sr., has fought hammer and tong with Detroit over just such "quality" issues as the discredited (now discontinued) V-8-6-4. At various times he has raised concerns about Cadillac's market sensitivity, its propensity for look-alike designs, even its drift toward smaller, lower-performance cars. More recently, the issue has been GM's reliance on factory incentives, a quick-fix market strategy that Sewell laments has "conditioned the customer to wait for the next big fire sale." Still, Sewell tends to downplay his differences with Detroit these days, pointing out that GM's decision to restructure its Cadillac Motor Car Division and give it the engineering and manufacturing autonomy it once lacked bodes well for his future.
"There probably hasn't been a bigger critic of General Motors -- and Cadillac -- than me," concedes Sewell. "The old guys used to hide their mistakes behind committees, but not anymore. Now folks like [GM executive vice-president] Lloyd Reuss and [Cadillac general manager] John Grettenberger can walk down the assembly line and say, 'Do it this way.' It sounds basic, but GM hasn't always worked that way."
Sewell didn't come by his outspokenness overnight. His father literally grew up with the automobile industry, starting in 1911, when at age 14 he began assembling Model T Fords from kits and selling them to farmers. Wiped out financially by the crash of '29, Carl Sr. persevered with a succession of dealerships in and around Odessa, Tex. In 1957, he bought Village Cadillac, in the fashionable Highland Park suburb of Dallas. It was the beginning of a beautiful -- and profitable -- relationship. Fiscally conservative ("My father's philosophy was if you make three dollars," says the son, "you give one to the government, spend one, and save one"), Carl Sr. made customer loyalty a fetish and encouraged his son to do the same.
