<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  DETROIT  Millions of dollars have been earmarked for the renovation of Cobo Hall, the long-neglected convention center that has long hosted this city&amp;#039;s annual auto show but that not unlike the industry itself will take a couple years yet for its expensive retuning to be complete. Last year, a chunk of ceiling insulation fell on my head. Hell, the space even caught fire the Audi stand suffered an electrical fire and apart from a brief evacuation, no one batted an eye. Because unlike what the financial prognosticators would have you believe, nothing here is nearly as bad as it sounds. The show goes on, renovation plans are moving ahead, and by 2013, the rebuilding will be complete. This year&amp;#039;s auto show is a wave of green concepts and luxury launches, a mix rusting away any pretension that there&amp;#039;s actually a consensus for the idea of where cars in America need to go. Everyone is launching a hybrid, or an electric, or a practical small car, and the big parties are back. Toyota is going to show a whole damn Prius family of cars. German and Japanese executives are once again stationed in downtown restaurants, laughing and backslapping up a storm. Twelve months ago, they all looked like someone had run over their cat, and then on Monday the folks at Porsche unveiled something called the 918 RSR, an impossibly spectacular hybrid racing car that oozes sex and stinks of the future.  You can tell there&amp;#039;s more money, more confidence floating around. Why shouldn&amp;#039;t there be?  Well, in the States, there are eighty billion reasons to argue for either side. It is, after all, how much in dollars the government spent to bail out Detroit how much you, me, and every taxpayer from Jersey to Juneau dumped into what was once the world&amp;#039;s greatest factory town. All for the sake of greener cars and American jobs, but really, for the whole American economy. In March 2009, President Obama said that he wanted to GM, Ford, and Chrysler to &amp;quot;lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars,&amp;quot; and the whole world looked at a town with a hollow core, a town where 50-story buildings sit vacant in the city center, and shrugged. I remember thinking that, yeah, it seemed possible. I also remember thinking that, for a number of reasons, it seemed patently impossible. Government sponsorship or no, you can&amp;#039;t undo decades of damage in a few years. In 1998, Detroit owned 70 percent of the U.S. car market. Ten years later, battered by everything from quality problems to fuel-economy issues, that number had dropped to just 53 percent. Last year was the first year that GM, Chrysler, and Ford saw a collective rise in market share that number rose to a whopping 43 percent. Some 10.4 million cars sold in 2009, 11.6 in 2010. Industry analysts predict that number will rise to something like 13 million in 2011. If you are wildly optimistic, I give you permission to believe this.  But an uptick in production wouldn&amp;#039;t be enough, and it isn&amp;#039;t. Good thing, then, that General Motors is making great strides, rethinking its decades-old approach to operating debt. The government-subsidized, 40-plus-mpg Chevrolet Volt is, surprisingly, as good as the ad men say it is. Ford has a handful of amazing new cars, a much bigger handful of older products that are the wheeled equivalent of a week-old Big Mac, and more inventive gumption than anyone else. Finally, long-suffering Chrysler is now owned by Fiat and in the process breaking down and rebuilding its lineup, before launching a passel of ground-up new models in a few years. GM paid off its government loan back in April. Given interest and payment timing, Chrysler still has a few years to go. Detroit&amp;#039;s average fuel economy, weighed down by the millions of gas-guzzling pickup trucks sold in the heartland, is still low compared with Europe or Japan. And that&amp;#039;s it.   If all that sounds vague, that&amp;#039;s only because firm answers are still a ways out. The pace of this industry is comparable to that of mid-day traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway; the average car company takes two to three years to move a new model from concept to production, and almost every new product released since the bailout concluded was in the pipeline before it began. Doom-and-gloom analysts point to new-car inventory levels and credit markets and worry, but the fact of the matter is that we just don&amp;#039;t know enough yet. Anyone who tells you differently is full of it. Listen: stark reminders of reality often get in the way in this town. Detroit&amp;#039;s armada of salt-crusted cabs and rusty, smoke-belching minivans. You watch this city consume itself, rebuild, and consume itself again, and you start to hate auto shows for their glitzy false promises. Inertia is everything, but answers will come soon enough. Hell, after spending $80 billion, a little patience seems cheap. And a little prevention of head trauma for visitors here if the rafter blueprints at Cobo Hall are to be believed might come even sooner than some of these concept cars. In the Motor City, it&amp;#039;s time to look up. PLUS: Is This the Biggest Car Bombshell of 2011?  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a9221/detroit-auto-show-2011-4810644/>