Under the headline “Motor City West Revs Up Demand for Space,” the Wall Street Journal ran an article over the summer that should scare the bejesus out of Detroit and Michigan.
“The future of the car is in Silicon Valley,” a vice president of the San Francisco-based Bay Area Council Economic Institute boldly predicted in the story, adding, “We’re getting this entirely new ecosystem around automotive parts.”
Yikes.
First it was southern U.S. states luring auto assembly plants in the 1980s; then maquiladora auto plants exploding along the Mexico border in the 1990s; then a mad scramble to match the so-called “China price” when America’s automakers were desperately trying to buy cheaper components in order to offset their unsustainable legacy costs.
Now we have Silicon Valley challenging Detroit’s leadership in the auto industry’s most promising growth areas — autonomous cars, connected vehicles, eco-friendly powertrains.