The Ship That Sank Detroit Is Coming For Japan And Germany

The Ship That Sank Detroit Is Coming For Japan And Germany

Look at these photos of Detroit from the midentieth century. Now look at it today. Detroit was once the richest city in America. It built the cars that built the middle class. But now just look at these charts. Over the second half of the 20th century, Detroit collapsed. Factories closed, jobs vanished, and the population fell by more than half. Economists and politicians blamed automation, outsourcing, unions, union busting, oil shocks, and of course, bad management. But what if I told you that a big part of Detroit’s decline was actually one of the most brilliant innovations in shipping from the 20th century? A marvel of engineering and supply chain efficiency, and how even as it decimated Detroit, it helped save the economy of two nations devastated by war. But now in the 21st century, a new version of the same ship is on the horizon, and it’s ready to help a rising superpower do to Japan and Germany what they once did to Detroit. Back in 1850, the biggest technology of the day was the railroad. It promised to connect all parts of nations like Great Britain. But outside of Edinburghough, Scotland, engineers had a problem. How would they get the train across an ocean inlet called the FTH of Fourth? Say that one 10 times fast. A bridge engineer named Thomas Bouch had a solution. And it wasn’t a bridge. It was an ingenious ramp that could be raised and lowered with a tide and allowed train cars to be rolled right onto a barge and then rolled onto the tracks on the other side. The Rorow Revolution was on, and the biggest leap forward was during World War II. The Allies needed to get tanks onto the beaches of Nazic controlled Europe. There would be no port, no ramps. So, they designed ships with a folding ramp right on the front. The idea came from none other than Winston Churchill. But it was the defeated nations, Japan and Germany, that would soon start using the row ships for a different kind of invasion. It started with Volkswagen. Volkswagen. The Beetle became a fad in the United States in the 1950s and60s. The VW was small. It was not ostentatious. It was the car that many baby boomers would take to college. It was good on gas. There was enough demand that the Germans wanted a more efficient way to transport all those Beatles across the Atlantic. Instead of loading each car into a ship by crane, Volkswagen decided to drive them onto repurposed cargo ships. But it was Japan that took this idea to the next level. In 1970, the Japanese launched the Toyota Maru number 10. It could hold 1,200 cars. The rotor ship is the last sort of technological innovation that enables Toyota and the other Japanese makers to crack the American market wide open. The Toyota Maru number 10 pioneered the sealed box design that row ships use to this day. Ships like the MV Tonsburg. It’s nearly three football fields long with a maximum load of 42,000 metric tons. But notice there are no containers anywhere to be seen. That’s because the Tonsburg is really a floating 9story parking garage. It can carry 6,000 cars. That’s $300 million worth of cargo. From the stern, a steel door folds down that allows cars to be driven on board. This row has nine cargo decks connected with fixed and movable ramps to load all of the cars. Three of the decks have hydraulic lifts that can raise or lower the entire deck to make space for massive construction equipment or squeeze in more cars. By packing the ship tight, the cost to ship each vehicle is much smaller. Hey, Dynamos, Nick Carlson here. Have you ever wondered how YouTube ads like this one come together? Well, let me tell you some behindthe-scenes secrets. For us, it all starts with Notion. They’re the sponsor of this episode. And by the way, I love telling you about tools we actually use because I can genuinely recommend them to you. At Dynamo and Business Explains the World, we work with a ton of external collaborators to make each episode and the ads within them possible. We use Notion to keep track of every episode’s ad, where it’s at in the production process, who owns each step, and so we know what we’re talking about, what the campaign brief is. Now that notion has released its new AI agent, it’s like having a robot taskmaster, keeping us all in sync. Notion’s AI agent can pull the sponsor brief, draft a script in our house style, link to the latest talking points, and drop it in our campaign page with the right checklist and owners. Because our agent is a notion super user, it knows our pages, databases, and templates. It plans the steps and executes while we review and approve changes. The agent only uses what we give it access to, so it learns our preferences and gets faster over time. And this kind of process-based helper bot can apply to whatever kind of work you’re doing. Let Notion do your work for you. Try the new AI agent at this link, which is also in the description below. Thank you, Notion. Now, let’s get back to the show. But there’s more innovation than just great engineering here. A critical insight was that building more of these ships allowed them to turn the whole world into their market. The Japanese car companies were already changing the way cars were made because their factories were destroyed by World War II. The silver lining was that they got to start over. Brand new factories, clean sheet designs, the latest industrial machinery. The cars were cheap, light, and well-made. The Toyota RO ship operated the same way. The cars rolled off the assembly line and into the belly of the ship with ease. The whole system was designed around selling cars to other countries and their timing was perfect. In those days, American cars didn’t travel by ship. They were ships. Big honken land yachts. The 4900 is a car for you. Typical American car of the 60s and 70s. Big, low, and long. The bigger the better. More space. wasn’t always the most efficient in terms of engineering. Certainly not the most efficient in terms of fuel consumption. But then came 1973. Arab nations embargoed oil shipments to the United States because of America’s support for Israel. One out of every seven gallons of oil we’d been using just wasn’t there anymore. The Middle East embargo would be felt by all of us. Gas prices shot up. People lined up their cars for hours to buy a few gallons. Suddenly, the big American car is an endangered species. Everybody wants to get into something more fuel efficient. I’m used to being able to go when I want to, when I want to. But suddenly, I think I’m going to have to start curbing my habits. My family and I have limited the use of our cars. Detroit had long been indifferent to building competent small cars. The Chevy Vega had a lot of promise, very poorly made. the Ford Pinto. Everybody knows of them uh supposedly blowing up when they were rear ended. Little exaggerated, but it greatly uh dented the reputation of Ford. But by that point, Toyota, Datson, Honda, all sort of offering these lowcost, well-made, relatively affordable cars. Now, imports make up an ever greater share of the American car market. If you take the excitement of driving seriously, but don’t want a big car, a new imported American car may be for you. Eventually, the newly elected Ronald Reagan had to do a humiliating thing. In 1981, he asked the Japanese to voluntarily limit the number of cars they sent to the United States, and they agreed. The RO ship and its lowcost cars had conquered America. Today, more than 700 row ships traverse the seas. The RO ship teaches us that in business, having a great product isn’t enough. You also need great distribution. Earlier this year, while working on another story for Business Explains the World, I went to Dubai. I went there to understand why there were so many supercars in the junkyards north of the city. Along the way, I debunked a bunch of internet myths and I learned that Dubai is there and those cars are there because of trade. Dubai is a global crossroads for the import and reexport of cars and car parts. That’s only possible because of the same kind of ship we’ve been talking about, the Rorow. Now I’m in Flat 12 Cafe, a place where you can see lots of beautiful Datson and Ferraris and Porsches. Inside were some of the most beautiful machines ever built. A Ferrari Tessterosa, a vintage Jaguar, a Rally Legend, a 911 Turbo. But the ones that stopped me in my tracks were these three Datons. You might have a guy who’s got three or four beautiful new Ferraris, but he doesn’t have a 74 Datson 260Z. They are exactly the kind of car that were brought to America by the thousands in roship shifts and nearly destroyed Detroit. But the story doesn’t end there because while I was in Dubai, I kept seeing these other cars on the road. Sleek, silent electric vehicles you can’t buy in America. Built by a company called BYD. I was fascinated by these cars because everyone who’s driven one from Marquez Brownley to the CEO of Ford says they’re among the best cars on the planet. Cutting edge tech, great to drive, great to look at, and all for a much lower price. But that superior quality and low pricing is not the only reason BYDs are about to take over the world. That reason is bigger, much bigger. Remember the MV Tonsburg, the ship we started the episode with? Capable of carrying 6,000 cars at a time, the Tonesburg is, let’s say, modest compared to the size of the ship carrying BYDs around the globe. Meet the BYD Shenzhen. With 16 decks, seven more than the Norwegian ship, it can carry 9,000 cars, more than 50% more than the Tonsburg. It can sail on natural gas, conventional fuel, or electric power stored in BYD’s own batteries. And it’s efficient and flexible. their car, their ship, their batteries. Even its hull is engineered for efficiency, coated with a drag reducing paint that slices through the water and cuts emissions. Seeing this ship on the seas, German, Japanese, and US car makers are worried. They should be. The ship that almost sank Detroit is about to change the economic landscape of the world again. Hey, Dynamos. If you like this show, you’re going to love our new show, The Rise of Civilization. Combining the power of cuttingedge AI with the knowledge of deeply respected historians, we’re going to explore the ideas, events, and people that built and shaped empires. Join us on a journey as we use today’s tech and centuries of knowledge to uncover our collective past. These ships were designed to solve a basic problem. get cars across the ocean cheaply and safely. So, how do they work? As soon as the ramp is down, a carefully orchestrated process begins. The world’s most precise team of valets carefully load and unload the ship like a big rolling game of Tetris. They can fill an entire ship in a single day. These are brand new cars, and the manufacturers expect them to arrive at their destination in mint condition. No smudges or scratches. The drivers even have to wear soft clothes and gloves. No belt buckles that might chip the paint. The Rorowro ship can carry everything from a cheap sedan to a Lamborghini worth a quarter million dollars on the upper decks. On the lower decks of the ship, there’s room to put big trucks and farm equipment. The ship can even take yachts, trains, and airplanes. Basically, anything on a trailer with wheels.

For decades, Detroit stood unchallenged. It was the city that built the cars that built America. Then an unlikely force from overseas appeared, quietly rewriting the rules of global trade. What followed was a slow-motion collapse: factories shuttered, jobs vanished, and foreign automakers surged. Today, an even more formidable version of that same innovation is rising. Nations that once benefitted from the first wave are now bracing themselves … because this time, they might be the ones in the crosshairs.

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