Site to Illustrate Detroit Automotive Innovation & Industry Proposed (HOME for STEM Juggernaut!)

Automotive theme park

A DISNEY FOR DETROIT?

   It’s time to get serious about creating a stupendous, one-of-a-kind, Disney-esque automotive attraction in the heart of Detroit.

   Something so exciting that it would draw millions of visitors from far and wide, cementing Detroit’s place as the Motor City in the eyes of the world for generations. Dan Gilbert is thinking — and even tweeting — about it. Bill Ford has been talking toGilbert about it. Roger Penske is pondering how to jump-start the notion from talk to action. If these three guys are intrigued about the notion, what are the rest of us waiting for?

   ‘It should be downtown’

   “Let’s be frank and honest,” Gilbert said in an interview, “Detroit blew it for decades and decades when it came to leveraging the sexiness of the automobile.”

   Gilbert, the Quicken Loans chairman, Cleveland Cavaliers owner and major investor in downtown Detroit real estate and start-up companies, doesn’t have a detailed vision or proposal yet, but he said, “I would think it should be downtown. You could build something as big as an Epcot Center,” the 300-acre theme park at Walt Disney World in Orlando.

   “It could be something of that magnitude,” Gilbert added, encompassing the past, present and future of the automobile, with opportunities to drive cool vehicles on paved tracks and off-road courses. “It’s just endless what you could do.”    On Jan. 5, under his Twitter username @cavsdan, Gilbert posted the following two-part Tweet: “I am looking for the most creative, knowledgeable and experienced ‘Car Guy’ in the world who knows & lives cutting edge car design … who knows racing, custom cars, etc., & loves cars! He/She also loves technology but above all is a big time visionary. You know this guy?”

   “I didn’t say to anybody why I tweeted that,” Gilbert told me last week, but his intent was to find someone “who has the kind of vision and who we could hire into our Detroit team here and start fleshing out some of these ideas and working with others.”

   ‘It would be cool’

   A month ago in the Free Press, I wrote about my crazy-fun visit to Mercedes-Benz World outside London, where adults and kids alike can drive supercars around dry and slick-wet tracks, and also gawk at historic race cars and a Concorde supersonic jet plane at the adjacent Brooklands museum. Why, I mused, doesn’t the alleged motor capital of the world have anything this cool in Detroit?

   When I talked at the North American International Auto Show recently with Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Dearborn automaker founded by his great-grandfather, he said he had talked with Gilbert about the same notion.

   “We agree, it would be cool to have something big like that in Detroit,” Ford said. “The question is, ‘What exactly is it? What does it look like? And what would our contribution (from Ford) be to it?’ A lot of our history is already in the Henry Ford” museum complex in Dearborn.

   A collaborative effort

   Roger Penske, the legendary head of auto racing teams and the Penske Automotive Group that owns 326 dealerships, said General Motors, Ford and Chrysler would all need to be key players in such a project.

   “I think a key thing, given the competitive juices with the Big Three, it can’t be one or the other,” Penske told me this month. “There’s no question the Henry Ford museum brings the heritage, but there are also so many modern things taking place, so much technology in the concept cars at the auto shows, there’s a lot we can put downtown — and that would drive people into our city and drive commerce, which is what we need.”

   Gilbert said he’s had brief conversations with Penske on the topic, “but I haven’t pushed it in a big way yet. Maybe we’re getting ready to.”

   Penske said perhaps the Downtown Detroit Partnership, a civic group that has supported the Grand Prix along with downtown cleanup, could get behind the effort. “We’d need commitments from the Big Three and others — this is going to cost money — and then we have to understand the viability and sustainability of it,” he said.

   Historically, the inherent reluctance of Detroit’s auto companies to team up with fierce competitors has led to a haphazard scattering of classic car collections and a few small-scale local museums, such as the recently closed Walter P. Chrysler Museum in Auburn Hills. The GM Heritage Center, a swell collection of 600 mint-condition classic GM cars and trucks, is tucked away on a Macomb County side street, not open to the public.

   It’s vexing to many in Detroit that the most popular car racing shrines are in the South — Charlotte, Daytona, Talladega — and Indianapolis. And that the world’s best pure auto museums are in Germany and California.

   Leadership needed

   Gilbert contends that the popularity of the Woodward Dream Cruise, which sprouted in 1995 and grew organically to draw more than 1 million people to the region each August, suggests that something much more powerful is possible here.

   “You just know,” he said, “that if you create an incredible attraction in downtown Detroit, with all this interactive high-tech stuff, and there was cooperation among the automobile companies and city, the state and others in the business community, there could be millions of people visiting the city to see it.”

   Gilbert, an owner of sports teams, casinos and a home mortgage empire, is no shrinking violet when it comes to risk. He knows why ambitious projects scare people.

   “The problem becomes, when everybody looks through the prism of spreadsheets and return-on-investment, which are phony ways to measure business and wealth and what you’re going to create in the future, you can’t rationalize and justify it,” he said.

   “It’s going to take leadership and it’s going to take cooperation,” he said.

   Visionary sought

   For now, Gilbert is still looking for the guy — or woman — he sought in his Jan. 5 tweet that generated hundreds of responses. “It’s someone with the vision for creating the kind of attraction and interactions that not only brings millions of visitors, but also young talented people, who love to design cars and are excited about Detroit,” he said.

   Legions of Detroit naysayers will no doubt scoff at this idea, pointing back to the Flint Auto-World theme park flop of the mid-1980s as proof that a similar Detroit effort would be doomed.

   But if Gilbert is gung-ho and the likes of Ford and Penske are intrigued, it’s certainly worth exploring to see whether we can get some traction.

MERCEDES-BENZ WORLD: The car-based attraction is at Weybridge, Surrey, about 30 miles southwest of London.

PHOTOS BY MANDY WRIGHT/DFP, SXC.HU, SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES, ALI NASSER, BLOOMBERG NEWS, MERCEDES-BENZ FREE PRESS ILLUSTRATION BY JASON KARAS

TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT AMOTOR CITY ATTRACTION, TOM WALSH SAYS

EPCOT CENTER IN ORLANDO: Test Track presented by Chevrolet features an all-new ride experience, including an interactive pre-show area retooled and reimagined.

“AUTO TURM” CAR TOWER: Cars stacked at the Autostadt Volkswagen showroom in Wolfs-burg, Germany.

NASCAR HALL OF FAME: In addition to cars, driver and team memorabilia, the hall in Charlotte, N.C., also features interactive experiences .

MALCOLM CASE-GREEN

   Mercedes-Benz World outside London, a place where adults and kids alike can drive supercars around tracks and also gawk at historic race cars. Visitor attractions include exhibitions and displays that cover the heritage, innovation and engineering behind Mercedes-Benz.

Dan Gilbert

Bill Ford

Roger Penske