Reading between the lines

By Al Hatch

The other day I was at a meeting with Nancy Darga, Executive Director of the Motor Cities Heritage Foundation, and good friend Ron Wilmer who is an advocate for barrier free accessibility for disabled  people.  Ron was explaining to the both of us that disabled Americans have over $224 billion in discretionary income that just sits in the bank.  Mainly it sits there because the fear of not knowing what lies in store for them once they arrive at their destination.  If you stop and think about that, that is an enormous number, $224 billion!  The whole purpose of the meeting was to see what the car hobby could do to make their venues accessible to disabled people who enjoy the car hobby.  And you know, once some of the obstacles are pointed out, they are relatively simple to fix with little or no cost to the event promoters.   Give it some serious consideration when planning your events.

As the conversation progressed, Nancy told us that she had just recently returned from a national convention of National Parks managers.  Each park manager got throwing around  annual attendance figures for their respective parks; a million here, 2 million there, etc.  Nancy chimed in a said, ‘You know, we have two car events in Michigan that occur on the same weekend in August that attracts about 2 million people!  The ‘Woodward Dream Cruise’ and the ‘Back to the Bricks Cruise and Car Show’!  Nancy said the jaws dropped wide open!  Two million in just one weekend!  And that did not include the numbers from the third venue that occurs on the same weekend and that being the NASCAR race that is held at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan.  Add that number to the mix and it starts to approach 2.3 million plus ‘gear heads’ participating in one of three southeast Michigan car events in one weekend.

More interesting is the fact that 95% plus of the attention is on American made iron.  Michigan’s automotive heritage is second to none and no other state in the union or country for that matter has put more automobiles on the highways of the world.  Not something that any of us should take lightly and certainly not overlook.  This brings us to an interesting point of view (at least from this writer’s point of view); Michigan’s automotive heritage is a diamond in the rough in that it is extremely marketable as a tourist destination.  We have the automobile museums (Henry Ford, R.E. Olds, the Sloan Museum, Gilmore, Ford Piquette) and the large automotive car events that attract thousands of car hobbyists and spectators to our state.  And generally speaking, up until this point, it has been done thru word of mouth or each event paying for their own specific promotional material and keeping in mind, thru the private sector, they are attracting two million plus participants and spectators to auto related events in the state of Michigan.  The economic impact of all of this?  Enormous!

Just think if the state of Michigan would start to help promote our auto heritage on a larger scale and what it would do for our hobby.  Obviously, until there is a unified effort no one knows for sure.  But there is one thing we all intuitively know, that a unified effort from the State of Michigan and the hobbyists would not hurt but only help to create tourism for our state via the old car hobby.  

Just reading between the lines.

• Login or register to post comments