Please scroll down to listen to my media interviews and read a sampling of my articles in Foreign Policy, RealClear Politics, PR News, The Washington Post and Forbes.
Frank Ahrens on SiriusXM Satellite Radio Discussing the Biden Reset with North and South Korea: Click HERE to Listen
South Korea’s Corporate Hierarchies Are Breaking Down
November 20, 2020
(Reprinted from Foreign Policy)
By Frank Ahrens
There’s a change underway in South Korean corporate culture. It’s subtler than the country’s massive cultural hits like BTS, Blackpink, K-dramas, and the Oscar-winning Parasite—but in the long run it may be more important.
Young professionals are rattling the rigid, hierarchy-bound corporate systems that have become a core part of Korean working life. Unlike in the past, they are finding a sympathetic ear in C-suites across South Korea, which are increasingly filled with Generation X and even millennial executives. This confluence is already causing a massive shift in the way the country does business.
South Korea’s economic rise was built by the chaebols, or family-owned conglomerates, that were selected as national champions by the government and that received preferential treatment. Today, many are international household names—Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, LG, Lotte, and others.
Working at one of the top chaebols meant a prestigious job for life, a prized possession in a country that experienced bitter privation in the wake of the Korean War. Competition to get hired young was tough, but there was a path to success for those who could afford it: Years of study at private after-school academies in hopes of scoring highly enough on the national college entrance exam to gain admission to one of the country’s top three universities. A degree from any of the three was usually a ticket to employment at one of the top chaebols.
But South Korea was too successful at prioritizing education—it created too many four-year college graduates for the number of available jobs at the top chaebols. Youth unemployment rose along with dissatisfaction. We followed the formula, young people griped, and now you say there are no jobs? They gathered online in the 2010s and coined the term “Hell Chosun,” or “Hell Korea,” to describe their woes. Privately, middle-aged professional South Koreans groused about “gentlemen scholar” college graduates who felt they were above taking jobs at middle-tier chaebols, which were less prestigious but also reasonably secure work.
There was another factor on the side of the young Korean professionals, and they knew it: Despite being among the global leaders in hours worked per week, South Korea’s productivity is inversely proportional to its effort. Millions of hours were wasted as junior employees sat at their desks, doing nothing, waiting for their bosses to leave work—because you didn’t leave before them. Koreans have long theorized how much could be unleashed if all this culturally enforced wasted time and effort could be eliminated.
A new generation of corporate leaders began rising to power and reading the weather. Today, there are an estimated 130 adult children of chaebol families 50 years old or younger in leadership positions in the country’s largest companies, including three at the chairman level.
This doesn’t mean, however, that chaebols have overnight become squishy collectives. This doesn’t mean, however, that chaebols have overnight become squishy collectives. Family owners have not instantly diluted their power by breaking up the interconnectedness of the individual chaebol business units. The conglomerates are not suddenly less opaque to foreign investors. Chaebol bosses still wield a level of influence over Koreans’ daily lives on a scale comparable to America’s Gilded Age grandees.
Still, the beginning of change is visible. When I walked out of the lobby of Hyundai Motor’s headquarters in Seoul in December 2013, leaving my job as the automaker’s vice president of global corporate communications, every man in the lobby was wearing a dark suit, a white or light blue shirt, and a tie.
Five years later, I walked back into the same lobby. My first question to my Hyundai friends: “Where are all the ties?” Almost every man was dressed in business-casual attire, most without jackets. I was told the answer was twofold: the changing attitudes of young Korean professionals and the leadership of then-Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun.
Chung, 50, is the grandson of Hyundai founder Chung Ju-yung and the son of the second company chairman, Chung Mong-koo. The younger Chung is the exemplar of change underway in corporate South Korea.
Chung Eui-sun was educated and worked in the United States, unlike his father and grandfather. Also unlike them, he speaks fluent English. As Chung Mong-koo’s only son, Chung Eui-sun had his fate sealed from birth: hereditary succession. He took management jobs at Hyundai and its affiliate Kia, staying in the shadow of his father the chairman, but making noteworthy changes along the way as he rose through the ranks. He hired a legendary German designer to revitalize the Kia look. He launched Hyundai’s premium Genesis brand. He tweaked the dominant company culture in small but telling acts of rebellion: Instead of picking standard-issue black for his company luxury car, he chose dark blue.
For all practical purposes, Chung has been running the company for the past few years as his elderly father receded from view. In October, he was appointed as Hyundai Motor Group’s third chairman, the head of South Korea’s second-largest chaebol and the world’s fourth-largest automaker.
When I left Hyundai in 2013, teams were arranged in rows of cubicles with the most junior employee sitting farthest from the team leader. When promoted, an employee literally moved one cubicle closer to the team leader. One of the most promising young members of my team at Hyundai—top-three South Korean university graduate, trilingual—checked out of chaebol life because, he said, “I know what my salary is going to be in 20 years.” For a previous generation, that was immeasurable security. For his, it meant suffocation.
Today, the once-dour Hyundai cubicle farm has been renovated to include rest spots and desks of different sizes and shapes; employees can work wherever they like. There are flexible working hours; employees no longer have to arrive by 8 a.m. (or risk being shamed if they are late). Instead of staff members dutifully walking a paper document to a superior to receive their signature, wasting time while waiting until they are free, team leaders and executives are encouraged to sign online.
When I was unlucky enough to be in the lobby whenever Chairman Chung Mong-koo decided to enter or leave the building, security guards ushered us mere mortals out of the lobby until he passed, such was the deference for his station.
Now, young Hyundai employees crowd around Chairman Chung Eui-sun and take selfies with him. This is nothing short of a remarkable revolution, especially at what has been known as the most conservative of chaebols. Chung’s trusted top executives come largely from the company’s global operations—Koreans who have lived and worked in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia, Europe, and everywhere the company operates, unlike previous generations of South Korea-bound leaders. Chung has hired more non-Korean executives to work at the headquarters in Seoul.
Corporate South Korea has tried to Westernize in fits and starts before. In the late 2000s, LG headquarters hired a raft of Western C-suite executives to internationalize the company, which made fine fodder for glowing business magazine coverage. Soon enough—but less discussed in the media—they were gone, because, my Korean Hyundai colleagues told (warned?) me, they were “poor communicators.”
The key is not for Korean companies to become more Western. The key is for them to become more global while embracing their unique Koreanness as a brand attribute. Chung Eui-sun grew up during the time when Hyundai and South Korea as a whole were fast followers: those that could mimic what the innovators did, and usually cheaper.
Now, that’s all changed. Chung is taking over Hyundai at a time when South Korea is the innovator. It was the first country to roll out commercial 5G service. Bloomberg named it the world’s most innovative country five years running. And the world has watched South Korean innovations—drive-through testing, mobile apps, choreographed drone shows—bend the COVID-19 curve twice this year.
Recent years have seen periodic media coverage of an alleged loosening of Korean work culture, but this was usually little more than policy PR that rarely filtered down to the beleaguered employees.
This moment feels different—a confluence of young professionals and youthful leadership, both of whom have global perspectives and can choose from the world’s best business ideas while keeping the best of the Korean ways and discarding the worst. The new Chairman Chung said he wants to change Hyundai culture to be “more open” to good ideas. If this is true, and if other Korean chaebols follow suit, this moment could herald a combination of South Korea’s already demonstrated creativity and innovation with a corporate culture that finally matches it.
What Does Kpop Have to Do With U.S. Politics? Plenty.
june 26,2020
(Reprinted from RealClear Politics)
By Frank Ahrens
Maybe the first time you heard of K-pop fans, or maybe even K-pop music, was in the wake of President Trump’s campaign rally last weekend in Tulsa, Okla. But it will not be the last.
TikTokkers came up with the idea of ordering thousands of tickets to Trump’s rally with no intention of showing up, in hopes of making the arena embarrassingly empty. Whether the TikTokkers or COVID-19 was the reason for low turnout is up for debate. What is clear, however, is that K-pop fans took the TikTokkers’ idea and signal-boosted it across social media with lightning speed and algorithm-savvy tactics. It was only the most recent of a number of social media disruptions caused by K-pop fans, which I believe will increase, especially as the presidential election draws closer.
Loosely, K-pop is the term given to pop music created by artists from South Korea, typically by what are erroneously referred to as boy bands and girl bands. (These are grown men and women.) The songs’ lyrics are mostly in Korean with some English words. But that has proven no inhibitor to the genre’s worldwide growth. The beats and grooves are universally appealing, the artists’ choreography is spellbinding, and the artists themselves, by and large, tend to project an agreeable, even wholesome persona and are increasingly associated with charitable causes. Like any musical genre, the songs cover the range of emotions, but much of the music is positive and affirming. This is music you can dance to AND feel good about supporting, as opposed to wallowing in whiny emo rock or bloodying your head with nihilistic metal.
But you don’t really need to know about K-pop music. It’s the K-pop fans you need to worry about. If you’re involved in politics, government, advocacy or communications and you don’t know about K-pop fans, then you’re engaging in professional malpractice.
Why haven’t you heard K-pop? Pretty simple. The songs don’t get the same American radio airplay as English songs. (Though K-pop gets big radio airplay in Europe and Latin America.) Even in 2020, radio is still a common touchstone for the non-digital tastemakers, i.e., the Olds, who continue to decide much of what is considered important in American culture. If they don’t hear K-pop on the radio, they reason, it must not be important. Our parents probably felt the same way about rap back in the day.
Want some numbers? In a New York Times article, a Twitter spokeswoman said that K-pop was the most tweeted-about music genre worldwide, with more than 6.1 billion tweets in 2019, an increase of 15% from the year before.
The most popular K-pop act now is the band BTS, which was the most tweeted-about artist for the past three years, Twitter said. That beats Beyoncé, Taylor Swift or Kanye, artists you may have heard of.
CNN reported that in April 2019: “BTS became only the third group in 50 years to have three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 charts in less than 12 months, joining the ranks of The Beatles and The Monkees.” Earlier this year, Forbes reported that ticket site StubHub said tickets for BTS shows worldwide were outselling tickets for shows by Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande.
Not without reason have K-pop fans been called “the most potent online force in the world right now.” They have boosted their musical idols to global success, as measured by music and ticket sales and YouTube views. They have helped get politicians elected in Korea and raised funds for social causes globally. And they have rained down havoc on their enemies. Now they’re setting their sights on American politics and our culture wars. There’s a digital storm coming.
K-pop is made for a generation that gets its music not from vinyl or CDs but from YouTube. K-pop fans don’t just use online tools, like we use Amazon for shopping. They are digital natives who live their lives online. As such, they have become highly proficient at understanding how digital tools and social media work in ways that mystify the establishment.
The vast majority – vast majority – of K-pop fans are NOT Korean. K-pop fans are multi-ethnic (in the U.S., mostly people of color); they live everywhere around the globe, are male and female, and can be any age, though the highest concentration of fans is younger. Politically, they skew left, embracing LGBT issues, globalism, anti-racism activity, and feel-good self-affirmation.
Quoting T.K. Park, the pen name of the author of the popular “Ask a Korean” blog: “K-pop fans gather online, around a shared interest over an idol star. Their organization is decentralized -- there is no clear leadership or hierarchy, but they nonetheless coordinate smoothly to create high impact events both online and offline.” (To read this entire instructive Twitter thread, click here.)
Now, K-pop fans have focused on U.S. politics.
Earlier this month, they crashed a Dallas police department's app that was soliciting videos of illegal activity by flooding it with K-pop fan cam videos instead, as a way to protect protesters. They attacked racist hashtags on Twitter, such as #whiteoutwednesday, and flooded those with K-pop fan cam videos, rendering the hashtags impotent. K-pop and K-pop fans have been attracted to the Black Lives Matter cause, and BTS donated $1 million to the movement. Within 24 hours of the BTS donation, the amount was matched by K-pop fans around the world, spontaneously. That’s fundraising.
While the K-pop fans’ impact on physical attendance at Trump’s Tulsa rally is cloudy, the impact on the most valuable of political assets – voter data – is real. If a voter requests a ticket to a rally, that person is considered a strong supporter and likely to give money. Signing up for a ticket usually requires an email or phone number, and presidential campaigns use this data, and sell it to down-ballot candidates, to solicit donations.
If a campaign gets 50,000 ticket requests from real supporters, that’s a gold mine of fundraising data. If, however, the ticket requests come from political enemies using phony email addresses and temporary phone numbers from Google Voice or Burner – people who would never donate to the candidate’s campaign – then the data set can be rendered useless. It’s “sugar in the gas tank,” as one economist wrote on Twitter.
If you’re a communicator or political consultant, you are naturally asking yourself: “Okay, how can I use K-pop fans to my benefit?” You can’t. No more than you can hope to hold a cobra by the tail and aim it at your enemy.
First off, whom would you call? There is no Media Contact for K-pop fans. They are a global network in the most 21st century use of the term, united over social media by hashtags and symbols, such as the purple heart used by the BTS ARMY fan club. Second, they can’t be bought. Any attempt to do so would backfire; the candidate or brand attempting to strike a paid partnership with K-pop fans or otherwise cozy up in a disingenuous way would be outed and crushed on social media by the fans.
You can certainly learn digital marketing lessons from K-pop fans, and should. But if you are dead set on trying to harness the power of K-pop fans’ global network, your best bet is to be authentic in your candidacy or product messaging, honestly embrace the causes and narratives that appeal to fans and cross your fingers. Otherwise, you proceed at your peril.
Twitter and the Era of Flack-Shaming
March 14, 2019
By Frank Ahrens
Prior to social media, the most humiliating response a PR pro could expect was an angry hang-up or testy email from an annoyed reporter. If the response was silence, the PR person was forced to trepidatiously phone the reporter, which usually then led to the angry hang-up. Sometimes with profanity.
Today, though, we are in an era of flack-shaming. Reporters routinely publish on Twitter the most ridiculous email PR pitches they receive for their followers to mock. Often, the shaming is warranted, especially if the PR pro is “reaching out” or “circling back” to the reporter, asking if they can “jump on a call,” or “have a desk-side meeting.”
The most generous journalists redact the names of the offending communicator. Some reporters make a point of pantsing the PR person. They share the entire exchange on Twitter, including the cringe-inducing faux-chummy language and the sender's email address.
There is a useful saying: “Never type anything on a screen you don’t want to see in print.” Until now, there has been a reasonable expectation that communications between PR pros and reporters remained between them. Today, though, there is no bar, so communicators must write email understanding they may be published.
Transparency: Why do journalists do this? Some may see it as transparency, a way to show how the sausage is made. PR people assume that every reader knows that companies, politicians, charities, celebrities and countries have PR pros, but maybe not. So when a reporter brings to light the typically prosaic exchanges that occur between journalist and PR pro, especially if they are written in goofy or insincere jargon, it can feel like the reader is getting a glimpse into the secret world of spin-doctors. Everyone gets a laugh at the PR person's expense.
Outrage: Sometimes reporters flack-shame to publicly expose that a nefarious or controversial entity has retained PR representation. This is a double shame: It shows the entity is trying to buff its image with positive media coverage and it identifies the PR agencies willing to work for such entities.
Ethics: Reporters also flack-shame to virtue-signal to their peers and sources that their journalistic and ethical standards are unimpeachable. When a PR person invites a reporter to an event or – worst of all – offers payment, a tripwire is triggered. This results in the most dangerous form of flack shaming. The reporter will be understandably angry and incredulous that a flack thinks their byline is for sale.
Thus motivated, they will take to Twitter and They. Will. Hang. You.
Huawei'$ Ca$h: Recently, The Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin reported to his 203,000 Twitter followers that he received an email invitation from a representative of Chinese telecom giant Huawei. The invitation promised an all-expenses-paid trip to visit the company’s facility in Shenzhen. Rogin tweeted the email invitation, along with the name and address of the PR person who sent it. His reply to the PR person via Twitter said Washington Post policies and personal ethics forbid him "from taking thousands of dollars in gifts from a foreign corporation that acts as an arm of a foreign government intelligence agency.”
Ouch.
Other reporters who'd received the invitation joined the fray. Some noted the Chinese Embassy sent the invitation. None of this helped disprove suspicions that the government of China uses Huawei as an espionage tool.
Sometimes, a PR pro doesn’t even have to email a pitch. All you have to do is pick up their phone call.
Imagine being the unlucky pro who saw New York Times food correspondent Kim Severson tweet to her 99,300 followers recently: “Just spoke with @tacobell PR for a story I'm reporting. The guy on the other end of the line asked how much it will cost to be included the story. FOR THE RECORD: We don't pay sources nor do they pay us.”
Severson’s comment came only days after a Reuters/Ipsos poll in the Columbia Journalism Review found that 60 percent of respondents believe that sources sometimes or very often pay for inclusion in stories.
Severson’s tweet forced Taco Bell senior manager, PR & brand experience Matt Prince to jump into the fray: “A junior member of our team was doing their due diligence to ensure this was an editorial and not advertorial opportunity. Requests we unfortunately deal with quite often. Asking IF something is pay for play is not the same as asking FOR pay for play.”
Could Severson have handled the matter privately with the first PR person (who mercifully goes unidentified) or Prince? Sure. Could Taco Bell have better trained its PR team members to identify the difference between New York Times journalism and advertorial? Sure. Yet it’s gotten more complicated initially to tell the difference between the two.
Big journalism outlets such as the Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal sell, and help customers create, sponsored “native” content. It runs alongside the papers' journalism on their websites.
Severson followed up with a conciliatory tweet: “I deal with corporate PR people a lot and have never been asked whether a story I'm reporting would cost money, so it was news to me. Reactions have been interesting and I've learned things. That makes it a valuable Twitter moment in my book.”
A lesson for us all.
South Koreans are showing the world how protests can work
Dec. 8, 2016
Reprinted from The Washington Post
By Frank Ahrens
An older Korean neighbor down the street from me here in Washington told me recently that when Americans ask her about the scandal engulfing South Korean President Park Geun-hye, she feels “so ashamed.”
In East Asia’s Confucian culture, where face and respect matter so much, it’s understandable that she would feel embarrassment. But it is not justified. The response of the Korean people in this crisis, though less-reported than the twists and turns of the bizarre affair, has been exemplary and something my neighbor ought to be proud of.
On Saturday, South Korea held its sixth national protest in as many weeks, with as many as 1.7 million people packing downtown Seoul, within sight of the Blue House, the presidential residence. Since October, protesters have gathered in democratic, peaceful and even joyous assembly, demanding the president’s ouster. Park is accused of letting a longtime friend with no official government role, Choi Soon-sil, see classified documents and improperly influence government actions. In turn, Choi has been charged with using her relationship with the president to shake down the nation’s biggest companies for donations to her companies, personally enriching her. South Korea’s National Assembly is scheduled to vote on Park’s impeachment Friday.
Mass protests in South Korea are nothing new. Nationalists protested the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula during the first half of the 20th century. Democracy advocates protested the dictatorial rule of Park Geun-hye’s father, Park Chung-hee, in the 1970s. Union workers protested from almost the moment South Korea became a democracy in 1987. Hundreds of thousands protested the American military presence after a U.S. Army vehicle hit and killed two young girls during training exercises in 2002.
There’s a key difference between those protests, which were unruly and even violent on both sides, and the current ones. There have been isolated scuffles, but the protests this time have been largely peaceful, save for one notable outlier. A Korean man, so distraught by Choi’s actions, drove a flatbed truck with an excavator to the office of government prosecutors, where he believed Choi was being questioned. He unloaded the excavator and proceeded to ram the prosecutors’ office with it, claiming he wanted to “help her die.” He was quickly subdued by police, and no one died.
This sort of measured government response to protest has not always been the case in Korea. Park Chung-hee arrested, tortured and killed political opponents and demonstrators. His dictator successor, Chun Doo-hwan, did the same, massacring some 600 democracy protesters in 1980. Even as recently as September, an elderly Korean man, protesting Park Geun-hye’s agricultural policies, died from injuries after being hit by a police water cannon.
But not this time. Police have formed thousand-strong blockades and snaking bus lines for crowd control. Surely the kid-glove treatment from police has something to do with Park’s 4 percent approval rating — and a remarkable 0 percent among those under 30. After all, what’s the point in cracking down on protesters when they represent the entire country’s opinion, even the opinion of some within the president’s party?
The police have largely backed off heavy-handed tactics, letting the people assemble.
And assemble they have.
These protests have had more in common with peace-ins and family festivals than political mobilizations. Stages have been erected where performers sing protest songs, but popular songs, too. Mothers and fathers bring their children; the little ones for the fun, the older ones to experience the historic moment. Protesters wear Park and Choi masks — not gas masks — and engage in street theater while displaying comedic signs. On Saturday, protesters were given permission by the government to march within 100 yards of the Blue House — the closest ever. It has been a moving sight to see hundreds of thousands of Koreans in Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Plaza at nighttime, holding candles, surrounding the statues of King Sejong and Admiral Yi Sun-sin, Korea’s two greatest historical figures, as protesters write the next chapter in Korea’s political history.
And, just to top it off, when protesters disperse for the evening, they clean up after themselves, throwing away garage and even recycling.
We have seen similarly well-mannered revolutions elsewhere in Asia, such as the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, where residents protested Beijing’s intervention in local elections. Protesters cleaned the streets the mornings after clashes with police and sorted plastic bottles for recycling while wearing goggles to protect their eyes from pepper spray, media reported at the time.
Students protesting Japan’s security laws last year were polite and well-dressed, according to reports, and said they wanted to “behave well and take our rubbish home.”
A strong social compact exists in Korea and other East Asian countries, and citizens can hold one another accountable for unacceptable public behavior. When I arrived in Seoul in 2010, older Korean women were still admonishing young couples on the street for kissing in public. Seoul, which was known as a “smoker’s paradise,” was well ahead of America in creating smoke-free public spaces on sidewalks and at bus stops so smokers would not foul the commons for nonsmokers.
Strong democracies outlive presidential scandals. It happened in the United States during Watergate, and it’s happening in Korea now. Koreans are showing the world that mass public protests can be powerful and peaceful — even polite — and still be effective. It’s a lesson Americans could stand to remember, especially now.
Iacocca Is Rightly Remembered For The Mustang But The Minivan Is His Biggest Legacy
July 7, 2019
By Frank Ahrens
In the days since his death at 94, former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca has been rightly lauded as the father of the Mustang, from his days at Ford, and the brand-saving K-car, from his time at Chrysler. But when I think of Iacocca, one word comes to mind: minivan.
Iacocca did not invent the minivan, any more than Ray Kroc invented McDonald’s. Rather, both men had the vision to see the massive potential of their respective products and the will and smarts to bring them to market.
From the excellent Automotive News obituary of Iacocca, we learn that both Ford, under Hal Sperlich, and Chrysler, under Burt Bouwkamp, dreamed up the idea of a smaller van, aimed at families, in the early 1970s. Unlike today, when minivans are marketed for their roominess and convenience, these product designers were looking to create a vehicle that was “garageable;” in other words, make a van big enough for family use but small enough to fit in family garages.
But these early versions came to naught because of two of the worst traits of the U.S. auto industry: top-down, gut-level decisions not based on data or market research, and copycat syndrome. At Ford, Henry Ford II spurned Sperlich’s idea. At Chrysler, CEO John Riccardo killed Bouwkamp’s minivan, arguing that if a market for such a vehicle existed, “GM and Ford would have one,” according to Automotive News.
Sperlich came to Chrysler with Iacocca after Ford fired him, and his minivan idea had a second chance.
I love the minivan. Not only for its immense, unapologetic, in-your-face, so-uncool-it’s-cool utility. I love the minivan because it’s my favorite example of a product people didn’t know they absolutely, positively could not live without until they saw it.
These kinds of products come along once in a generation. They are such slam-dunk hits that you’d think they’d be no-brainers to dream up, like clean drinking water. But they’re not. It takes a special genius to look at what everyone else is looking at and be the only one to see the vast hole in the market, the gaping need so elemental that consumers might not even be able to put it into words. If you asked car buyers of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s what they needed and described the minivan, maybe they wouldn’t get it. It takes that connection – actually seeing the thing that fits the uniquely shaped hole in your need – that makes consumers shout, “Yes! That’s it! That is exactly it!” Product geniuses take the inchoate and make it real. Steve Jobs did this. So did Iacocca.
And let’s be honest: The K-car was a revolutionary sedan platform, with a transverse engine and front-wheel drive. But it was a sedan, and we had seen those before. The Mustang created the Pony car category, but it was – and remains – a niche vehicle, more a part of the national imagination than the nation’s driveways. The minivan, though, was both: revolutionary and a massive commercial success. That’s why it’s Iacocca’s most important and lasting legacy. In 2018, 53 years after its introduction, Ford celebrated its 10 millionth Mustang made. By 2000, 16 years after the Plymouth Voyager debuted, Americans were buying 1.4 million minivans per year.
To be strict about it, Chrysler’s were not the first minivans. That honor may go to the 1936 Stout Scarab, an aerodynamic Art Deco rolling salon that looked more like a Bauhaus toaster than a car. It featured movable chairs inside and a small table.
Leap forward to 1949, and Volkswagen rolled out the Type 2 Microbus, which became a Summer of Love staple and favorite of hippies and Boomer restoration enthusiasts. But it was too bus-like for popular uptake. Just as the first-gen Ford Econoline, though adorable, was too truck-like.
As America moved out of cities and into the suburbs, parents piled kids and groceries into station wagons, which were cash cows for the Big Three. Station wagons were great. They still are. And there should be more beautiful ones in America.
But one cannot deny it is easier to step up while getting into a car rather than down, and easier to step down when getting out. Wagons can’t do this. Minivans can. It is another element of their utterly brutalist utility.
The Plymouth Voyager debuted in 1984 and it took off. The Voyager and sister Dodge Caravan sold 209,000 units in their first year, and sales just kept rocketing upward. The upscale Chrysler Town and Country – there may be, by the way, no more suburban name for any vehicle than “Town and Country” – bowed in 1990. The phrase you heard most often from owners was, "drives like a car."
The minivan is notable for another reason: It is one of the few vehicles Detroit executed that caused Japan to stumble for years trying to play catch-up, rather than the usual obverse. When foreign automakers saw that Americans wanted minivans, they tried to retool their existing vans, such as the Toyota Van and VW Vanagon. Sales results were predictably poor and did not turn upward until the Japanese began making clean-paper minivans that Americans wanted, such as the Honda Odyssey and Toyota Sienna.
Within a few years of its introduction, the minivan had become so ubiquitous it entered the popular culture. It spawned a demographic cohort – the Soccer Mom – and became shorthand for giving up your cool urban lifestyle for the soul-deadening cul-de-sac. Of course that was wrong – by the turn of the century, American suburbs had become more diverse and integrated than many American cities, which were gentrifying and polarizing.
Despite their extreme utility, list of features and increasing stylishness (once most automakers engineered out the gash on the side for the sliding side-door track), it’s probably wrong to say that most minivan buyers were enamored of their minivans. In 1998, I wrote a story about minivans and hung out at a dealership to talk to customers. I remember one couple that had settled on a minivan, knew they needed a minivan, knew the minivan was absolutely, positively the correct choice. But even up until the moment they signed the contract for their minivan, they were browsing pictures of SUVs on the lot, because, they said, laughing, they just couldn’t imagine thinking of themselves as minivan people.
Despite, or maybe because of, this perception, minivans enjoyed a few moments of reverse-cool, such as in the 1995 film “Get Shorty,” when John Travolta’s character describes his black Oldsmobile Silhouette as “the Cadillac of minivans” and wows Danny DeVito’s character with the remote-control sliding side door.
A Dodge Caravan has a star turn during a car chase in the 2005 Brad Pitt-Angelina spy spoof “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” One beat after a villain steps from a speeding car into the Caravan through one of its sliding side doors, Pitt’s character grabs him and tosses him out of the other side’s sliding door. “These doors are handy,” he muses.
It’s safe to say that minivans were to the 1980s and 1990s what SUVs became to the past 20 years – the must-have American vehicle. So there’s a cruel poetry to the fact that it was the SUV that killed the minivan. Well, if not killed it, certainly usurped it.
But the minivan abides. Fiat Chrysler sold 270,000 minivans last year. That’s not nothing.
It is another characteristic of its persistent practicality that the minivan stubbornly refuses to roll quietly into the junkyard of automotive fads. It’s an elegant turn that a minivan, the Chrysler Pacifica (which, by the way, is a lovely design with some killer interior features) was chosen for Waymo’s autonomous vehicle testing. This puts the humble minivan on the cutting edge of the automobile industry.
And this should come as no surprise – without the need for a steering wheel and a pilot cockpit, more and more autonomous vehicle concept cars are resembling spacious minivans or, perhaps, even, rolling salons. Perhaps by 2036, the 100th anniversary of the Scarab, we’ll be riding around in autonomous minivans that don’t look too different from what Mr. Stout envisioned.