City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (39 page)

Remember the 1960s cartoon the
Wacky Races
, where drivers in soupedup sports cars and homespun contraptions competed for rally victories? Dubai is the Wacky Races, day in, day out. There may be no place on earth with such a variety of vehicles on its roads. Backhoes compete for lane space with Lamborghinis. Gasoline tankers rumble among ATV quad bikes. There are scurrying minibuses crammed with waitresses, juggernaut dump trucks piled with boulders, and flimsy Chinese hatchbacks tailgaited by hulking Hummers.

General Motors has carefully studied this vehicular cornucopia. GM’s managing director of its Middle East operations, Terry Johnsson, says ninety separate vehicle brands share Dubai’s roads—twice as many as in most countries.

“You have a consumers’ paradise. Every possible brand is here: all the Chinese, all the Indian, all the European, Asian, and American brands,” Johnsson says in a very slight Scandinavian lilt. “A lot of markets say they’re competitive. There is no market with Dubai’s number of brands.”

The UAE is one of the world’s biggest luxury car markets. The tiny country is the number one destination for the world’s most expensive car, the $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron. Only around three hundred Veyrons have been built. UAE drivers bought twenty-seven brand-new ones in 2006 and 2007, says Stephanie Vigier, a Paris-based auto market analyst for the research firm Global Insight.

The UAE is the world number two market for Hummer, second only to the United States, and the world’s number three market for Bentleys. The UAE is a vital market for Lamborghini, Range Rover, the sumptuous Maybach limousine, and the $95,000 Porsche Cayenne SUV. The UAE is the world’s fourth-largest buyer of Cayennes, behind only Germany, China, and Russia. There are so many Porsches on Dubai’s roads that they’ve become mundane. Hence the demand for Veyrons.

Cars are practically driving themselves out of the showrooms. Rolls-Royce sales tripled in Abu Dhabi between 2006 and 2007. Ferrari purchases jumped 60 percent that year.
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Sales of new cars rise 20 percent a year in the UAE.

An Emirati household may own up to a dozen vehicles, each with a
distinct purpose, whether it’s going out in the desert, dropping the kids at school, shopping, or nightclubbing.

In the United States, where gas rose above $4 in mid-2008, GM’s penchant for big cars was a liability. In the UAE, subsidized fuel is less than $2 per gallon. Big SUVs are the rage. GM sells its biggest 4x4s as fast as it can ship them in. Sales of Chevy Tahoes and Suburbans and GMC Yukons are growing at 100 percent a year. In the Gulf, people want V8 engines, as much air-conditioning and on-board electronics as possible. GM’s dire sales would be even worse if it weren’t for the Gulf.

“Call it four-dollar gas, call it American competitiveness, call it the weak dollar, but all that has done nothing but focus our attention on the opportunities over here,” Johnsson says, in his office near the top of the World Trade Centre. “You definitely want to be investing where you can generate cash.”

Johnsson doesn’t look like a typical GM man. He carries himself with Euro-intellectual poise, with a shaved head, square black plastic-framed glasses, and a sharp blue suit. Instead of a tie, a checkered hankie juts from his breast pocket.

Over the next decade, Johnsson expects the Gulf to be such a large car market that its preferences will start shaping the way American vehicles are designed. “If you were to go into the design studio in the U.S. for a look at the next-generation Chevrolet Tahoe, and you asked them, ‘Where’s the coolbox in the center console for the Middle Eastern consumer?’ they’d show you,” says Johnsson. “They have a whole list of things they’re doing for the Middle East market.”

One reason the UAE is such a profitable car market is because the driving is so bad.

Rajan Jacob is the showroom manager at the Al Tayer Motors Ford dealership in Dubai. Al Tayer is the world’s tenth largest Ford dealer and the top seller of Ford Mustangs outside North America. It also happens to be the world’s number one dealer of Jaguars and Land Rovers, and one of the biggest sellers of Maseratis.
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Al Tayer’s showroom, with Ferraris, Maseratis, Range Rovers, and Jaguars poised in the windows, is a major
source of rubbernecking on the adjacent Sheikh Zayed Road. (The al-Tayer family also happens to be tribal cousins to the ruling Maktoums, with roots in the Liwa Oasis.)
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The 250-car pileup in March 2008 might have been bad for those involved, but it was great for car dealers. Most of the victims, once they got out of the hospital, needed new wheels. Some of them came to Al Tayer and a few looked over the new Fords. Rajan Jacob was lucky enough to outfit four crash victims with Ford Explorers and Ford Focuses.

“A lot of people who got out of Fords in that crash, they came to us again and bought another Ford, because they weren’t injured,” Jacob says. “A lot of people who crashed their Japanese cars also bought Fords. They opted for something safer. Safety is a big factor.”

At rival General Motors, Terry Johnsson hasn’t examined the link between crashes and sales, but he knows it’s there. “It will drive sales. It has to. There will be a replaced car, there’ll be replaced parts. I can’t put a number to it,” Johnsson says. “For an individual dealer, it could make a significant difference.”

In the West, establishing your identity is a simple matter. You wear a T-shirt with a slogan, you let your hair grow long and shaggy, or you shave it off. Or you stumble into a tattoo parlor and have ink injected under your skin. Or you don’t do any of it, and that says something, too.

In the Gulf, Arab men generally wear plain all-enveloping white robes, plain white headdresses, or perhaps a red-checked headscarf, and a black band or two that fixes the scarf to the head. There are no brand names, no fancy embroidery, no stripes or plaids.

Women have a bit more room for adventure in their black
abaya
, some of which bear patterns in sequins or crystal and can be sheer, even see-through (with clothes worn underneath). Their headscarves might be turquoise or saffron, not always black.

It’s difficult, especially for a man, to make a big personality statement with his clothing. You can glean hints from a man’s sandals or shoes, perhaps noting that his toes are manicured or not, and the type of pen clipped to his pocket, his cufflinks or the brand of watch on his wrist. If he wears a long beard, okay, he’s religious. But those are small
details compared to the booming personality statements made when the man climbs into his car. Is it a white Range Rover Sport? That signals understated wealth. Is it a red Ferrari or Maserati? That’s an attention-craving rebel with cash to burn. A Bentley? An old-money identity. A boxy Mercedes G-Series 4x4? That’s an admirer of Sheikh Mohammed. A Mercedes or BMW sedan? That’s for the gray man who disdains attention. A Toyota or Nissan sedan? That’s sensible frugality, which says, “I am poor.”

Terry Johnsson got a briefing on local preferences at the U.S. embassy just after arriving in 2004. Then ambassador Michelle Sison told him that influential Gulf nationals, especially members of the royal families, care deeply about three things. “First, oil and gas. Number two, airplanes. And number three, cars,” Johnsson says. “The rest of their business relationships might be important, but none carry the same level of passion.”

Dubai’s road network is a puzzle. On the one hand, streets are modern and well lit. Ample signs in Arabic and English point the way. On the other hand, Dubai’s streetscape is anonymous. The roads are often unnamed, or given names like Street 14b or Road 363 that nobody uses. Worse, names are repeated from neighborhood to neighborhood. There are probably a dozen named Street 14b, for example. They meander in curlicues and culs-de-sac that only residents can fathom. There are no house addresses. Since there is no mail delivery, the municipality never introduced them. Everyone in Dubai gets mail in a post office box.

All this makes navigation difficult. Directions are given by proximity to landmarks. In the old days, this worked. But in a city of two million spilling over the desert, navigation is akin to Sudoku.

On January 9, 2004, the confusing street grid was part of the reason Paul Johnson, General Motors’s top executive in the Middle East and Africa, died. Johnson was a tall man with dark hair and a baby-faced friendliness. He was fifty, but looked more like forty. His colleagues at GM called him P. J.

Paul Johnson was Terry Johnsson’s predecessor. The two are unrelated. Johnson was a longtime GM man, starting with Pontiac in 1978
and then working his way up through the Saturn division and to Vauxhall, GM’s British make. In 1999, GM sent him to run the carmaker’s Middle East operations. He and his wife, Jane, and their three sons, settled in a comfortable villa in Umm Suqeim, near Jumeirah Beach.

Johnson’s last moments alive were spent at his home. His eldest son had returned on winter break from college in the States and Johnson grilled steaks in his backyard to celebrate. At dinner, however, Johnson began choking. A piece of steak lodged in his windpipe and he couldn’t dislodge it. Jane and the boys tried to help but nothing seemed to work. Jane called an ambulance. In her distress, she did her best to describe where she lived. But Johnson’s wife spoke English and the emergency dispatcher did not understand it well. He sent an ambulance but the crew couldn’t find the home. For the next forty minutes, paramedics meandered in search of the choking man. The GM executive’s condition grew grave. Without air, Johnson lost consciousness. He was close to death when the paramedics finally found him. They rushed him to the American Hospital, another twenty minutes across town, but Johnson never regained consciousness. Soon he was dead.
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Johnson’s death jolted Dubai’s authorities. A memorial service at the World Trade Centre drew two thousand mourners. Sheikh Mohammed phoned his condolences to Jane, and city authorities began straightening up the emergency response system. The roads department began giving streets names and numbers.

“He should never have passed away,” Johnsson says.

Dubai’s relentless growth has stretched roads beyond capacity. More than a million vehicles pack the streets, with 135 new cars registered every day in 2008. Entire neighborhoods are built and populated with no expansion of the surrounding streets, which descend into gridlock as buildings fill with tenants. The congestion costs Dubai $1.2 billion in yearly economic losses.
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A survey of Middle East commuters declared Dubai’s streets the most congested in the Arab world, surpassing even the infamous gridlock of Cairo. The average Dubai commuter spends an hour and forty-five minutes on the roads, twelve minutes longer than the average Cairene.
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Dubai is a city of incongruities. The roads are modern but the network is incoherent. The cars are advanced but driving is anarchic. Malls
are rife but there is no art museum. The airport is world class, but education is substandard. An optimist would say that’s the essence of an emerging market, the reason Dubai crackles with opportunity. A realist would point to a government that preferred impulsive decisions to levelheaded planning.

One reason that Dubai’s urban fabric is so incomprehensible is the fact that until 1995, the city had no functioning master plan to guide its growth. In 1993, Egyptian urban planner Hamed Hattal was hired to bring order to Dubai’s hurtling sprawl. When Hattal arrived from Saudi Arabia, he was stunned to find that Dubai had no database of land ownership, no zoning laws, no planning standards or building regulations. The city’s Land Department, which registers property ownership, had barely discovered computers. The department was infamous for its bureaucratic depths, and as a hangout for Emirati falconers who would swill coffee and stroke their birds.

“Dubai was growing without boundaries, without standards,” says Hattal, a slim man with a shock of gray hair and the technocrat’s white shirt and tie. “The government didn’t know what land it had available. There was no information about the population. And we had no idea which pieces of land had been allocated for what.”

The city relied on a 1985 master plan, the Dubai Comprehensive Plan, which the government never approved, perhaps because it vastly underestimated the pace of expansion. The 1985 plan, drawn up during the doldrums of the Iran-Iraq war, projected Dubai’s population would reach 500,000 by 2005. But as the war wound down, Dubai took off on a growth tear. The city reached half a million by 1990, fifteen years earlier than predicted. Hattal says planners understood the document’s deficiencies, but still used it as a rough guide, for lack of another.

The acute misjudgments of the Dubai Comprehensive Plan are partly responsible for the grinding traffic jams that locked down the roads in later years. One oversight was the lack of bridges over the creek. After the 1976 completion of the Garhoud Bridge, no creek crossings got built for thirty years, until the 2007 opening of Business Bay Bridge. All traffic from one side of the eight-mile creek to the other funneled into two bridges and a tunnel that were bunched near the seashore. Crosstown traffic flowed through the heart of the city and local drivers had to jam onto the highways simply to cross the creek. These were major bottlenecks before a spate of new bridges started opening in 2007.

Now Dubai is in the midst of building a $4.2 billion light rail system. It’s a hugely ambitious project, with forty-five miles of underground and raised track coursing through town like giant strips of linguine, rising up and over bridges and burrowing beneath Bur Dubai and Deira. At the time of writing, the city was testing trains on its Red Line, set to open by the end of 2009.

It’ll be a godsend when the trains start running. With an alternative in place, city fathers say they’ll tackle the vehicle fleet: hiking gasoline prices and parking fees and installing more toll gates. The idea, says planning director Abdulredha al-Hassan, is to “make it harder for people to use private cars.”
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