The South wants to be the new Detroit

Sonny Perdue now drives a Kia. Occasionally.

The jet-black, $37,500 Borrego sport-utility vehicle showed up in the governor’s Capitol parking spot last month, a gift to the state from the South Korean car maker —- which is building a $1.2 billion plant in west Georgia.

Apparently, company executives didn’t want Perdue showing up on their doorstep in something out of Detroit.

In the midst of a high-stakes debate over whether to salvage the U.S. auto industry with an umpteen-billion-dollar federal bailout, this is a small detail, but a telling one.

In its own way, the governor’s new ride may be as meaningful as the demolition of the Ford plant in Hapeville, or the abandonment of the General Motors plant in Doraville.

For behind the philosophical back-and-forth over government intervention scheduled to begin today in the U.S. Senate is a cut-throat economic reality: The South has ambitions of becoming Detroit’s rival.

A federal dollar that artificially props up manufacturing on the northern end of I-75 is a dollar that hinders the creation of new economic models downstream, some Southern politicians maintain.

Last week, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina argued that the refusal of the federal government to bail out the Pittsburgh-based steel industry in the 1970s ultimately led to the establishment of new steel mills in the South. Which permitted the birth of a new facet of the auto industry —- highly automated, mostly nonunion, and foreign-owned.

“There wouldn’t be a BMW in South Carolina or a whole host of other auto industries scattered across the South, because we would have just kept them all in Detroit,” the Republican said.

Georgia’s Kia plant is scheduled to open next November, employing as many as 2,500 workers. The site is in U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland’s 3rd District. Westmoreland, like other House Republicans, voted against the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

He’ll vote against a Detroit rescue as well —- on the grounds that it would create a slanted field of play for the workers he’ll soon represent.

“One of the things we have constantly said is we can’t compete with some of these foreign businesses because the government has intervened in those businesses, and it makes an unfair advantage,” Westmoreland said. “What we’re doing here with the auto industry is basically the same thing.”

As have other states, Georgia laid out a boatload of incentives to land its auto plant, worth an estimated $415 million. But that’s not the same thing, the Georgia congressman said.

“I don’t think we were doing that because of bad business decisions Kia was making,” Westmoreland said. “We did that to get them in here, to create the jobs, to create the taxes, to put economic development into the area.”

Regional rivalry has its limits. Before turning one’s back on Detroit, one must consider the impact that 1.5 million more unemployed would have on an already shaky national economy.

Foreign car makers with interests in the South made up roughly 40 percent of the U.S. sales market in July, but contrary to what you might expect, they’re not interested in seeing Detroit disappear, said Bruce Belzowski, an assistant research scientist for the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.

Companies like Toyota “really don’t want to be seen as conquerors, from an image perspective,” Belzowski said.

If you’re a member of Congress, you never know what this economy might bring.

An attitude anchored too firmly in laissez-faire today might hurt Delta or Lockheed tomorrow.

Even if you’re a prospective Kia employee, you might not want to see Detroit fall. Wages are lower in Southern auto plants, but they’re still tied to wages hammered out between the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Three, according to Belzowski.

“Those people wouldn’t be making the money they’re making now if not for the UAW,” he said.

jgalloway@ajc.com