It is fashionable and easy to bash Detroit’s car companies, lazily painting them with the broad brush of incompetence and insularity, then concluding that Ford Motor, General Motors and the former Chrysler Group — now part of the world’s 4th-largest automaker, FCA — are pitiable industrial relics, soon to be overwhelmed by the great geniuses and innovators of Silicon Valley – the Teslas, Googles and Apples of the world.

The facts, however, point to a Detroit-based cluster of resurgent car companies, all highly profitable and all attacking the automotive market with new products and services grounded in new ways of doing business. Detroit’s car companies are nothing like they were in the pre-financial crisis era before 2009.

The Chevrolet Volt will arrive as an affordable, long-range electric vehicles — and a potential Tesla killer.

The reality is that the bankrupt City of Detroit is not a metaphor for its automotive industry. Detroit may be, literally, a ward of the state, but Ford, GM and FCA are thriving, growing and most important of all profiting in the largest, most competitive, most challenging and most heavily regulated industry in the world.

This is the truth missed by The Globe and Mail’s Globe Drive writer Peter Cheney. In a pre-Detroit auto show screed headlined The rise and fall of Detroit as the driving force in the car world, Cheney asks, “does Detroit still matter.” This was a good and relevant question to ask in 2010, at a time when both GM and Chrysler were clawing their way out of bankruptcy with U.S. and Canadian government assistance, and Ford raced to restructure on $23 billion (U.S.) borrowed on Wall Street.

But the question is ludicrous in 2016. It reflects an anti-Detroit bias that is tiresome, ill-informed and commonplace. Detroit’s car companies no longer produce Pintos that explode and Vegas that implode. Yes, GM birthed and then buried an early electric vehicle concept called the EV-1 – which starred in Who Killed the Electric Car – and that certainly was a disastrous mistake. But GM’s EV-1 blunders happened two decades, a bankruptcy and at least six CEOs ago. To drag out the EV-1 now is to suggest GM has not learned from its past and that misreads the facts. And to lump GM, Ford and FCA together as failed, old-style industrial relics is simply wrong.

For proof in GM’s case, look no further than this week’s unveiling of the Chevrolet Bolt electric car — with a range of about 321 km or 200 miles, nicely equipped for less than $40,000 (U.S.) before taxpayer incentives. Here we have the first pure electric car with long-range capabilities, a handsome city runabout that will be available through GM’s worldwide distribution network, backed by a factory warranty from a car company that is both profitable and credible in its claims to Wall Street and Main Street.

The Bolt, in short – and I am not alone in saying this — looks like a Tesla killer. Pam Fletcher, the chief of GM’s electrification programs, won’t come out and say so directly, but in conversation that’s what she implies. The Bolt, she says, is a real car that GM will build and sell, not the promise of something amazing – like the still mysterious Tesla Model 3.

GM’s claims for the Bolt are not grounded in fantasy or part of a stock play that allows its CEO to take out a $400 million personal line of credit with one of its underwriters (as is the case with Tesla CEO Elon Musk). GM has revamped its manufacturing and product development activities and now is mass producing some of the highest quality cars in the world (GM’s Chevrolet brand is ranked higher than Toyota in the latest J.D. Power Initial Quality Study).

The Chevy Bolt’s cockpit.

Tesla, one of the Silicon Valley darlings, is not a mass producer, has no experience as such, and in the most recent Consumer Reports auto issue, Tesla’s quality has come under fire. GM, unlike Tesla, makes billions selling 10 million cars a year. Tesla sold just over 50,000 cars last year and lost $19,810 (U.S.) per car at an average selling price of about $100,000 (U.S.).

Some great and wonderful ideas are coming out of Silicon Valley and all the world’s automakers have a presence there, including GM. But Silicon Valley types have no experience or understanding of how to produce a mass-market car in political environments that demand local job creation and regulatory perfection. Apple, for instance, farms out its manufacturing to low-cost and essentially unregulated plants in China. GM, Ford and FCA build vehicles in hundreds of factories around the globe, each one important to the local economy and all of them the antithesis of a sweat shop.

The Bolt and all GM’s other EV vehicles are engineered, designed and built in the Detroit area. Cheney, like too many others, suggests, however, that the “(auto) industry’s intellectual axis” has shifted away from Detroit to where “the cutting-edge is in Silicon Valley, Calif. (sic), where Google, and Apple are focusing on a world where cars drive themselves and sales are no longer driven by social status and consumer aspiration.”

GM CEO Mary Barra, a company lifer but no relic from the past.

Of course there are all sorts of good ideas and initiative bubbling up in Silicon Valley, but Ford applied for 5,872 patents in 2015 – a record and an increase of 36 per cent over 2014. No Silicon Valley company came close to filing such a huge number of patents. Electrified vehicles? Ford applied for 400 patents in this area alone last year. By 2020, Ford will have invested another $4.5 billion (US) in electrification, adds the automaker.

Ford, like its Detroit rivals, has very active research programs working on driverless cars and electrified vehicles, along with more conventional technologies designed to improve fuel efficiency, safety and connectivity. Essentially all this creative work is being done in the Detroit area.

Yet too many ill-informed commentators, and quite honestly the broad marketplace as a whole, view Detroit as a tired old company from a dying town, Detroit. The facts show otherwise.

Ford took a big risk with its aluminum-bodied F-150 pickup.

Indeed, Ford’s aluminum F-Series pickup is triumph of innovation and creative engineering on many fronts, not least of which is manufacturing. One of the main plants building the F-Series is in Dearborn, Mich., the Detroit suburb where Ford has its headquarters. This is not a coincidence; Ford wants its best plants building its most important product and one of them in the Detroit area.

Some may dismiss the aluminum F-Series as something less than “game-changing technology,” but that would be wrong. The F-Series is the crown jewel of Ford, it’s most profitable model by far. Ford took a great risk in converting its large pickup with its massive towing capabilities to lighter weight aluminum, a material that is tricky and expensive to use in vehicles. Sure, Land Rover and others have been using aluminum bodies for many years. But all of them are low-volume, high-cost producers.

The F-Series, on the other hand, is a high-volume model that must be produced at costs competitive to steel-bodied rivals. It is sold to loyal but demanding customers who expect 20 years of relatively trouble-free service from their pickups. Ford had to reinvent its design, engineering and manufacturing processes to build a mass-market F-Series, its cornerstone vehicle. A mistake here would have wrecked the company. Calling the aluminum F-Series an “incremental change to a legacy product” reflects a deep lack of understanding and appreciation of the complexity of building, selling, servicing and supporting an aluminum pickup.

Most important of all, however, are the dramatic, deep and sweeping changes that have been made within Detroit’s car companies.

Ford is accelerating testing of its Fusion Hybrid Research Vehicle as the first automaker to test a fully autonomous vehicle at Mcity, the world’s first full-scale simulated urban environment at University of Michigan.

Let’s start with the facts about GM. Since emerging from bankruptcy, the world’s third-largest car company has focused on product quality and innovation, stable management and sustainable growth. GM is intent on capital returns and strong margins, not market share gains. GM’s five brands, Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Opel, and Cadillac are all growing, but carefully and profitably.

A key pillar, of course, is dependability. In the latest three-year J.D. Power Vehicle Dependability Study rankings, GM is essentially the equal of the very best historically in this study – Toyota and Honda. Buick is ranked No. 7 in Consumer Reports listing of top brands and the Regal is the sop sports sedan. The Chevy Impala is the best large car, as well.

GM CEO Mary Barra may be a company lifer who worked her way to the top through various engineering and management assignments, but she’s anything but “old” GM. She steered GM through its ignition switch recall crisis and now those costs – to GM’s image and bottom line – have largely been absorbed.

Thus, GM says it will have earning per share of $5-$5.50 (U.S.) in 2016 and double-digit EPS growth for several years. And Barra represents new GM in another way: her rise to CEO and now board chair was smooth and seamless, not the outcome of outside events or internal power struggles. She took over from Dan Akerson in an orderly way.

The same holds true at Ford. Former CEO Alan Mulally came on board in 2006, recruited by executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. and up to the point of his leaving last year, led a complete turnaround at Ford. Current CEO Mark Fields was part of the team that created the business plan for the reinvented Ford. His ascent to the corner suite was, again, seamless and smooth.

The rest of the Ford turnaround team, including Joe Hinrichs who is in charge of the Americas, Steve Odell, head of global marketing, and Jim Farley, the boss in Europe, by all accounts have worked together without infighting since almost the first day Mulally arrived and continue to do so now he is gone.

Those who know Ford’s history of executive backstabbing and bickering see this as a triumph of corporate culture change. It should not be overlooked that it was a Ford, Bill Ford, who enticed a somewhat reluctant Mulally to come to Ford from Boeing. Apparently there are good ideas about corporate governance to be found in Detroit, too.

Ford is immensely profitable and has been for years now. And anything but complacent. CEO Mark Fields says Ford sees Google, Uber, Apple and their ilk as emerging competitors. He admires them, is inspired by them, worries about them, and wants to invest his own company with a Silicon Valley-like culture.

“So, we’re really pushing ourselves to think, to act and disrupt like a startup company,” he told analysts during a recent conference call. One based in the Detroit area, not California.

As for FCA, it’s a miracle this company exists at all. Back in 2006, many believed the former Chrysler Group should be broken up, its valuable pieces sold to other automakers. Today, one of those valuable pieces is Jeep, which now sells more than 1 million vehicles around the world and is growing. FCA just spun off its Ferrari brand to raise about $10 billion to development new models and technologies. FCA, which really has two headquarters, one in Europe the other in the Auburn Hills, Mich. suburb of Detroit, is a company with a very global vision. A withering Detroit relic? It’s a joke even to suggest such a thing.

FCA is a lean, aggressive company, whose CEO, Canadian-trained Sergio Marchionne, is a ferocious, relentless and impatient boss and competitor. He has led FCA to a place where effectiveness and efficiency are paramount. This is not a stodgy company.

So to argue that Detroit’s car companies are relics, that all the great automotive innovation has shifted to Silicon Valley, is at best myopic at worst ignorant. The facts show that Detroit’s car companies are healthy, profitable, innovative, and formidable.

They’ve also been humbled in the last decade. That humility, combined with drive and determination, is a powerful force and one that Silicon Valley’s many geniuses and stock promoters should not underestimate.