Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
By Paul Ingrassia
Random House; 320 pages
Can failure save Detroit? That's one of the fundamental questions Paul Ingrassia, a Pulitzer Prize--winning former Detroit bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, explores in his treatise on U.S. carmakers' rise, fall and hoped-for resurrection. It was quite a fall. Throughout much of the 20th century, companies like Ford helped build the American middle class. For part of the 1990s, Detroit trounced its Japanese rivals in the SUV business. But then U.S. automakers, essentially, got lazy. Their war with the auto unions didn't help. Nor did the rise of the likes of Toyota. By the autumn of 2008, the Big Three CEOs had rushed to Washington to beg for a bailout. Detroit's arrogant insularity had left it with crushing debt, slipping standards and lots full of cars nobody wanted. The Big Three's days may be numbered. Ingrassia foresees a future in which five or six smaller companies split their share of the U.S. market, with 10% or 20% for each. The ultimate question facing the new leaders is whether they will learn from their predecessors' mistakes.
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