This is the epic saga of the American automobile industry's rise and demise, a compelling story of hubris, denial, missed opportunities, and self-inflicted wounds that culminates with the president of the United States ushering two of Detroit's Big Three car companies—once proud symbols of prosperity—through bankruptcy. The cost to American taxpayers topped $100 billion—enough to buy every car and truck sold in America in the first half of 2009. With unprecedented access, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Ingrassia takes us from factory floors to small-town dealerships to Detroit's boardrooms to the inner sanctums of the White House. He reveals why President Barack Obama personally decided to save Chrysler when many of his advisors opposed the idea. Ingrassia provides the dramatic story behind Obama's dismissal of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner and the angry reaction from GM's board—the same people who had watched idly while the company plunged into penury.
In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves did? He also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work). Along the way we meet Detroit's frustrated reformers and witness the wrenching decisions that Ford executives had to make to avoid GM's fate.
Informed by Ingrassia's twenty-five years of experience covering the auto industry for The Wall Street Journal, and showing an appreciation for Detroit's profound influence on our country's society and culture, Crash Course is a uniquely American and deeply instructive story, one not to be missed.
Back in 1994, Paul Ingrassia wrote a book, with coauthor Joseph B. White, about the American auto industry. Its title, Comeback, pretty much says it all. Comeback was a gossipy, insidery account of Detroit’s boardroom wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s, which ended with the bad guys kicked out, a new breed of CEO taking charge, and the Big Three once again on top of the world.
What, I wondered, did the Washington Monthly think of all this back in the day? So I dug into the archives and took a look. James Bennet, who is now editor of the Atlantic but started his career at the Monthly, reviewed Comeback in 1994, and it turns out he was properly skeptical. "It is too much of a leap," Bennet wrote, "to conclude that Detroit has regained the lead, as the packaging of this book suggests, perhaps in hopes of drawing a wider readership." After all, the auto industry had looked publicly robust before, even as it was getting sicker on the inside. Was it possible that a strong yen was just hiding all the usual Detroit pathologies once again?
We all know the answer to that question now, so kudos to Bennet for getting it right fifteen years ago. But how about Ingrassia? His latest chronicle of the industry is called Crash Course, and once again the title says it all. So does Ingrassia get it right this time?
I won’t make you wait for the answer: it’s impossible to say. This time around Ingrassia takes a studiously descriptive approach to his subject, willing to forecast neither doom nor gloom nor anything in between. "Predictions are perilous," he admits at the end, and that’s about all the fortune-telling we get from him....