Comeback : the fall and rise of the American automobile industry

Authors:Paul Ingrassia, Joseph B. White

Summary:"This is the biggest story of the eighties and nineties, brought to life with the narrative drive of the best fiction and the kind of brilliant reporting that made books like Barbarians at the Gate and Indecent Exposure major bestsellers: the collapse and astonishing comeback of America's automobile industry." "Detroit's vulnerability was dramatized during the Iranian oil embargo in 1979, when American car buyers began rejecting America's gas-thirsty models for Japan's cheap, efficient four-cylinder engines. By the mid-1980s, when the Big Three tried to produce smaller cars and couldn't match Japan in price or quality, the crisis was full-blown. Barely a few years ago it seemed inconceivable, even to insiders, that Detroit could recover, with its bloated management, outdated products, wasteful methods, and careless quality." "Pulitzer Prize-winners Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White take us into the boardrooms, the executive offices, and the shop floors of the auto business to reconstruct, in riveting detail, how America's premier industry stumbled, fell, and picked itself up again. Bigger-than-life characters - Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford II, Don Petersen, Roger Smith, Bob Lutz, among many others - leap off the pages. It is a story propelled by greed, by stubborn pride, and by sheer refusal to face facts, but it is also one full of dedicated, unlikely heroes who struggled to make the Big Three change before it was too late, and triumphantly succeeded." "Here is the truth about Chrysler's remarkable recovery - a real business miracle; about the boardroom coup that revolutionized GM, the industry's ailing giant; about the way in which a small group of middle managers, intent on saving the Mustang, ended up reinventing Ford."