Comeback

About this book

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a few years ago it seemed inconceivable, even to insiders, that Detroit could recover, with its bloated management, outdated products, wasteful methods, and careless quality.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. This is a story of upheaval, renewal, fierce competition, and triumph, which begins in 1982, when Honda started to build cars in Marysville, Ohio, and the entire U.S. car industry seemed to be on the brink of extinction, and ends just over a decade later with a remarkable role reversal, as the Japanese car industry falters and America's Big Three emerge as winners on a global scale. Along the way, Ingrassia and White tell scores of fascinating stories - of Steve Bera, who was sent by GM to learn the secret of Japanese productivity ("No problem is problem"); of GM's Roger Smith, who changed General Motors, but in all the wrong ways; of the rise of Bob Lutz, Chrysler's preeminent "car guy," and the fall of Don Petersen, who, like many previous Ford executives, forgot whose name was on the building; and of the rise and fall of Bob Stempel. They tell of men like Tom LaSorda, who learned how to beat the Japanese at their own game; Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua, who tried to transform GM's bureaucrats into "warriors" in the "Third Industrial Revolution" and achieved fame as "Superlopez," until his career foundered in rumors of industrial espionage and treachery; Bob Marcell, whose struggle to build a whole new kind of car at Chrysler ended in triumph; and John Coletti and Will Boddie, who brought in Ford's new Mustang in record-breaking time....