This classic either tells, or foretells, every significant event in the U.S. auto industry since 1965. When small cars first appeared on American roads, Mr. Yates wrote, Detroit's moguls dismissed them as affectations of weirdos, pinkos and cheapos. Instead, Americans were becoming fascinated with new technology in all sorts of products. In cars this meant high-revving engines, floor-mounted stick shifts and road-hugging suspensions--the antithesis of Detroit's bloated land yachts. The chapter titled "The Detroit Mind" cites the "witless isolation from the cultural mainstream" that has cost General Motors, Ford and Chrysler dearly.
Before John Z. DeLorean was indicted for drug dealing, he indicted General Motors. GM's "token hippie" portrayed the company's executive suite as rife with back-biting, butt-kissing and boorish behavior. DeLorean's post-GM effort to build an "ethical sports car" collapsed. After winning acquittal of the drug charges, he spent his final years dodging creditors. But before self-destructing, he was a terrific executive (launching the muscle-car era with the Pontiac GTO), and his tales of GM's dysfunction were both rich and prophetic.
Henry Ford invented mass production, but General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan invented mass marketing and rolled right past Ford. Sloan, who led GM from the 1920s to the 1950s, left no private papers. But David Farber's research reconstructs his achievements and failures alike--the most notable failure being an inability to see beyond GM's narrow institutional interest: Sloan stoutly resisted turning GM's factories over to weapons production during World War II. Sloan "was not much ruled by a moral vision or a sense of compassion for others," Mr. Farber writes, but his work brought prosperity to millions.
If revenge is best served cold, Lee Iacocca presented a gourmet feast in his 1984 best-selling autobiography. Henry Ford II, who fired Mr. Iacocca from Ford's presidency in 1978, is portrayed as a spoiled, scheming scion who boasted that his favorite food in the executive dining room was hamburger--when everyone else knew his chef was using ground prime steak. Mr. Iacocca's later resurrection as the leader of Chrysler's miraculous early 1980s comeback is one of the great business stories in history. His first-person telling of that story, along with his television commercials that are now being reprised, made him America's first celebrity CEO.
The California custom--er, kustom--car culture of the 1950s and 1960s and the rise of stock-car racing in the South (modern-day Nascar) come alive in this collection of essays. This isn't strictly a car book but instead a description of the post--World War II rise of popular culture--and the hallowed place of automobiles within its various strains. Thus we meet Southern stock-car legend Junior Johnson and California custom-car guru Ed Roth, among others. "Cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe's great formal century, say, 1750 to 1850," writes Mr. Wolfe. "They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color--everything is right there."
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