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An in-depth, hard-hitting account of the mistakes, miscalculations and myopia that have doomed America?s automobile industry.
Currency
September 2004
368 pages
ISBN: 0385507704
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
In the 1990s, Detroit’s Big Three automobile companies were
riding high. The introduction of the minivan and the SUV
had revitalized the industry, and it was widely believed
that Detroit had miraculously overcome the threat of
foreign imports and regained its ascendant position. As
Micheline Maynard makes brilliantly clear in THE END OF
DETROIT, however, the traditional American car industry
was, in fact, headed for disaster. Maynard argues that by
focusing on high-profit trucks and SUVs, the Big Three
missed a golden opportunity to win back the American car-
buyer. Foreign companies like Toyota and Honda solidified
their dominance in family and economy cars, gained market
share in high-margin luxury cars, and, in an ironic twist,
soon stormed in with their own sophisticatedly engineered
and marketed SUVs, pickups and minivans. Detroit, suffering
from a “good enough” syndrome and wedded to ineffective
marketing gimmicks like rebates and zero-percent financing,
failed to give consumers what they really wanted—
reliability, the latest technology and good design at a
reasonable cost. Drawing on a wide range of interviews with
industry leaders, including Toyota’s Fujio Cho, Nissan’s
Carlos Ghosn, Chrysler’s Dieter Zetsche, BMW’s Helmut
Panke, and GM’s Robert Lutz, as well as car designers,
engineers, test drivers and owners, Maynard presents a
stark picture of the culture of arrogance and insularity
that led American car manufacturers astray. Maynard
predicts that, by the end of the decade, one of the
American car makers will no longer exist in its present
form.
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