The End of Detroit

An in-depth hard-hitting account of the mistakes miscalculations and myopia that have doomed America’s automobile industry.. 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.