Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster by Paul Ingrassia, Narrated by Patrick Lawlor (Read via Audible.com)


What a sobering view of the giant industry. This book give a good account of making automobiles throughout history in the USA. It mainly focuses on the big three. What I found that was total flabbergasted me, was the amount of time that all three management teams had to change their fate before their collapse in 07-08. They found cash cows with SUV’s, but did spend any decent abomut time to innovate the rest of their product line. I think of the EV program in the early 90’s that GM did. All the development that went nowhere.

On top of that was the whole UAW thing. Just how Enron took business too far, the UAW took unions way to far. To the point where they were paying people to do nothing everyday. Admittedly I have a severely limited perspective on the entire operations of that group, but from a casual outsider, both management and the union were at fault. They both worked themselves into such absurd long winded terms, I would not be surprised if there was a clause for smoking on the assembly line. Oh wait, there was. For a very long time.

A great piece about the auto industry.

8/10