Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry

Ingrassia and White, Wall Street Journal reporters who shared a Pulitzer for their Detroit coverage, wrote this account of the American automobile industry from the late 1970s crisis through the early 1990s recovery.

The period covered is the one in which Detroit lost roughly a third of its market to Japanese manufacturers and then began responding. The book covers the Chrysler bailout and Iacocca's tenure, the Ford Taurus programme which was the first American product genuinely competitive on quality, the NUMMI joint venture in which General Motors learned the Toyota production system directly and largely failed to transfer the lessons to its other plants, the Saturn project, and the boardroom revolt at General Motors in 1992 that removed Robert Stempel.

Their explanation of the failure emphasises complacency built during a period of no real competition, a management culture in which finance controlled product decisions, and labour agreements accumulated over decades that made cost reduction impossible. Their account of the recovery emphasises specific product programmes and the individuals who protected them from the normal process.

The title's optimism was premature. The industry's recovery in the early 1990s was partial and both General Motors and Chrysler entered bankruptcy in 2009, which Ingrassia's later book Crash Course covers. Read this as the account of one cycle within a longer decline, written when the outcome looked better than it proved.