The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry
YATES, BROCK
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY Brock Yates / Empire Books (dist. by Harper & Row) / $13.95 David E. Davis, Jr. Brock Yates has written a book that is flawed in detail,...
...Detroit, meanwhile, tries to nourish itself with the largest remaining chunk of that original market-monolith, but the surviving segment is old, sullen, and confused...
...He cites as Exhibit A the General Motors J-cars, which came to market overpriced and underpowered in the spring of 1981...
...Yates should not be so demanding of a group of typical American executives forced to save a business quite different from the one they were trained to run...
...These are not adjectives to gladden a marketing manager's heart...
...Yates is not entirely to blame for this glaring weakness...
...Solomon would find the solutions to a domestic automobile company's problems beyond his grasp these days...
...Japanese managers are building their products and mailing them off to markets that are light-years removed from their own daily experience and automotive heritage...
...One suspects that it was this aspect of the book that got it enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times and the Village Voice...
...Stuttgart is Flint, Michigan with red-tile roofs, and Munich, jewel that it is, is still locked away in provincial Bavaria...
...In this, General Motors is no worse off than Daimler-Benz or BMW...
...Exhibit B is his negative impression of the kind of lives led by automotive executives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, marrying the two in a scathing indictment of the entire domestic industry...
...This is not surprising, because Yates is a writer, not a reporter...
...The senior executives of Detroit grew up and made their bones in a monolithic industry serving a monolithic market...
...This was a 4000-pound vehicle with a V-8 engine in the front, driving the rear wheels through a three-speed automatic transmission...
...In this case, they read it, stumble over a couple of dozen easily checked errors before they reach the end of the second chapter, and dismiss the whole thing as the work of an underinformed dilettante...
...It is apparent throughout that the publisher slapped the book together with an absolute minimum of fact-checking, proofreading, or any of the other niceties that are supposed to attend getting books out in the major leagues...
...It was the envy of the entire world-Eastern, Western, Third, and uncharted...
...He uses the language with an easy grace that you cannot get from journalism school...
...Europe, especially, is selling us cars it has been rehearsing fifty years to build...
...Is it possible that what we're seeing is not the decline and fall of the American automobile industry, but the decline and fall of the traditional American automobile constituency and Detroit's inability to analyze and deal with the separate components of that ongoing collapse...
...A. here is another problem...
...Brock Yates has written a book that is flawed in detail, easily nitpicked, yet devastatingly accurate in its overall effect...
...One wonders how one of Mr...
...Yates suggests that American car companies are failing because they're run by bean-counters, not red-blooded car enthusiasts or worldly philosopher-kings...
...Best known for his pioneering work in the effects of alcohol on female sexuality, Davis is widely regarded as incredibly youthful in appearance and an all-around great human being...
...This doesn't make them bad people...
...He takes his subjects on the fly, relying on memory and the casual power of his prose, rather than dogged research and a stern interviewing technique, to communicate his impressions and conclusions to readers whom he treats as pals...
...Japan re-packages what Europe pioneers...
...Nowhere in the book does he really come to grips with this critically important flaw in his disposi-tions-for-attack...
...Yates's argument really comes a cropper when we look at car-biz in Japan, an industry run by short guys in electric-blue rayon gabardine suits...
...It has become a dozen, maybe a hundred different automobile businesses...
...It is worth noting that most of the American subsidiaries of imported car companies are managed by guys who ten or fifteen years ago weren't making it with Detroit's giants...
...Unfortunately, right as he is in general terms, the book's errors tend to undermine Yates's case...
...One would hope in writing such a book that the target-Babbitts would read it, see its wisdom, and immediately set about correcting all the things they've been doing wrong...
...The Europeans and Japanese are doing very well on the various profitable splinters that best suit their special industrial ethos and the needs of their respective trade ministries...
...car business except the people who build their cars here...
...Why then is it that everybody seems to make it big in the U.S...
...True, they hire very good people to tell them what it's like over here, and they are good listeners, almost to a fault, but they nonetheless come to the party without any of the aujgrnotive derring-do Yates seems to think is requisite for success...
...Nor are there any run by urbane, witty fashion leaders...
...Yates's admired Japanese or European managers might fare if he were suddenly put into the position of a Roger Smith or a Philip Caldwell...
...This will be especially true with his main targets, the executives themselves...
...For good reason: it was the best transportation value available anywhere under the sun...
...The truth is that there aren't any car companies run by car enthusiasts...
...Most of the people in the United States wanted what had become known as the "standard American car...
...All they know about the markets they've set out to conquer is what they've been told...
...Unfortunately, the market-monolith disintegrated, and the Detroit-monolith was slow to spot the signs and portents of that fundamental shift in the very nature of the business...
...Car companies run by car enthusiasts are usually the first to fail...
...is editor/publisher of Car and Driver magazine and Brock Yates's long-lost older brother...
...Unlike 98 percent of the people writing for a living today, Yates really has the gift...
...This is not a new approach, but Yates does it well and it's fun to read...
...The business is now fragmented...
...His basic thesis is that the American automobile industry is in trouble because the people who run it are narrow Midwestern traditionalists, unwilling or unable to drag their companies into the highly competitive marketplace of the eighties...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
