Book of the Month

The End of Detroit

How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market
By Micheline Maynard (Doubleday, NY, 2003, $14.95 hardcover).

Without a “phenomenal renaissance,” says Business School lecturer Micheline Maynard, it’s likely that at least one of the Big Three auto manufacturers “will not continue in the same form as now—neither size, in the case of GM, nor the presence of the Ford family at Ford, nor the protection of DaimlerChrysler for Chrysler, can shield them.”

Maynard has interviewed past, present and future leaders of the domestic and foreign auto industry, and her forecast is that by 2010, “barring a miraculous rebound during the next few years," Detroit’s Big Three will see their market share in America drop to about 50 percent, down from 76 percent in 1980. A sign of the times: August 2003 sales of Toyota vehicles in the US surpassed Chrysler for the first time.

What’s more, Maynard says, all the Big Three companies will continue to shrink and one could well go bankrupt. Offsetting job losses and declines in pension and health care benefits somewhat will be the rise of foreign manufacturers operating within the United States, both independently and in partnership with US firms. However, the Middle West is losing out to other regions of the country in placement of new or expanded plants, and this bodes ill for tax revenues and living standards in Michigan and the rest of the industrially challenged Rust Belt.

Maynard traces the hidebound thinking of the Big Three top executives that has led to poor product planning and, even worse, poor product quality. ”Too many American car buyers are simply fed up with vehicles that Detroit has tried to peddle to them," she says. "Millions of customers, loyal for generations, finally got tired of tinny doors, keys that didn’t fit both the door and the trunk. And instrument panels that simply looked cheap.”

The battle with the imports is almost over, Maynard reports, and her compelling array of interviews, economic statistics and colorful analyses of marketing factors explains why Detroit is losing. But her book also serves as a primer for American businesspersons in other fields and may help them avoid the driving habits that wrecked Detroit.

Maynard, who covers the auto and airline industries for the New York Times, gave Michigan Today readers a preview of her findings in this book in our Fall 2002 issue (see “The Maven of Motown,” http://www.umich.edu/news/MT/02/Fal02/motown.html).

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