Unlike that film, which focused on working-class suffering resulting from corporate misconduct, this book s focus is on the executives suites. The headquarters office stories in Comeback are both tragic and comical. We learn how Bob Stempel feared to build a leaner, meaner GM, and how the company s board of directors sent him packing. We read of Lee Iacocca s apparent amazement at the existence of self-service filling stations, developed during the decades others tended to his gas tank at Ford and Chrysler. The final third of the book suggests that U.S. auto makers learned some lessons from their Japanese competitors.
Quality is a much higher priority in today s Detroit, as are fuel efficiency and innovative design.
Recently, the Japanese auto makers have been hobbled by a high-priced yen, which boosts the price of imports in the United States, and by complacency caused by their own past successes. The authors suggest the Japanese companies might have learned some lessons, though not entirely good ones, from U.S. firms. The two authors, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters for The Wall Street Journal , provide a careful view of Detroit management. But they don t write all that much about other important parts of the automaking story, particularly unions, the environment and the continuing battle over building safer vehicles. Safer vehicles are an important issue to many of the people who actually buy cars and trucks, but they seem an afterthought to executives in this industry, who dragged their feet in adopting basic technologies like seatbelts, and later airbags.