How to build a car
Four books show you how
They contain all of the elements of a good thriller novel, from a
huge cast of characters to emotional tension, lots of machinery and
enough plot twists to drive even Tom Clancy crazy. The difference?
They're non-fiction, and they're about the automotive industry.
I really shouldn't have been as surprised as I was by Brock Yates'
The Critical Path: Inventing an Automobile and Reinventing a
Corporation, James Schefter's All Corvettes Are Red, Michael
Shnayerson's The Car that Could and Mary Walton's Car: A Drama of the
American Workplace. After all, bringing a car to production is a
blood-sweat and-tears effort that involves thousands of people, all
with their own agendas and departments and budgets to protect.
What does come as a surprise is the access that each of the
reporters were given to the innards of the corporations that they
surveyed. Yates spent two years reporting on Chrysler, and was even
present at top-level management meetings during the development of
its current minivan. Schefter spent more than five years away from
his family, immersed in GM's styling studios, boardrooms and test
tracks. Walton spent months at a time in the basement that was the
headquarters for the Taurus platform group. Shnayerson enjoyed
similar access during the development of the EV1.
Each of the books are excellent, providing a lot more insight than
the PR pap that's typical of the genre. There aren't any glossy color
photographs of cars driving off into the sunset here (photos,
black-and-white are mostly of people, not cars). Instead, we're
bathed in the glow of fluorescent lights in boardrooms, of the sunset
seen through the frozen-over windshield of a car doing cold-weather
testing up north, drivers' teeth chattering because the heater's
broken again. Everything from the highest-level management meeting to
the petty arguments in the styling studios over which side view
mirror to use are documented in explicit, sometimes painful, detail.
They end up reading like the proverbial thriller novel, too,
something almost inevitable with the huge casts involved in the
development of all of the cars, with the amount of money invested in
each program (even the C5 Corvette, with its limited production, ran
well over $250 million.) Tragedy and humor are present at many a
turn; we're there as Corvette engineer Tom Krejcar dies, and also
when Jackie Stewart thumps the Taurus' gas cap against the side of
the car, repeatedly calling it "a piece of crap." All of the books
are also long enough to allow the depth that's so missing from other
car books too; they all run at least 250 pages.
Ironically, the how-to-build-a-car genre is probably on its last
legs. Because of how good each of the books has been, they've at
times angered the executives who allowed them to be written in the
first place. While Yates and Shnayerson both portray the corporations
and programs they examine as forward-looking and innovative, and
Schefter's judgement (despite all of the infighting and poor
management he points out) remains relatively positive, Walton is
openly critical of Ford's management and marketing arms, and makes a
point of mentioning how they tried to have the book suppressed.
Thankfully, they had no such luck. Of all of the four, Car is
perhaps the most successful. It's the most objectively written, and
its coverage doesn't stop at the point that the car starts rolling
off the line. Instead, she follows the Taurus into showrooms, where
we're educated about car-salesman jargon, and into J. Walter
Thompson, Ford's ad agency, where months are spent perfecting the
car's jingle. Because it's written by an outsider to the
industry&emdash;Walton's a business reporter with the Philadelphia
Inquirer&emdash;it pulls fewer punches and isn't afraid to be harshly
critical when need be.
It's a shame that Car is what will probably be the last book of
this genre; all four of the books are great fun for the automotive
enthusiast, and a great relief from the
heavy-on-pictures-short-on-insight type of books that we're used to
reading. Snap up all four while you can.