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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
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Adam Johnson talks about what trading vehicles can help you earn more money per trade
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
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In the end, there was only so much Lutz could do for GM after decades of soaring union costs, high gas prices, and, yes, lousy design. In 2009, the year it declared bankruptcy, General Motors’ market share fell below 20 percent—down from its peak of 51 percent in 1962. While the company’s $50 billion federal bailout didn’t enhance its popularity, Lutz still sees a silver lining in its emergence from bankruptcy. Its 2010 initial public offering, the most successful in history, is deemed a fitting capstone to a glorious career.
Lutz the writer, like Lutz the executive, remains a master salesman, and what he sells best in Car Guys is nostalgia for a bygone Detroit. In 1965, he notes, French national TV produced a fawning one-hour special on GM—which, Lutz writes, then had sales revenue that “exceeded the budget of the French Republic.” Still, design mavens and penny-pinchers alike should recall that Ford—Detroit’s real success story—somehow rode out the recession by listening to the bean counters, mortgaging its assets, and using the cash to avoid a bankruptcy filing and bailout. Ford CEO Alan Mulally is no car guy, but the former Boeing executive figured out how to run a car company. Maybe someday he, too, will write a book about it.
Leonard is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.
