Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster Book

Basically the story of how the US "big three" automakers came to grief in 2008/9, with GM and Chrysler winding up in bankruptcy and Ford narrowly averting this fate. There's a fairly extensive "backstory" going back to the time of Henry Ford to explain how the Big Three developed the corporate culture that would eventually bring them down, but the main emphasis is on the decisions starting in the 1990's that led the Big Three to rely pretty much exclusively on the profits from pickups and SUV's, while they lost money on regular cars. This situation was barely tolerable when the price of gasoline was low, but led to catastrophic failure when the price rose finally.

The main problem according to the author was complacency in management, ridiculous demands from the UAW (like the "Jobs Bank" that paid employees without work to do to be paid 95% of their previous salary), and the refusal of management to confront the glaring problems. The book is written by a journalist, and this definitely shows. The story tends to be presented via the main personalities (the CEO's of the various companies and the head of the UAW) and a few minor ones (the owner of a car dealership in ME and a worker in IL), and there's not so much in the way of abstract analysis. The language that it's written also has the "breezy" feel of the automotive section of a newspaper rather than the formal prose of an academic work.

The book is surprisingly thin on the mechanics of the actual "bailout" process under the Obama administration, and it's clearly not written from a political perspective. That is, there isn't much analysis of why exactly the decisions that were taken (e.g., to "save" both GM and Chrysler rather than let them go through the regular bankruptcy process) were taken. The account is generally favorable to the administration's decisions, though without being too partisan about it. However, the justification for screwing over GM's bondholders is specious.

On the whole, an "easy" read, but not very deep.