(EXPANDED FROM 1/22/2021)
The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry is one of the most important automotive books of the last 50 years. That’s because Brock Yates presented what may very well be the best all-around critique of Detroit groupthink by a U.S. car-buff writer. This is also a strikingly rare example of accountability journalism within the automotive media.
Decline and Fall is a subtle example of the “new journalism” (Wikipedia, 2021). Yates did not insert himself into the story like a Hunter S. Thompson, but he displayed top-notch storytelling skills.
Yates offered the requisite bashing of government and safety advocates required of all loyal and true car-buff writers. However, he also snuck in a remarkably subversive punchline: “All the government interference could have been avoided if the industry had demonstrated some social responsibility during the 1960s. Had the leadership at General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler been less fascinated with the big-car, big-profit merry-go-round, the overreaction from Washington could have been avoided” (p. 254).
Reread those last two sentences. Now imagine that U.S. automakers had instead taken the initiative to make their entire lineup of cars more efficient and road worthy in the 1960s. Also picture automakers jointly agreeing to add basic safety features and emission controls on a voluntary basis. Do you think that might have staved off a massive wave of governmental regulation?
Yates’ book grew from a prescient magazine essay
Decline and Fall grew out of a 1968 article Yates wrote for Car and Driver magazine. In that essay, Yates (2018) coined the term “Grosse Pointe myopians” to describe complacent and insular management that was failing to respond to changing post-war consumer needs and aggressive foreign automakers. Grosse Pointe is the exclusive suburb where U.S. auto industry leaders tended to live during that era.
In his book, which was published in 1983, Yates switched to using the term “Detroit Mind” to sum up a penchant for building cars that “were too large, too heavy, too clumsy and too inefficient to meet the needs of the modern driver” (preface). He also pointed to a shift in focus from engineering to marketing and finance. That contributed to an environment of penny pinching on technological advancements, both in the cars as well as manufacturing facilities (p. 29).
As an automotive enthusiast, Yates was most concerned about the lack of roadworthiness of American cars. For example, he noted that General Motors and Ford refused to bring into the U.S. market a number of European offerings that were internationally competitive when it came to handling and braking (pp. 180-181). However, Yates also lamented Detroit’s bad taste in styling and “negligible regard for quality” (p. 233).
One blind spot in Yates’ analysis is that he did not explore the connection between the complacency of auto executives and the increasingly oligopolistic nature of the U.S. automobile industry. Nor did he explore whether more robust enforcement of antitrust regulations could have resulted in a greater number of independent passenger-car manufacturers surviving into the 1970s — and acting as a counterweight to “Detroit Mind” like they did in the early postwar years.
Yates didn’t get Ralph Nader quite right
When discussing the rise of government regulations, Yates didn’t follow the usual practice of demonizing Ralph Nader (go here for a recent example). However, Yates did suggest that Nader’s lack of interest in driving, let alone automotive engineering, resulted in an excessive focus on making vehicles that were “invulnerable: four-wheel padded cells in which witless drivers could bash into each other without fear of injury” (P. 258).
This was not a fair assessment. Nader’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed, called for better passenger protections but also criticized the original Ford Mustang as a classic example of “styling imperatives superceding engineering development” (1966, p. 166). For example, Nader quoted Road Test’s trenchant assessment that the car was a “hoked-up Falcon with inadequate brakes, poor handling, and marvelous promotion” whose engineering features were “carried over from 1910” (1966, p. 166). Isn’t this the kind of critique that Yates would normally applaud?
Also see ‘How good were the top automotive journalists of the past?‘
One of the strongest parts of the book was Yates’ documentation of how General Motors’ enormously expensive effort to downsize its cars in the 1980s resulted in a lineup that still wasn’t competitive with foreign competition. That led him to conclude that the U.S. auto industry would not bounce back without a new generation of corporate leaders who “can understand the reasons behind their failure and be made to appreciate the necessity for drastic — even revolutionary — change” (p. 291).
Yates displayed courage in offering such harsh criticism. As discussed further here, after his 1968 essay came out he was denounced by an auto executive as “worse for the industry than Ralph Nader” (preface). I wonder whether his car-buff-writing career would have been cut short if he had worked at a less iconoclastic magazine than Car and Driver. I also wonder whether he experienced enough blowback that his later writings took a more industry-friendly turn. Nevertheless, Decline and Fall is arguably Yates’ masterpiece — and still worth reading.
The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry
- Brock Yates; 1983
- Empire Books, New York, NY
“Those who suffered the most from the J-car debacle were hourly workers and lower echelon administrators who soon appeared in the unemployment statistics. Scores of General Motors plants including the J-car factory in Southgate, California, were shut down temporarily, or closed permanently, and many lost their jobs because management thousands of miles away had made a series of blunders. For the most part, it was business as usual. Business the Detroit way.” (p. 76)
“‘It’s like entering the priesthood,’ remarks another local observer. ‘They get out of college and go into the system at the zone level. From then on the Corporation takes care of everything; it sells their houses when they move, invests their incomes, provides them with new cars every few thousand miles, gets them memberships in the right clubs, and so on. They even retire together in GM colonies in the South and Southwest. You talk about a cradle-to-grave welfare state. They simply have no concept of the real world.'” (p. 80)
“Sadly, the entire episode of government regulation of the automobile industry has led to excesses on both sides. The 1970 Clean Air Act, as spearheaded by Senator Edmund Muskie, was pure government overkill, placing more stringent requirements on Detroit than the Japanese or Common Market nations did on manufacturers in their own countries, where pollution was, if anything, worse than in America. Some Washingtonians operated with insufferable arrogance. When informed that massive investment in the research and development of emissions equipment might drive faltering American Motors out of business, Senator Muskie observed, ‘So be it.'” (pp. 260-261)
OTHER REVIEWS:
The New York Times | Commentary Magazine | Amazon
RE:SOURCES
- Nader, Ralph; 1966. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.
- Wikipedia; 2021. “New journalism.” Last modified Jan. 10; accessed Jan. 21.
- Yates, Brock; 2018. “The Grosse Pointe Myopians.” Car and Driver. Posted May 2.
This review originally posted December 1, 2019, expanded on January 22, 2021 and June 17, 2025.
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