Ed Cray’s ‘Chrome Colossus’ offers a masterful history of General Motors

August 25, 2025 Steve Readings 2
GM history

(EXPANDED FROM 1/2/2021)

Ed Cray’s history of General Motors is one of the better automotive books in my library. A big reason why is that Chrome Colossus: General Motors and its Times eschewed the usual car-buff focus on product minutiae and instead focused on how GM’s growth interacted with its political power.

The main downside of Chrome Colossus is that Cray got wrong some factual details that an editor with background in the auto industry would have caught.

Topics Cray delved into included building the interstate highway system, fending off antitrust actions and attempting to stymie regulations. He also did an excellent job of explaining GM’s complex internal politics.

A book like this arguably could not have been written by a professional car-buff writer because it strays too far from Detroit groupthink. Cray was a journalism professor at the University of Southern California. He wrote a variety of books, including biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and the musician Woodie Guthrie (Roberts, 2019).

General Motors history 1959 Cadillac
Cray rightly criticized William Mitchell for championing tail fins that “grew in both nonfunctional size and lethal potential” (p. 375). However, he was off by four years when stating that Mitchell took over GM design in 1954 (Old Car Brochures).

Chrome Colossus is a critical but not an ‘activist’ book

Chrome Colossus does not have the hard-charging rhetoric of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed (1966). Even so, Cray’s narrative is grounded in accountability journalism. He tells a damning story about GM’s championing of planned obsolescence and opposition to regulations as well as its slowness in responding to a rising tide of imported cars.

For example, Cray described how in the 1950s GM emphasized annual styling changes because its president, Harlow Curtis argued that it “has been the most important single factor responsible for the growth and vitality of our industry” (p. 375).

General Motors history Corvair
As late as 1957 GM executives resisted coming out with a compact car partly because they thought the market could be small enough that an entry would hurt the independents — and spark antitrust action (p. 403) (Old Car Brochures).

Cray’s facts are sometimes off. He stated that 1954 Cadillac sales “jumped 25 percent” after its cars were given “Dagmar” bumper guards. They may have “offered no protection to the bumper and were themselves costly to replace,” but Cadillacs first sprouted them in 1951 — and output went up only 6 percent (p. 375).

I have found Cray’s discussion of antitrust policies to be particularly useful. He paid close attention to congressional hearings in the 1950s that assessed whether GM had become too big. American Motors’ head George Romney presciently testified that the oligopolistic structure of the U.S. auto industry was stifling its ability to respond to changes in consumer needs (p. 379). Go here for further discussion.

General Motors history 1970 Chevrolet
Cray argued that under Mitchell’s design leadership the average GM “standard-sized” car “ballooned a foot and a half in length and gained one-half ton in weight” (p. 375). His numbers are off but his basic point is well taken (Old Car Brochures).

Cray cut GM slack in championing auto dependency

Cray rightly criticized GM for not shifting quickly enough with the market toward smaller, more economical cars that eschewed the “merchandising laws of Sloanism — trading up and planned obsolescence” (p. 530).

Even so, he also gave management a get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to the energy crises of the 1970s. Cray concluded, “No corporate executive in the days of twenty-cent gasoline could have imagined the costly energy dependence that General Motors’ large cars would foster. No executive, no soothsayer anywhere, could have foretold the dire effects of America’s wholehearted reliance on the automobile as personal transportation. In the opulent years, it had all seemed so appropriate for the richest nation in the world” (p. 531).

This argument may partly reflect the “on the other hand. . .” quality of American journalism. However, his conclusion doesn’t acknowledge that opposition to an auto-centric transportation system first gained momentum in the 1960s (e.g., Cathcart-Keays and Warin, 2016).

Cray also sounded naive in light of recent revelations that GM and Ford researchers knew about climate change back in the 1960s (Joselow, 2020; go here for our take). Of course, Chrome Colossus was published in 1980, well before climate change received much attention.

1970 Toyota Corolla
Cray argued that GM marketeers “erred badly” by not taking into account the rise of households headed by women, who were less interested in big cars and had weaker loyalty to domestic brands (Automotive History Preservation Society).

Kirkus Review offered sharp but vague critique

A Kirkus Review panned Chrome Colossus, calling it a “mundane, plodding affair, with little new information to impart and nothing (fresh or otherwise) to say” (1980). The review did not back up the critique with much evidence besides calling the book inferior to Bernard Weisberger’s Dream Maker (1979). However, the conclusion declared that Chrome Colossus “falls below the Fortune standard of fluent, informed business journalism.”

I imagine that Cray would have found that to be a compliment. If Alex Taylor III’s (2012) glowing review of American Icon: Alan Mulally and the fight to save Ford Motor Company is any indication, Fortune would seem to favor fawning tributes to auto executives (see my take on American Icon here).

Cray died in 2019 (Roberts, 2019). If he were still alive I would imagine that he would find major chunks of his analysis dated. I don’t laud this book because it gets everything right, but because it can help one think about GM in deeper ways than car-buff books.

Chrome Colossus: General Motors and its Times

  • Ed Cray; 1980
  • McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, NY

“Events moved quickly in the presidential election year of 1916. Durant, the uncontested majority stockholder, was elected president in Nash’s stead. One by one, the bankers followed Nash from the board room and were replaced by the heads of the motorcar companies, including Henry Leland and Walter Chrysler. Chrysler’s decision to stay on came as a last Durant-inspired slap to Nash and Storrow, who had expected the one-time Kansas farm boy to join them in a new automobile venture.” (p. 146)

“The committee considered no alternatives to a massive highway system; it had not intended to. In the two years before the committee’s recommendations were adopted as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways — in the Cold War era, ‘defense’ was a righteous mantle which special interests sought to cloak themselves — no one weighed the merits of mass transit or rehabilitated railroads. The emphasis and concern were solely upon the automobile and truck.” (p. 358)

“‘Unlike Ford, GM have (sic) always controlled Vauxhall’s product policy very tightly from Detroit,’ British automotive writer Graham Bannock observed, ‘even to the extent of forcing Vauxhall to follow the American styling trends of the ‘fat fifties.’ They were spectacularly out of place in Britain at the time and were probably responsible for Vauxhall’s unhappy ‘tin-can’ image.” (pp. 518-519)

OTHER REVIEWS:

Kirkus Review | Amazon | Goodreads

NOTES:

This review was originally posted on March 31, 2013 and expanded on Jan. 2, 2021 and Aug. 25, 2025. Production figures and specifications were calculated from data provided by the auto editors of Consumer Guide (2006). 

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2 Comments

  1. For Motor Trend I wrote an article that proposed why and how GM should be broken up. This was at the height of its domination. You may wish to find it and add it to your excellent resources. Might even be worth a mention.

    Reply

    • Karl, I have briefly discussed your Motor Trend article here, although you may disagree with my take.

      BTW, Motor Trend has apparently stopped making available its archives of past issues, so your piece can no longer be found at the link provided. I don’t know why this happened; is it because Hagerty stopped sponsoring the service? Or because of a change in Motor Trend’s management? Whatever the reason, it’s a big hit to the study of American automotive history — and yet another illustration of the tenuousness of electronic sources of information.

      Reply

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