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An award-winning business reporter with more than fifteen years of experience specializing in the automotive industry, Bill Vlasic is currently the Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times. The coauthor of Taken for a Ride, Vlasic is a winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for excellence in financial journalism and has been recognized for his reporting and investigative journalism by the Associated Press and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

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Once Upon a Car is the brilliantly reported inside-the-boardrooms-and-factories story of Detroit’s fight for survival, going beyond the headlines to chronicle how the country’s Big Three auto companies—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—teetered on the brink of collapse during the 2008 financial crisis. In a tale that reads like a corporate thriller, Bill Vlasic, who has covered the auto industry for more than fifteen years, first for the Detroit News and now for the New York Times, takes readers into the executive offices, assembly plants, and union halls to introduce a cast of memorable characters, many of whom are speaking out for the first time, including the executives who struggled to save their companies but in the end had to seek a controversial, last-gasp rescue from the U.S. government.

Vlasic goes behind the scenes to portray the men at the top during Detroit’s last stand. Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors, tried to turn around a dying company, only to be forced to resign as a condition of the government bailout. Bill Ford, great-grandson of the legendary Henry Ford, had the will to keep Ford alive but needed the guts to hire an unknown outsider, Alan Mulally, to transform the company before it crashed. At Chrysler, leadership was constantly changing as new owners tried in vain to fix the smallest of the beleaguered Big Three. And through it all, the president of the United Auto Workers union, Ron Gettelfinger, fought to save the jobs of the men and women who build American-made cars and trucks.

This tale of an iconic industry in crisis is more than a big business drama and provides a rich, unvarnished portrait of how Detroit’s decline affected tens of thousands of workers and dozens of communities nationwide. The story moves from the gleaming corporate skyscrapers and massive auto plants to the halls of the U.S. Congress and into the Oval Office, where President Obama and his aides wrestled with how to keep General Motors and Chrysler from going out of business. Vlasic shows why the bailout worked, and how Detroit can succeed under new leadership and build automobiles equal to any in the world.

Once Upon a Car tells a uniquely American tale of success, failure, and redemption. It is an important and illuminating chapter in an astonishing story that is still unfolding. And no one is more qualified to write it than Bill Vlasic.

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Once Upon a Car

The Fall and Resurrection of America's Big Three Auto MakersBy Bill Vlasic

William Morrow

Copyright © 2011 Bill Vlasic
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061845628

Chapter One

Larry Buhl had been planning this rendezvous for months, and
today was finally the day.
It was the second week in January, and the 2005 North American
International Auto Show was in full swing in downtown Detroit.
The Cobo Center convention floor, bigger than a dozen football
fields, was a mass of people roaming like herds among the exhibits of
the world’s biggest automakers. The elaborate displays of the hometown
giants, General Motors and Ford, owned one side of the hall.
The German luxury brands Mercedes-Benz and BMW anchored the
other end.
And somewhere in the middle was the man Buhl was looking for.
He walked along the carpeted paths between the million-dollar
show stands, each one reflecting the company behind it—sleek and
futuristic at Honda and Nissan, lots of chrome and bright colors at
Dodge and Chrysler, stark backdrops and pretty women in slinky
dresses at Ferrari and Lamborghini. Cars of every size and shape were
bathed in bright spotlights, polished and posed for the hordes of
journalists and camera crews and auto executives that swarmed
around the hall.
Buhl felt right at home. He lived in Connecticut but had grown
up just down the road in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He had been
going to the show for years. It was like an extension of the holidays in
Detroit—Christmas, New Year’s, auto show. It was also the perfect
place to blend into a crowd and meet someone unnoticed. Buhl crossed the
convention floor, took a turn behind the man-made mountain with a Jeep
hanging off it, made a left at the Toyota exhibit, and spied the smallest,
plainest stand in the entire place—three quirky little cars surrounded by
college-age sales reps in polo shirts and khakis. And there, working by the red Scion sign,
was Jim Farley.
Since last summer, Buhl had been trying to set up a meeting
between Farley, a rising executive at Toyota and head of its new Scion
division, and one of Buhl’s oldest friends, William Clay Ford Jr., the
chairman and chief executive officer of the Ford Motor Company.
The idea came to Buhl during a conversation with Farley’s father on
a golf course in northern Michigan, where the Farley and Buhl families
had owned vacation homes for years. “Something struck me
when I saw Jim’s dad,” Buhl recalled. “I thought Ford could really
use a guy like Jim.”
Larry Buhl had known Bill Ford since they were kids. They went
to private schools together, played the same sports, socialized
throughout college, and stayed close into their mid-forties. One went
on to become a successful entrepreneur buying and selling specialty
metals on the East Coast. The other became the leader of the second
biggest car company in the world.
Buhl cherished their bond, but lately he had been worried about
his friend. He saw what the pressure of running the Ford Motor
Company, his family’s business for more than a hundred years, was
doing to Bill. Executives came and went at Ford headquarters, but
none of them was able to help Bill stave off the flood of Toyotas, Hondas,
and other foreign cars that were relentlessly beating Ford in
the market. Buhl saw Bill’s spirits sag when they talked about it. “It’s
too much for you,” he kept telling him. “How can you shoulder all of
this responsibility yourself?”
What Ford needed was fresh blood. Buhl would never be so
presumptuous as to suggest to Bill that he hire Jim Farley. But if he
could get the two of them together, who knew what might happen?
When he brought it up, Bill said sure, he was open to it. It was a little
trickier to convince Farley. Buhl’s brother Robbie, a professional race
car driver and fellow car fanatic, had been tight with Farley for years.
Still, when Buhl called Farley, he was cool to the idea of sitting down
with anyone at one of Toyota’s biggest competitors.
“I’m not interested in going anyplace,” Farley said. “I’m really
happy at Toyota.”
“Come on,” Buhl said. “I’m just talking about introducing you to
a friend of mine.”
“I don’t feel comfortable about this,” Farley said. “Things are
going so well for us, and for me.”
“You have to meet him,” Buhl said.
“Why?”
“Because,” Buhl said, “it’s good for you.”
Now as he walked toward the Scion stand, Buhl still didn’t know
if Farley would ever consider leaving Toyota. What he did know was
that Jim Farley could sell cars as well as anyone on the planet.
And he was proving it every day. In just two years, Farley had
grown Toyota’s new Scion brand, created specifically for younger
buyers, from zero sales in the United States to 100,000 vehicles a
year. His bosses in Japan and in Los Angeles had entrusted him to
somehow make bland and reliable Toyota hip, and he embraced the
challenge. Farley took Scion cars to rock concerts, street festivals, and
college campuses—anywhere that Generation Y hung out. He was
constantly on the road, setting up Scion showrooms inside existing
Toyota dealerships, and making them cool, pressure-free boutiques
for these interesting little Japanese cars with funky designs and small
engines.
Farley inhabited the job completely—hanging out with twenty-
something trendsetters on the coasts, learning why they chose their
favorite products, from computers to clothes to cars. “You need to
love your customer, feel their joy, understand their pain,” he said.
“You have to get so close to them you can smell their breath.”
But as sensitive and idealistic as he sounded, Farley had an edge
to him. Other automakers were the enemy vying for the same turf,
and Farley would never give an inch. When he heard that Bob Lutz,
the vice chairman of General Motors, had called the shoebox-shaped
Scion xB “weird-looking,” those were fighting words. “I could care
less about Detroit,” Farley said. “Give me a break. Detroit got its ass
kicked trying to market to kids.”
At the Scion stand, Farley was in his element—chatting up
reporters, showing off the cars, greeting visitors. With a mop of
brown hair flopped over his forehead and wearing a suit that looked
just a size too big, Farley seemed younger than his forty-two years.
He also was having way more fun than the buttoned-down, deadly
serious executives holding court at the other displays. The media
flocked to him, and he rarely disappointed. He was provocative,
blunt, and unafraid to criticize an older generation’s view of today’s
young consumer. “These kids are not Camaro buyers from the seventies
being reincarnated,” he said. “These people are sharp. They have
higher expectations.” He said it all with a mischievous smile that
called to mind his late cousin, the comedian Chris Farley of Saturday
Night Live fame. He even sounded like Chris, especially when he
laughed.
When he saw Buhl walking up,...