I was given a Kindle for Christmas, which is among the cooler Christmas gifts I have ever received because it has totally gotten me back in the reading game again. I have been tearing through books left and right, which is a marked departure from the dearth of reading I had been doing outside of magazines before getting my mitts on the Kindle. As you’d expect, there’s a bunch of car guy stuff in my list of recently read tomes as well as historical books, popular culture, and assorted other weirdness. Seeing as this is BangShift, I wanted to talk about three car guy books I have recently finished that I’d highly recommend you pick up, especially if every time you look out the window the world looks more and more like a scene out of a snow globe. I’ll go into more depth below but these books aren’t necessarily “feel good” titles. They are however enthralling in their own way. I’d be very interested to hear your feedback once you have read these books or if you have read them in the past.

Ok….onto the books!

 Car Guys VS Bean Counters: The Battle For The Soul of American Business – Bob Lutz

This inside account of GM’s product turn around and eventual collapse due to the financial melt down of 2008 is a fast moving and entertaining read. That being said, I am a Bob Lutz fan and enjoy his perspective and blunt nosed style. In this book, Lutz tells the story of being hired at GM, being hated at GM, helping the company turn the corner with quality and product improvements and then watching the whole thing come unraveled when the financial markets collapsed and the bottom fell out.

The process of the government coming into the company and basically determining the products and brands that stayed and went is fascinating as is Lutz’s account of getting “car people” back into positions of making decisions. The GM products today were born years ago in the murky days before and during the company hit the skids. Lutz tells stories that have the reader alternating between laughter and disbelief on how screwed up the decision making process was in regard to product. The money that was spent in the wrong places, the decisions being made by people who had no clue about what they were doing, and ultimately the battle to undo that system makes for a very compelling read. Lutz doesn’t waste the reader’s time with fluff, this is a mover and a shaker of a book.

If you are not a Bob Lutz fan, reading this book probably isn’t going to be that pleasurable an experience. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Lutz gloats or brags about what he did inside GM, there’s no forgetting that this is his book. He’s front and center for most of it and that’s a good thing if you enjoy the way he tells the tale. It would be nauseating and bordering on intolerable if you don’t like what he stands for or how he says it.

I have always been fascinated by how colossus industrial companies like GM operate from the inside. This is a look at how one company got so far into left field with how they approached their business, they needed the aid of a government cash defibrillator to keep them from slipping beneath the waves of history. Lutz tells us how they got there and why they’re coming back.

Check it out!
A Savage Factory: An Eye Witness Account Of The Auto Industry’s Self Destruction – Robert Dewar

The next two books also deal with the auto industry but from a vastly different level than Bob Lutz saw it from. These books are about factory life at Ford and GM in the 1970s and 1980s, basically the nadir of quality and management that set the scene for a generation of young car buyers to lose faith in these companies. The first of the two books I’ll look at is this one, A Savage Factory. This book was written by Robert Dewar who served as a foreman at the Ford transmission plant in Sharonville, Ohio for several years in the 1970s and 1980s.

In reading this book, the takeaway I had was complete amazement that ANY vehicle made by Ford actually started and drove off the lot in the 1980s. You’ll see that this wasn’t a single company problem when we get to the next book. Anway, Dewar left a job at another large company and came to Ford with an MBA to be a foreman at the the plant. He did it for a simple reason, the job paid huge money. Little did he know that he’s be walking into an environment so toxic it routinely drove front line guys like him to the local mental hospital (seriously). He was given 39-minutes of training on his first day and told to run the department that makes torque converters. The workers at the plant immediately began “testing” him by slowing things down, breaking stuff on purpose, and causing a general ruckus.

Dewar learns how to play the game between his workforce and the upper management people that they hate. Peace is always fleeting and the book depicts the factory as bounding from one catastrophe to the next with the guys running the place demanding employees heads and employees doing everything in their power to undermine the company (one torque converter assembler dropped a nut in every converter that came by, causing an entire shift’s work to fail…which was thousands of converters).

The book is a little rough around the edges with regard to editing but that didn’t faze me at all. The story is so wild, so crazy, and so indicative of what happened to the US auto industry in the 1980s, it jumps off the page. The only scene I struggled with was one where Dewar found himself at the mental hospital seeking help. His conversation with a doctor is a little too perfect for espousing his message of how the cultures of all big companies seem to be toxic. There’s a little preaching in the book, but mostly it is a string of amazing stories that show how everything was wrong at the time Dewar was at the plant. A great read for sure.

Rivethead: Tales From The Assembly Line – Ben Hamper 

The last book in this installment is Rivethead: Tales From The Assembly Line by Ben Hamper. Like A Savage Factory, this book is all about life in a car factory circa the 1970s and 1980s. The big difference between the books is that Hamper tells his story from the perspective of the guy doing the work on the line. To say that things weren’t any better at the GM factory than they were at Ford would be an understatement. Hamper’s tales of drinking and using drugs on the job (along with seemingly everyone he knew at the plant) disappearing for days on end, and general debauchery again led me to wonder how a damned thing that rolled out the door at GM actually started and ran without falling apart during that era.

Hamper is by far the most talented writer of the three guys in this blog item but I had an intense frustration in what I saw as squandered talent due to his chemical intake and the treatment of his body. Hamper goes into detail about his family situation growing up which is highlighted by  a drunken deadbeat father who obviously didn’t set any sort of life example for him. By the end of the book, he has all but walked the same path as the guy we see painted so despicably earlier.

This book presented one of the strangest paradoxes I have ever experienced while reading anything. I was enthralled with the subject matter, the stories, and the seeming impossibility of this guy’s life as it was during his time on the line but by the end of the book I wanted to slap the guy upside the head and tell him to get his shit together because he was flushing an amazing talent down the drain.

I can’t say that I agree with Ben Hamper’s politics (he’s pals with Michael Moore…but don’t let that stop you from reading the book) but his account of 10 years on the GM production line should be read by anyone who wants to see how the US auto industry “lost” to the Japanese and Europeans. Funny thing is, it isn’t clear as to how much things have changed since Hamper’s book, which ends in 1988. How can I say that? Remember a couple of years ago when Chrysler employees were found to be populating a park on their break drinking heavily and smoking dope? Hamper and his pals did it daily, except they sat right on company property. Apparently security has “tightened” enough to at least force the guys off the ranch, but the culture still seems to exist.

Ben Hamper’s book is an awesome read. I’m interested in everyone else’s opinion of how they feel about the author by the time the tale is over and he’s….well I am not giving away where he ends up at the close of the book. You’ll have to see that for yourselves.