Take a drive on most U.S. highways and even consumers wholly
uninterested in the auto industry would have to agree with New
York Times automotive writer Micheline Maynard --- the Big
Three's dominance of the American car market is over.

Imports dominate California's car-clogged roads. In Texas, once
dominated by domestic truck brands Chevrolet and Ford, imports are
increasingly popular with younger, more affluent consumers. Even in
the Big Three's home state, Michigan, import brands have built some
of the biggest and most extravagant dealerships in the country to
serve a growing number of customers.

In August 2003, cold hard facts began piling up alongside such
anecdotal evidence. For the first time ever, Toyota outsold
Chrysler, now owned by the German-American company DaimlerChrysler.
It was a seminal point for the domestic carmakers that had tried
everything short of giving away cars to shore up their faltering
market share in the past two years. By September, the Big Three's
market share hit 57 percent, a historic low.

How and why Toyota surged to this position and how once-dominant
brands of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler let it happen is at the
heart of THE END OF DETROIT.

Ms. Maynard deconstructs how imports from Korea, Japan and Germany
systematically have eaten away at the market share of U.S. car
brands. Through detailed and engaging reporting, she shows how
these companies consistently offered consumers higher quality,
cheaper prices or more dramatic styling and performance. She also
talks about why the U.S. companies have failed to stop the imports
in their tracks.

Ms. Maynard does a superb job of offering insight and evidence as
to how Toyota and Honda grew from offering cheap energy efficient
cars in the 1970s to full-line auto makers with trucks and sport
utility vehicles that rival the power and performance of the
domestic makers.

She dives into the differences between Honda and Toyota, explaining
how divergent these two Japanese companies really are, despite the
fact that they are often "mentioned in the same breath ---
Toyota-and-Honda, all run together --- as if they were one big
company instead of two." Ms. Maynard, however, rightly points out
that the two companies are following very different corporate paths
to win consumers. Both corporate strategies spell trouble for the
domestic automakers.

Toyota has plans to be the world's No. 1 automaker, overtaking
General Motors by the beginning of the next decade. Ms. Maynard
believes Toyota's domination is inevitable; she even writes a
fictional news story in which Toyota announces this fact. While it
is hard to argue with Toyota's superiority, Ms. Maynard doesn't
discuss in detail whether Toyota could fall prey to the same
problems as the domestic makers while it pushes for world
domination.

By contrast, Honda is content to build vehicles for its small but
zealous customer base, Ms. Maynard says. Sometimes, ironically,
those zealous customers are in fact its biggest competitors.
General Motors now buys Honda engines for use in its
vehicles.

She also outlines the comebacks of upstart brands such as Korea's
Hyundai and Japan's Nissan. Hyundai dominates the low-end of the
market with its inexpensive sedans and small sport utilities.
Nissan is pulling a flanking position by offering flashy, high
performance products like the 350Z and even a sexy minivan called
Quest.

But when Ms. Maynard turns her attention to the U.S. automakers, it
is with less of the fine detail with which she brought the imports'
story to life. Her broad brush of the U.S. industry may leave
readers wanting more stories and details on how the Big Three lost
their grip. Instead, her re-telling of how Ford neglected the
Taurus family sedan and lost its No. 1 ranking to the Camry has an
outsiders' feel, which contrasts to the insider's feel of her
reporting on Toyota and Honda.

Despite this, her conclusions about how the Big Three lost control
of an industry they once dominated are in depth enough for
executives in any industry to learn from. Ms. Maynard writes that
the Big Three continued to produce inconsistent, poor quality cars
that didn't meet consumers' changing needs, even as a growing list
of competitors upped the ante. Worse yet, the Big Three blamed
everyone but themselves for the problems besetting them. And
finally they suffered from a major case of hubris, believing that
their consumers would keep coming back if they added enough macho
sizzle to cars.

A telling anecdote in that regard comes in one of the book's final
chapters. Over lunch Ms. Maynard asks Robert Lutz, a former
Chrysler executive that GM hired to bring passion back to its cars,
which automobile he wanted buyers to think about when they thought
GM. She writes, "Lutz unhesitatingly chose the Chevrolet Corvette."
Low slung V-8 sports cars popular with retirees aren't likely to
help GM beat Toyota and other imports in the coming years.

Ms. Maynard predicts that by 2010 the U.S. carmakers will account
for just 50% market share, a slide of nearly 40% since the 1960s.
She predicts that by 2010 the Big Three (if all of them survive)
will compete in a market more akin to Europe's, where a dozen
strong competitors compete to control smaller slices of market
share.

If this could happen to the once mighty Detroit, readers will take
pause and think about what industries could fall next.