Wheels

by Arthur Hailey

He had once been asked if such rulings, on the disposition of immense wealth, worried him. He replied, “No, because mentally I always knock off the last three figures. That way it’s no more sweat than buying a house.”

The ranks of auto company designers were heavy with expatriate Californians whose route to Detroit, like his own, had been through the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, which operated on a trimester system. For those who graduated in winter and came to Detroit to work, the shock of seeing the city at its seasonal worst was so depressing that a few promptly returned West and sought some other design field as a livelihood.

loathe and hate—everything that’s white.”

Car dealers had long been the auto industry’s least reputable arm, and while direct defrauding had been curbed in recent years, many observers believed the public would be better served if contact between manufacturers and car buyers were more direct, with fewer intermediaries. Likely in the future were central dealership systems, factory-operated, which could deliver cars to customers more efficiently and with less overhead cost than now.

Elon Musk seems to get a lot of his marketing cues from this book

Without parts manufacturers, the Big Three would be like honey processors bereft of bees.

That’s where parts makers hit paydirt—on long runs.” “And the ten-dollar limit?” “Say you’re doing a repair job. Something’s damaged. Costs more than ten dollars, you’ll try to fix it. Costs less, you’ll throw the old part out, use a replacement. There’s where I come in. High volume again.”

This—though Zaleski had neither the philosophy to see it, nor power to change the system if he had—was a reason why North American automobiles were generally of poorer quality than those from Germany, where less rigid factory systems gave workers a sense of individuality and craftsmen’s pride.

Whatever unknown quantities were coming, he knew that they would share them. “There were rumors,” Barbara

The miracle of the modern automobile was not that it sometimes failed, but that it mostly didn’t; not that it was costly, but that—for the marvels of design and engineering it embodied—it cost so little; not that it cluttered highways and polluted air, but that it gave free men and women what, through history, they had mostly craved—a personal mobility.