Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Air Pollution

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 560 pages
• Published by: Basic Books
• Edition: 1st Edition January 15, 2000
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1568581475
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1568581477
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Weighs: 1.8 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
In a riveting tale of colossal negligence and corporate skullduggery, Doyle (Altered Harvest) contends that Detroit auto makers duped the American people for half a century with claims that they lacked the technology to produce low-cost, low-pollution vehicles. Doyle, a former analyst with the Environmental Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., makes a strong case that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have fought emission inspection programs, blocked or diluted requirements for pollution control systems and fudged testing data. Despite the big three's apparently strenuous efforts to hold back the development of electric vehicles, key elements of their technology are now advancing, he reports. But the struggle to reduce emissions has been a contest to squeeze better performance out of patchwork technologies, even as the global fleet of automobiles is slated to double in twenty years--making environmental problems worse. The goal, as Doyle sees it, is "'zero emissions technology' Clean cars period, not just cleaner cars." From this standpoint, he avers, the Clinton White House's Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, a cooperative venture begun in 1993, has been a diversionary sham, deepening Detroit's commitment to the internal-combustion engine and placing truly clean cars perhaps "several decades" away. Doyle's robust, often shocking narrative is enlivened with reproductions of ads, corporate and government documents, and propaganda campaigns. Although his exhaustive detail may daunt the general reader, his well-argued study is a valuable source for environmentalists, policymakers, consumers and partisans on all sides of the debate. Agents, Ronald Goldfarb and Robbie Hare at Goldfarb & Silverberg Literary Agency.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description
Smog was discovered in L.A. in the 1950s, and scientists showed that the city's burgeoning car population was the cause. Thus began almost 50 years of bobbing and weaving by the Big Three auto makers -- General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler -- to avoid responsibility. As the U.S. government became involved in auto regulation, the Big Three countered with threats, intimidation, and subterfuge. Catalytic converters, alternative fuels, and emissions standards all came about long after they could have as a result of this tug of war. In Taken for a Ride, Jack Doyle documents a sordid tale of delay, missed opportunities, and serious environmental culpability.

Reader Reviews
After a couple of months, I'm about 2/3 through with this book. I think a lot of amazon.com readers may find it a bit lengthy, so it occurred to me to go ahead and put forth some thoughts on it, of which I have a few. I run an alternative energy web page where I examine issues pertaining to Detroit's fight against progressive vehicles, and Doyle's book is definitely food-for-thought along those lines. Thus far, Doyle does a thorough well-footnoted job (maybe mainstream serious academics will be able to treat the book seriously, as well as casual readers) of taking the reader through the history of the clean-air wars as they pertained to cars. In light of research such as Doyle's, it is becoming increasingly difficult for opponents of clean-air-laws to claim that this sort of environmentalism is merely a pretext by left-wing tree-hugging extremists to attack business and cost jobs. In reality, Detroit's multi-million-dollar resistance to even the most common-sense improvements in their own vehicles is very difficult and frustrating to read about. One of the things I get from this is that something in the system seems to be broken, over the last five decades. The Detroit Automakers cannot be trusted, it would seem, to make any kind of good-faith effort to concern themselves with the environmental impact of operating their products. They can be trusted, however, to spend dozens of millions, if not more, in fighting every attempt by all concerned governments, to get them to build vehicles with better mileage and cleaner operation Fifty years or so since smog started becoming enough of a problem to occassion these battles between Detroit and Washington, we are still left with a very heated battle. These days, it is still Detroit vs. the state of California in a mano-a-mano over electric and hybrid vehicles. It is possible, one supposes, that a newly progressive Ford CEO (as discussed by Doyle) might be sincere in his attitude, but we are left a bit cynical. Doyle's extensive tale allows us to bring ourselves up-to-date and have a context for understanding the present-day wars. Instead of having a vague sense that Detroit deliberately destroyed various electric train businesses nationally in the 30s, we can read Doyle's explicit discussion of this, and we can have a more detailed vision of the depths to which Ford, GM, Chrysler and AMC sank in pitting themselves against every possible measure in the sixties and seventies as various federal and State officials realized that "something" had to be done, insofar as people in various cities were visibly physically suffering from smog. I think Doyle brings home that something was wrong in the system, as revealed in the ongoing problems between Detroit and government parties in their attempts to find solutions to the environmental impact of the autos. On at least one occassion, it would have appeared that anti-trust measures were considered, but that idea was dropped. This is good reading for those who are into trying to understand why on Earth Detroit can't be bothered to build Electric Vehicles and such. The answers are a little elusive, in my opinion, but Doyle's calm story is a good way to add to one's perspective.