Customer Reviews

All Corvettes Are Red

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As an avid vette fan since my teens, I finished this book in less than a week (I usually take months to read a book cover to cover). The C5 vette is a significant leap forward for chevy and it is amazing the car got built (read the book for the details!). You two may want to run out and spend $45k on a new vette for your garage after reading this book. I highly recommend it.

This is a great book. In depth, behind the scenes, look at how the C5 became America's greatest sports car. The author walks you through the politics at GM and how they shaped the debate inside. Great tidbits about the advanced technology like the special frame the C5 has, and the endless battle to shave off even a few ounces. Project management, corporate politics and intrigue; bone jarring horsepower, blind passion for America's sports car and more. This book should be boring but I couldn't put it down.

I will really keep this short: "if you are a car guy/girl, a banker, an ad-maker, an executive with any large company, an accountant, or just someone who likes to see how American industry "really works" and makes decisions...this book is a MUST." Put it this way, if you read BusinessWeek or Road & Track...you gotta read this great book. Corvette was almost killed by GM for sound business reasons in the early 1990s. They brought over Dave Hill from Cadillac to run the re-birth project, and his standards of quality control and planning allowed the new Vette (the 1997-98 "c5") to rival Porsche and other exotic euro-cars. In fact, I keep a little photo of a red c5 on my desk at work to remind me of all the business lessons learned from Hill and his Corvette team. I am a major Fortune 500 banker with an MBA, but so many of the lessons I learned in the book made sense to me in a way MBA courses don't. For me, this is one of the best stories about saving an American icon. So many of them are being lost and we will soon lose (in 2001 or so) the Camaro/Firebird (f-bodies) according to industry insiders. Read "ACAR" and see how close the country came to losing its beloved Corvette. Enjoy it...even if you never buy a Vette. Personally, I'll buy the poor-man's Vette, the Camaro, which was also designed I learned in the book, by John Cafaro, the c5 designer. See you...on the road! (The story of the "All Corvettes Are Red" title is also priceless, but too long to tell here. Buy it and see!)

Even though I don't own a C5 (yet) it was very interesting to see how the C5 was born from the C4 (which I own) and many of it's short commings were over come. The bureaucracy that exist in large corporations as well, was exposed.
Had it not been for dedicated employees this icon may have faded from American history.
Excellent reading for any Corvette lover or just plain car buff.

Being a two-time Corvette owner, I anxiously awaited the publication of this book, and had my copy on pre-order with a local bookstore. I had it read in under a week. I was not disappointed. Rather I was quite surprised.

"ACAR" is the story of the Fifth Generation of Chevrolet's Corvette, nicknamed C5. The author was given access to behind-the-scenes meetings during the entire development of the C5, albeit under gag orders until publication and until the C5 actually made production. In fact, James had access to parts of GM that some VP's couldn't even get to.

The book is a great read. The C5 was nearly cancelled on several occasions, mainly due to money problems with a struggling GM. You learn about GM culture, especially in management, that helped cause many of these problems. You learn a lot about what it takes anybody to create a new car. And you learn the dedication of a few engineers and managers who risked careers to keep the project going.

At last, a book with a story as dramatic as the car it was written about! And, what a BEAUTY! VERY well written.

I never realized that the automobile industry could be so cut-throat, or that the planning and design of a new car was so exhaustive and exhausting. If you love cars, adore the Corvette, and really enjoy a good business biography, this is a MUST READ. Enjoy!

Expecting a book about a car? Wrong. This one is about people reinventing a car and it's loaded with heroes, villains, and characters that you'll both respect and detest. It could be fiction, but it's all real.

"All Corvettes" was required reading for our marketing class and for the first time, we had a book that told it like is in the automotive world. Detroit and GM are obviously exciting, dirty, frustrating, wonderful places to work if you can stand the tension and have the guts to do your job right. The author made Corvette and GM come alive.

This story of how a large project happens in a big company is a must read for fans of engineering. It should be required reading in every engineering school in the country!
Very well, written, wonderful characters, (it helps that I have met a number of them), and of course the story of the creation of my favorite car.

I bought this book along with another pretty-picture book on the C5. I put this one aside and read the pretty book first. I then picked up this one and thought it might be a bit of a dry read since it was more about the process of making the C5 in lieu of the specs and technical aspects.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a picture of what these designers went through to make this car. Design problems, engineering problems, management problems, and financial problems all threatened to kill the C5 before it was created. Through all the issues, and a pushback on the release date of several years, comehow it all happened.

If you've got the pretty picture books with all the tech info, this book will help fill in the gap about how it all happened (and how it almost didn't).

One perspective many "vette" people should read. Makes me wanna re-do my career choice (I should have been an auto engineer). Read it, and you'll understand the many facets involved in auto design and fabricating along with personal "differences". Just read it and you'll know what I mean.