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

Jack Doyle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 20 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 Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows; 1st edition (January 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568581475
• ISBN-13: 978-1568581477
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,509,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interview with the Author, July 21, 2000

By 

Bill Moore (Papillion, NE USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Air Pollution (Paperback)

As the Editor-in-Chief of EVWorld.Com, I had the opportunity to do an audio interview with Jack Doyle last week (June 15, 2000). We will be webcasting that interview in three parts on the EVWorld.Com web site starting the week of June 24, 2000. In the interview, Jack shares his experiences in writing Taken For A Ride. Having read the book in preparation for the interview, I found it a devastating indictment of the US auto industry who used its political and financial muscle to stall auto emissions technology and regulations for decades.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye opening look at the damage done by the auto industry., November 21, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Air Pollution (Paperback)

Very thorough and indisputable account of the damage the auto industry has done to our health and environment by colluding and fighting environmental regulations through the years and withholding cleaner technology. Based on actual congressional records, trial transcripts, local government transcripts and other documentation. It describes how the companies lied, colluded and in some cases were found guilty, but yet have been able to continue to pollute. It doesn't read like a novel and can get wordy, but it is eye opening. This should be reading 101 for those congress people who are only listening to the car industries side of the story.

At the very end, the book also ponders the idea of litigation. Unlike tobacco, people don't have a choice in the air they breathe. I could see that some states might want to re-coup cost for asthma treatment and other illnesses created by the car industries smog.

As a couple side notes: I have personally seen the Chairman of the Air resources board for California with this book in hand. Right now the Car companies are continuing to fight Zev(Zero Emission Vehicle) mandates in several states. The shame is their arguments today read like chapters from this book in which the quotes are from the 1960's. Remember when they told us that putting in air bags would kill the car industry? That was 1982.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty Thorough, August 28, 2000

By 

jlsoaz (Arizona, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Air Pollution (Paperback)

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.