Riding the Roller Coaster: A History of the Chrysler Corporation (review)

Charles K. Hyde's history of Chrysler is the first new look at the company in almost twenty years and a welcome one. The thesis is implicit in the title; from its founding in 1924, Chrysler has either been riding a crest of fabulous sales with billions in the bank or skirting bankruptcy. Hyde attributes this to its managers' willingness to take risks and make quick market turnabouts, and to frequent infighting.

Riding the Roller Coaster breaks Chrysler's story into four distinct periods. From 1924 to 1935 its founder, Walter P. Chrysler, brought out his Chrysler Six and used his manifold skills to merge Maxwell, Chalmers, and Dodge to create the firm that successfully challenged Ford. Hyde likes Walter Chrysler, and credits him with being the most well-rounded automobile man in the company's history. When Chrysler turned control over to his manufacturing genius, Kaufman Thuma Keller, better known as K. T., the company became less innovative and its problems with the United Automobile Workers more difficult. Still, Keller's manufacturing skills helped the Chrysler Corporation contribute to the war effort, especially with its tank production. Afterward, Keller told his stylists to design cars so that people could wear their hats while riding in them. When asked why his cars were so tall, he blustered, "Chrysler builds cars to sit in, not piss over" (p. 152).

From 1950 to 1978 Chrysler had three presidents, a salesman and two bean counters, and its fortunes drooped toward the fateful production of its Volares and Aspens, well-engineered but shoddily built cars that Lee Iacocca once called "crap." Chrysler's leaders also squandered the company's slender resources to diversify into firms as disparate as air-conditioning and space electronics.

Iacocca was brought in to clean up the mess. Chrysler was broke, its suppliers unpaid, loans past due, and payrolls iffy. Iacocca put together a federal rescue package and brought out the K-cars (which Hyde contends were not what saved the firm). Iacocca also introduced the wildly popular mini-van, bought American Motors Corporation to get its Jeep, and experimented with platform committees to shorten the lead time for new products. He became increasingly dictatorial and capricious in his last years, however, and the board of directors pushed him out at the end of 1992. His replacement, outsider Robert J. Eaton, believed that the firm was too small to survive in the global marketplace and negotiated the Daimler-Benz takeover in 1998.

From the beginning, when Walter Chrysler hired Fred Zeder, Owen Skelton, and Carl Breer to design his new car, the firm was a technological trendsetter. These three built Chrysler's engineering department, which was responsible for such innovations as the high-compression engine, four-wheel hydraulic brakes, the oil filter, the air cleaner, and dashboard temperature and fuel gauges. Later, Chrysler engineering studied aerodynamics and designed the infamous unit-construction Airflow, which appeared in 1934. Chrysler pioneered work on gas turbine engines, fluid drive, the hemispherical-head V-8 engine in 1951, and front-wheel drive in the late 1970s, not to mention mini-vans and muscle cars. Such innovations helped change Americans' lives; they indirectly created soccer moms and "big box" hardware stores that could sell bulky products because they would fit in a van. Inexpensive Plymouths, Horizons, and Neons helped expand suburbs and strip malls. All Chrysler cars deepened national dependence upon foreign oil, with the geopolitical complications this has entailed.

Hyde tells his story well, covering personalities, the evolution of management strategy, technological changes, labor and employee relations, and competition, and he is not afraid to voice his own opinions about any of these matters. My only complaint is that toward the end the book becomes choppy and reads as if it were a cut-down version of a much longer manuscript, albeit a well-researched...