Right there on pages 13-14, it gets to the heart of the matter. In the spring of 1973, Pete Estes, a top executive at General Motors, asked David E. Davis to go to Europe to have a look at the new front-wheel drive cars they were building over there, and to see if they might be suitable for the United States. Estes told Davis that he wanted to know if the front-wheel driven engine could be installed in their small cars as an option, in order to charge extra. Davis thought that was the wrong question. What mattered more was would it work? And how long would it take? “Davis believed in the old Detroit of car men, no one would have asked what it might cost as an option but simply whether it made the car better… To Davis, the old auto executives were men who had little financial sophistication but trusted their almost primal instincts. The new Detroit, he thought, was more cautious, a place of people who had made their way up by taking as few risks as possible and never letting their eyes waver from the bottom line. Innovation cost money and entailed risk, and they had little stomach for it. The three main Detroit companies believed that they were fiercely competitive with each other, and in a sense, they were, though mostly on trivial matters. The more important the issue, the less they competed and the longer they waited for someone else to take the first step, lest it be a mistake. It was, in the words of another Detroit journalist, Pat Wright, ‘a shared monopoly.’ “

So off Davis went to Europe, but with “a certain ambivalence.” What he found there was “an auto enthusiast’s dream.” The front-wheel drive allowed the elimination of the drive shaft that was not only heavy but created a hump in the floor. Without it, the car could be lighter and roomier, costing less and requiring less gas than the chunkier Detroit models. He returned to Detroit to report to Estes what he had seen. “Front-wheel drive, he declared, was a breakthrough of immense significance. It was not a question that could be debated anymore, because it had already happened. It was the state of the art. It was the way all cars would be built in the future, not just small ones. There was, he emphasized, no turning back. The European market was extremely competitive, and thus the cars were likely to get better and better. Eventually Detroit would have to respond… Pete Estes listened to him patiently, but when Davis was finished, he shook his head. ‘When I was at Oldsmobile,’ he said, ‘there was something I learned that I’ve never forgotten. There was an old guy there who was an engineer, and he had been at GM a long time, and he gave me some advice. He told me, whatever you do, don’t let GM do it first.’ “

The chiefs of the Big Three flew into Washington in their private planes last week to ask Congress to bail them out. Saturday Night Live's rendition had an actor playing Barney Frank asking what their plan was. Their plan was to get $25 billion dollars right away, and then in the spring get $25 billion more, and then down the road another $25 billion or so. When Frank called them on it, allowing that it didn’t sound like much of a plan, one of the auto execs, offended, said, “We’re asking for a loan!” but when pushed had to admit there wasn’t any plan to actually pay the loan back.