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In the spring of 1995, General Motors occupied the sort of executive boardroom where it was possible to spend an entire morning discussing the future of the automobile business without ever getting close enough to an actual automobile to smell one. The carpeting was thick, the table was mahogany, the chairs were leather, and coffee arrived in silver thermal carafes accompanied by cups nobody in the room had carried there himself. Fourteen floors below, Detroit was still making automobiles by the hundreds of thousands. Up here, men who had spent thirty years learning the General Motors system were deciding what those automobiles ought to be.

They were, almost without exception, rich, comfortable and pleased with the way things were going. One had recently bought a vacation house in Naples, Florida, although he had discovered that saying simply “Naples” allowed people to believe Italy for several satisfying seconds. Another owned a forty-two-foot boat that became a yacht whenever somebody from accounting wasn’t nearby. Two belonged to the same country club and disliked each other principally because each believed the other had received his membership too easily. The Buick executive had recently acquired a Rolex and had spent three weeks developing the casual wrist placement necessary to make sure everyone else acquired that information as well. They had company cars, executive dining rooms, pensions accumulating at impressive rates and secretaries who knew where they were supposed to be better than they did.

Most importantly, they worked for General Motors.

General Motors was number one.

It had been number one for so long that number one had ceased to be a ranking and become something closer to a geological condition.

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The senior vice president conducting that morning’s product meeting stood at the end of the table beside a projection screen displaying the General Motors divisional lineup. Chevrolet occupied the broad foundation of the corporation, providing mainstream passenger cars, trucks and entry-level transportation. Pontiac supplied youth and performance. Oldsmobile occupied the comfortable middle ground between Chevrolet and Buick. Buick provided premium transportation for customers who had reached the stage of life when a Buick seemed like something a responsible adult ought to own. Cadillac remained the flagship of American luxury. GMC handled specialized trucks and utility vehicles. Saturn was the innovative newcomer, the much-publicized “different kind of car company,” and Geo gave Chevrolet dealers a line of inexpensive import fighters.

Eight brands. Every price point. Every kind of customer. Cars, trucks, sport utilities, compacts, family sedans, performance coupes and luxury automobiles. Thousands of dealers and hundreds of thousands of employees supported by factories, warehouses, proving grounds, finance companies and suppliers spread across a continent. When the final slide appeared, the senior vice president looked around the table with the relaxed satisfaction of a man who had just demonstrated not merely that General Motors had the automobile market covered, but that there wasn’t enough uncovered automobile market remaining to worry about.

At the far end of the table sat the youngest executive in the room, a thirty-two-year-old product planner from Fort Stockton, Texas, who had been invited because somebody in upper management thought it would be useful to have a younger person present. Apparently nobody had considered the possibility that the younger person might talk.

“The imports are gaining market share every year,” he said.

Several heads turned toward him. Nobody appeared irritated. The reaction was closer to the indulgent amusement of fathers listening to a child explain something he had recently discovered.

The Buick executive smiled. “That’s why we have Geo.”

“And Saturn,” the Pontiac man added.

A few men nodded, and for several seconds the matter appeared to have been resolved. The young executive opened the briefcase beside his chair anyway. He had brought charts, sales figures, product comparisons and several pages of market research, which immediately put him at a disadvantage. A senior executive could dismiss an opinion. A stack of paper required slightly more effort.

“It isn’t just small cars anymore,” he said. “Honda and Toyota aren’t living on Civics and Corollas. The Accord and Camry are taking a bigger piece of the midsize market every year. Toyota has Lexus now. Honda has Acura. Nissan has Infiniti. They’re moving directly into territory we’ve always considered ours.”

The Cadillac executive leaned back in his chair. “Have you driven a Cadillac lately?”

“Yes, sir.”

That seemed to settle the luxury-car question as far as Cadillac was concerned, but the young man continued. “And Ford has the Taurus. It’s still the best-selling passenger car in the country. Whatever we think about it, Ford took a chance with the design. They gave customers something that looked new.”

“We have the Grand Prix,” the Pontiac executive said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good car.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I don’t understand the problem.”

The young man looked down at his papers. During his first few years at General Motors, he had learned that every problem inside the corporation had already been solved, frequently before anybody had agreed that the problem existed.

“Our cars don’t look different enough anymore.”

That produced considerably more reaction than Toyota.

“Of course they look different,” the Buick executive said.

“From the front.”

The room went quiet.

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The young man stood, walked to an easel beside the projection screen and arranged four photographs he had brought with him. The first showed a Chevrolet Lumina. Beside it he placed a Pontiac Grand Prix, then an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and finally a Buick Regal. All four had been photographed from almost exactly the same side angle.

He stepped away.

For several seconds, nobody said anything.

That was because the problem was much easier to dismiss before the photographs were hanging beside one another.

The four cars were not literally identical, but their family relationship was impossible to miss. The rooflines followed almost the same arc. The doors occupied the same places. The glass looked remarkably similar. The wheelbases, proportions and basic silhouettes announced the common architecture before the grilles and badges had an opportunity to argue otherwise. They looked less like four automobiles created for four distinct divisions than four brothers who had been sent to different barbers.

The Pontiac executive pointed toward his photograph. “Ours has body cladding.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And fog lamps.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Buick man studied the Regal. “The grille is completely different.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Oldsmobile executive leaned forward and looked at all four pictures again. “I don’t see the problem.”

“The customer does.”

That was when they laughed.

It wasn’t cruel laughter. If anything, it was affectionate. Most of them remembered being thirty-two. At thirty-two, you worried about things. You saw threats everywhere. Eventually you accumulated enough titles, stock options and years of service to understand that corporations the size of General Motors did not get knocked over by every gust of wind coming across the Pacific.

The young executive waited for the laughter to die down. “We’ve been doing this for years. Look at the Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Cutlass Ciera and Century. Different grilles, different trim, different advertising, but fundamentally we’re asking four divisions to sell variations of the same automobile.”

“Different customers,” someone said.

“Different dealers,” said another.

“Different suspension tuning,” the Pontiac man added.

“Different interiors,” said Buick.

The young man nodded. “Everything is different except the car.”

That one didn’t get a laugh.

He returned to his briefcase and removed another photograph. This one showed a Buick Century, the version scheduled for the 1996 model year, finished in Sandrift Metallic with thin pinstripes running along the body. It was an extraordinarily ordinary-looking automobile. Four doors. Upright greenhouse. Fourteen-inch steel wheels hidden behind full wheel covers. Narrow whitewall tires. Taupe cloth inside. A front bench seat. A column-mounted automatic transmission selector. Nothing about it was offensive, and nothing about it would cause a child to press his face against a showroom window.

Under the hood sat General Motors’ 3.1-liter V6, rated at 160 horsepower and 185 pound-feet of torque and connected to a four-speed automatic transaxle. The Century had power steering, power-assisted antilock brakes, front discs and rear drums. It offered power windows and locks, air conditioning, cruise control, a tilt steering wheel, power adjustment for the driver’s seatback, a rear defogger and a factory cassette stereo. The steering wheel contained a driver’s airbag. The instrument panel provided a 110-mph speedometer flanked by fuel and coolant-temperature gauges. It was comfortable, reasonably economical, easy to drive and thoroughly competent.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with it.

That, the young executive believed, was the problem.

“This may be the most dangerous car we’re building,” he said.

The Buick executive stared at the photograph, then at him. “The Century?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My mother drives a Century.”

“I’m sure she likes it.”

“She loves it.”

“I believe you.”

“Then how the hell is it dangerous?”

“Because it’s good enough.”

The Buick executive blinked. Around the table, several men exchanged glances.

“Good enough for what?”

“For us to keep doing what we’re doing.”

The young man laid the photograph in the center of the mahogany table. Under the boardroom lights, the Sandrift Metallic Century looked harmless enough. Nobody had ever associated the Buick Century with industrial catastrophe. The thing had narrow whitewalls.

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“For years we’ve been able to build cars that were good enough because we had the dealerships, the manufacturing capacity, the market share and generations of customer loyalty. People bought Chevrolets because their fathers bought Chevrolets. They bought Oldsmobiles because their parents had moved up from Chevrolet to Oldsmobile. Then they bought Buicks because they’d reached the point in life when they thought they were supposed to own a Buick.”

The Buick executive nodded. “Sounds like a pretty successful business model.”

“It was.”

The room changed slightly.

One word had done it.

Was.

The senior vice president leaned forward. “You’re being unnecessarily dramatic.”

“Maybe,” the young man said. “But look at what it cost us to get here.”

He pulled several more pages from the briefcase and began distributing them around the table. This time nobody laughed, because printed near the top of the first page were two letters and two numbers everyone in the room recognized.

GM10.

The W-body program had been intended to produce the new generation of midsize cars that would carry several General Motors divisions into the future. Instead, its development had become one of those corporate stories everyone knew in pieces and nobody particularly enjoyed assembling into a whole. Estimates varied depending upon which costs were included and where they were assigned, but the young executive’s figures put the total development expenditure at something approaching seven billion dollars.

“We spent billions developing a family of cars that still compete against each other,” he said. “A customer who walks out of a Buick dealership and buys a Cutlass Supreme hasn’t necessarily been won by General Motors. We may have simply moved the sale from one pocket to another.”

The Oldsmobile executive frowned. “Oldsmobile dealers wouldn’t describe that as moving money between pockets.”

“That’s part of the problem.”

The young man moved through the rest of his figures. Different versions of similar automobiles were being assembled in different plants, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, while separate divisions maintained their own engineering priorities, dealer organizations, advertising budgets and management structures. Enormous amounts of money were being spent giving closely related automobiles enough superficial differences to preserve the fiction that they occupied completely separate places in the market.

Meanwhile, he pointed out, Toyota was worrying about panel gaps. Honda was worrying about engines. Lexus had entered the American luxury market with a nearly obsessive emphasis on quietness, reliability and customer treatment. The Japanese manufacturers had spent decades improving production quality while General Motors had spent much of the same period perfecting the art of putting four different grilles on the same basic idea.

“And we’re still selling the Century and Cutlass Ciera,” he said. “Those cars trace their architecture back to the early eighties. We’ll still have them in showrooms in 1996.”

“Because people keep buying them,” the Buick executive said.

“Yes.”

The older man smiled triumphantly and spread his hands. “Thank you.”

The young executive stopped.

He looked around the table and realized again what bothered him most. These were not stupid men. Stupid men would have been comforting. These were intelligent, experienced, highly educated executives who had spent entire careers learning how General Motors worked. They understood the corporation beautifully.

They simply assumed the rest of the world was obligated to keep working the same way.

The senior vice president closed the folder in front of him. “We’re number one.”

Nobody could argue with that.

“We’ve been number one for decades.”

That was true too.

“We have Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac covering virtually every passenger-car segment. We have GMC in trucks. We have Saturn. We have Geo specifically aimed at the imports. Unless you’ve got information the rest of us don’t have, I don’t see anybody taking our position away from us.”

The young man looked down at the photograph of the Century.

“No, sir.”

And with that, the meeting moved on.

That was one of the useful characteristics of a corporation as large as General Motors. An uncomfortable prediction did not have to be disproved. It merely had to survive until the next item on the agenda.

By 10:42, the Cadillac executive was discussing his golf handicap.

He had gotten it down to eleven, a claim nobody believed but everyone was polite enough not to investigate. The Buick executive complained that the greens at Oakland Hills had become too fast. The Pontiac man said his club had changed the rules regarding weekend tee times, which produced an animated discussion involving three men who had shown considerably less interest in the growth of Toyota fifteen minutes earlier.

The Oldsmobile executive mentioned his new place in Naples. Another man had recently refinanced a vacation home. Someone else was considering a boat. The conversation drifted toward the company’s pension formula, which everyone agreed was becoming increasingly complicated, although they also agreed that their own pensions were likely to be satisfactory.

Then somebody mentioned the new secretaries in the typing pool.

The subject held the room’s attention for a while.

Eventually the Cadillac executive asked whether anyone had figured out the new electronic mail system the company was beginning to use.

“Email,” the young executive said.

“Yes. That.”

“You can send messages to other computers.”

“I know that. Can you send one outside the company?”

“Yes.”

The Cadillac man frowned. “Why?”

The room laughed harder than it had during the entire product discussion.

“I’ve got a telephone,” the Buick executive said.

“And a secretary,” someone added.

“Exactly.”

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The senior vice president said his son had tried to explain electronic mail to him but had never satisfactorily answered the most obvious question. “What happens if the other fellow isn’t sitting at his computer when you send it?”

“It waits for him,” the young executive said.

“Where?”

Nobody at the table could provide an answer precise enough to satisfy him, and the mystery of where electronic mail went while waiting for somebody became the funniest topic of the morning.

From there the conversation moved naturally to watches. The Pontiac executive wore a Rolex Submariner. The Cadillac man preferred his President. At last the Buick executive found the opportunity for which he had apparently been preparing since breakfast and rested his left wrist casually on the mahogany table.

His new Rolex performed magnificently.

It told him that it was 11:26.

Nobody asked the young executive another question.

He began gathering his papers while the others discussed where they would have lunch. He collected the market-share projections and the manufacturing-cost figures. He picked up the photographs of the Taurus, Accord, Camry and Lexus LS. Finally he retrieved the picture of the Sandrift Metallic Buick Century and looked at it for a few seconds before slipping it into the briefcase.

There really was nothing wrong with the car.

That was the damnedest part.

The Century would start in the morning. It would carry a family in comfort. With the front bench seat, it could even carry six people if everybody involved was sufficiently friendly. The air conditioner would cool the cabin. The power windows would go up and down. The 3.1-liter V6 would carry it along an interstate at seventy miles an hour without complaint. The cassette stereo would play George Strait. The whitewalls would remain white provided somebody occasionally remembered to scrub them.

A family could buy the Buick, drive it for years, trade it for another Buick and never experience a particularly strong emotion about the automobile in either direction.

General Motors had become extraordinarily good at building that car.

Somewhere in Japan, people were still trying desperately to build something better.

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The meeting adjourned at 11:38. The executives rose from their leather chairs and headed toward the elevators. Several had company-provided Cadillacs waiting downstairs, although the cars were replaced frequently enough that some of the men seemed only vaguely aware of precisely which Cadillac they were driving that month. One asked another whether his current car had the Northstar engine. The other wasn’t sure. It had arrived clean, full of gasoline and with his preferred radio stations already programmed, which was apparently everything he needed to know about it.

The young executive remained in the conference room after the others had gone.

Through the windows, Detroit stretched toward the horizon. Factories, offices, warehouses and rail lines disappeared into the distance. Thousands upon thousands of people earned their living from an industrial empire so enormous that imagining its disappearance seemed ridiculous.

General Motors had survived the Depression. General Motors had helped build the Arsenal of Democracy and win a world war. At its peak, General Motors had sold more than half the automobiles purchased in America. It employed hundreds of thousands of people, supported entire towns and operated an economic network larger than many countries.

General Motors did not feel like a corporation.

It felt like weather.

You did not wonder whether General Motors would still exist tomorrow any more than you wondered whether Lake Michigan would still be there.

The young man closed his briefcase and rode the elevator downstairs.

Nobody remembered his presentation that afternoon. Probably nobody thought much about it the following week. There were sales targets to meet, factories to operate, dealer disputes to settle, bonuses to calculate and next year’s models to launch. The market-share reports still showed General Motors comfortably ahead of everyone else, which meant the reports contained the only fact that mattered.

The 1996 Buick Century went into production.

It was perfectly acceptable.

Millions of other perfectly acceptable General Motors automobiles had preceded it, and millions more would follow. Chevrolet continued selling Chevrolets. Pontiac continued promising excitement. Oldsmobile continued trying to explain precisely where it belonged. Buick continued providing respectable automobiles for respectable people. Cadillac remained Cadillac. Saturn remained different. Geo fought the imports.

For a while.

Then the years began doing what years do.

They arrived.

The Japanese companies continued gaining customers who had once been considered temporary defectors. Toyota grew. Honda grew. Lexus became something Cadillac executives discussed without laughing. The Ford Taurus eventually surrendered its sales crown, but not necessarily back to General Motors. The American automobile market fragmented, changed and became less interested in the old hierarchy Detroit had spent half a century constructing.

Geo disappeared.

Then Oldsmobile.

Then Pontiac.

Then Saturn.

Dealerships closed. Plants closed. Market share contracted. Generations of buyers who once moved automatically from Chevrolet to Oldsmobile to Buick to Cadillac discovered that they were under no legal obligation to do so.

The corporation that had once been so large that its executives could mistake size for immunity finally discovered that being number one and being invulnerable were two entirely different things.

In 2009, General Motors entered bankruptcy.

By then, most of the men who had sat around that mahogany table in 1995 were gone. They had retired. Their pensions had been discussed. Their vacation houses had been enjoyed. Their golf handicaps had undoubtedly improved through methods unavailable to independent verification. Their Rolexes had continued keeping excellent time.

The Buick Century had disappeared three years earlier.

Nobody blamed it.

That would have been unfair.

The Century hadn’t designed itself. It hadn’t selected the platforms. It hadn’t allocated seven billion dollars. It hadn’t maintained overlapping divisions, duplicated dealer networks, scattered production among factories or confused customer loyalty with a law of nature.

The Buick had simply done exactly what General Motors asked it to do.

Start every morning.

Carry six people.

Blow cold air.

Play George Strait.

And remain perfectly, relentlessly, disastrously good enough.

Back in 1995, though, none of that had happened yet. General Motors was still number one, and everybody in the boardroom knew it. They had always been number one. They would always be number one. It was a fact of life.

Outside, somewhere in the executive parking lot, a Sandrift Metallic Buick Century sat beneath the Detroit sky. It had fourteen-inch wheels, narrow whitewalls, Taupe cloth upholstery, a 160-horsepower V6, a driver’s airbag and a factory cassette player.

Nothing remarkable.

Nothing alarming.

Nothing anybody upstairs needed to worry about.

Just the future, hiding in plain sight.

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