Tagged: auto industry

  Back in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches through the ruins for clues to its fate, his family’s, and his own in his new book Detroit: An American Autopsy.

If Detroit is America’s vanguard in good times and bad, then here is the only place to turn for guid¬ance in our troubled era. While redemption is thin on the ground in this ghost of a city, Detroit: An American Autopsy is no hopeless parable. LeDuff shares an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer. Detroit is a dark comedy of the absurdity of American life in the twenty-first century, a deeply human drama of colossal greed and endurance, ignorance and courage.

DETROIT (AP) — Ford Motor Co. says its U.S. sales rose 2 percent in December, as strong sales of small cars made up for weak truck sales.

Sales of the Focus small car rose 58 percent from last December, while the Fiesta subcompact was up 53 percent. F-Series pickup truck sales were flat compared with last December. Sales of the new Ford Escape small SUV, which has been hit with several recalls, fell 21 percent.

Once America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is one of our country's greatest urban failures, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into something of a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, and utopian environmentalists have been drawn to Detroit's decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier.