As the 20th century’s final decade began, Tom Cruise felt the need for speed in a Chevy Lumina, the coolest new music came from Seattle, and NikeTown was the next big thing in retail therapy. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and with it the Soviet Union began its collapse. The Cold War was over. The good guys won. This was, declared political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the end of history.
Except it wasn’t. The 1990s would see the usual catalog of war and misery and political intrigue that has plagued humanity since the beginning. It would also see the invention of a technology that would reshape global culture—the world wide web. And it would be the decade that remade the auto industry.
For carmakers, the ’90s delivered a decade of unprecedented acquisitions, mergers, and alliances. Conventional notions of vehicle form and function were increasingly blurred if not completely outdated. It saw the death of the American family sedan, the rise of the SUV, the democratization of the luxury car, and the return of the roadster. The pickup became a lifestyle vehicle, and the primacy of the internal combustion engine was seriously questioned for the first time since the dawn of the automotive age. By the end of the ’90s, the Germans would be engineering Bentleys and Minis, the Japanese would be building pickup trucks in Texas, and the Americans would own the entire Swedish car industry.
When the decade began, Detroit’s Big Three had dominated the industry for more than 80 years, making and selling more cars and trucks than anyone else in the world. Detroit boasted plenty of imagination and technical skill, but little of it seemed to actually reach the
