Back on the Fast Track

Quiet, please. The new generation of power in Detroit is at work.

When Alexander James Trotman was named chairman of the Ford Motor Co. in October, there was no flourish or fanfare, not even a prior announcement. He was handed the keys to one of the largest and most powerful corporate kingdoms on earth in a small, no-frills gathering at the company's plant in Dearborn, Michigan, almost as an afterthought to the introduction of Ford's new Mustang. At General Motors 11 months earlier, affable, unassuming Jack Smith landed just as unceremoniously in that company's top job. Following the virulent boardroom coup that ousted his predecessor, chairman Robert Stempel, and most of his top executives, Smith ascended with no ritual at all, and settled down to business at the world's largest industrial corporation so quietly that he has seldom been seen or heard from in public since. At Chrysler, Bob Eaton owed his job to another noisy boardroom battle to persuade Chrysler's miracle worker Lee Iacocca that it was time for him to retire. After the dust settled early last year, Eaton drove up alone at 7:30 a.m. to Chrysler's factory gates in Highland Park, Michigan, in a new Grand Cherokee sports van, introduced himself to a plant guard and rolled through to work. Since then, Eaton has adopted Chrysler's informal team structure as if it were his own, pushing it along with the enthusiasm of a jolly and bookish college preceptor.

Such a modest and self-effacing style has not always been characteristic of a town that is better known for the flash and brassiness of its bosses, with cuff links the size of silver dollars and stogies the length of private yachts. Although few people outside the industry know their names, the three men who have ascended to power at GM, Ford and Chrysler within the past year have been working hard to accomplish what many said Detroit could never do: reinvent itself and profitably build cars that can stand bumper to bumper with the best the Europeans and Japanese have to offer. After two decades of spectacular management blunders that resulted in job loss on a Homeric scale, their success or failure is a legitimate test of the ability of American manufacturing to compete against the rest of the world.

A revolution in engineering, manufacturing and management has been proceeding in fits and starts since the mid-1980s at all three companies. Now it is finally starting to work. The evidence is found in a new generation of products: cars like Chrysler's white-hot LH sedans and Ram pickups, Ford's Taurus, Explorer and Lincoln Mark VIII, GM's Cadillac STS, the new Chevy Camaro and the Honda- and Toyota-killer Saturn.

For a change, Detroit is having a good year and is enjoying it largely at the expense of the once indomitable Japanese competition. The Big Three's sales have risen against Japanese automakers for the first time in a decade: U.S. cars posted sales increases of 10.7%, twice those of the Japanese carmakers. Fully 76% of Americans now say they are more likely to shop for an American car than they were five years ago, according to a TIME/Yankelovich poll this week.