A FREEWHEELING INSIDER ACCOUNT OF THE BASTARDS, BANDITS, AND BOZOS OF AMERICA’S CAR BUSINESS— AND WHAT YOU SHOULD REALLY KNOW BEFORE YOU BUY A CAR—FROM A FORTY-YEAR AUTO INDUSTRY VETERAN.
From the moment he joined a Memphis, Tennessee, dealership of Liberty Chrysler-Plymouth in 1979 as perhaps the only parts counterman in history with a graduate degree in Scottish medieval history, Randy Pressgrove has been a car guy.
In the ensuing four decades in sales and dealership development assignments across the world, he saw it all—from Chrysler and most of the industry’s narrow escape from the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1980s, to the 1990s revival of the VW Beetle, to the rise of electric vehicles (EVs), to the existential change brought on by the 2020s pandemic, and everything in between.
Written with an old-fashioned storyteller’s panache, a wide-angle historical lens, and the rare vantage point of someone with experience in all the methods and madness of the car-buying process from the factory to the showroom, this book reveals:
• What to do and what not to do when buying a car (never get the extended warranty!)
• The automobile business life at the dealership, customer, lonely manufacturer’s rep, and even the finance company levels
• The most memorable and vexing challenges facing those who’ve plied the auto trade— from great leaders and turnaround artists to bumbling misfits and sleazy salesmen—since its birth more than one hundred years ago
This Car Sux! is part hilarious and compulsively readable memoir, part Kitchen Confidential for cars, and part epic saga of the automobile industry as it evolved from a vibrant and quintessentially American institution of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s to one today that is beset on all sides by cutthroat competition, scandal, and existential technological disruption.
