This Car Sux!
Tales and Tips from a Life of Wheeling and Dealing
Surveying the automotive industry in terms of successes and failures across time, The Car Sux! is an entertaining insider’s memoir.
Randy Pressgrove’s dishy memoir This Car Sux! is about his work as a car salesman; it includes insights on the whole automotive industry.
Revealing how car dealerships operate, this anecdotal memoir is loosely arranged to highlight standout moments from the course of Pressgrove’s four-decade career selling cars. Some of its chapters are thematic, though there is some repetition: Four chapters in a row introduce different dealers that Pressgrove worked with, drawing out the quirks and eccentricities of each. Also considered are factors like information technology and human resources departments: One car company, Pressgrove reports, became infamous for firing older employees; the HR practices of another shattered cultural expectations of honor when it exited a national market abruptly, leaving its workers in the lurch.
Pressgrove’s memories also reflect notable industry events. He discusses automakers’ bankruptcies, pandemic challenges, and successful promotional tactics in the 1950s that are shown to have led to contemporary automotive incentive programs. Its examples are intriguing, as with the marketing failure of a car’s inauspicious debut abroad, where its name translated to a common expression for “It won’t go.”
Indeed, the book’s personal stories are somewhat overshadowed by its broader automotive industry insights. It explains what differentiates product successes from flops, surveying the industry’s ups and downs in a revealing, if rearward-gazing, manner. It describes how one company thrived due to a focus on expensive pickup trucks and sports utility vehicles, and it makes general arguments such as that anyone can succeed at selling cars after “a bunch of boneheads … go from the highest market capitalization of any company on earth in October 2009 to a scandalous, insipid sinking in September 2015 due to the diesel incident, then still survive” at the same sales volume as before.
Still, the prose is playful and holds attention, as when the book notes that “the driven entrepreneurs of the early twentieth century probably didn’t intend to put the entire world on wheels.” It is also sometimes brash and lively, as with its colorful reference to the “cads, curmudgeons, curs, clowns, characters, bozos, bumblers and buffoons” in the business. Such elements make its pages entertaining. The book represents a broad, sweeping tour of the industry, surveying both monumental changes and the vacillations of the past.
A revealing industry insider’s memoir, This Car Sux! reveals how car salespeople and automakers have done business across time.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
