Where would we be without the car? From the earliest "horseless carriages" to the wizardry of today's Formula 1 racers, this colorful volume documents the fascinating evolution of the automobile. Filled with illustrations, photos, and images of historical documents, it explores the car's massive impact on popular culture, the great inventors and models, today's cutting-edge technology, and what the future might bring.
This astonishing journey into the belly of one of our most important industries, a portrait of the energy and ingenuity of America at work, follows the 1996 Ford Taurus from its conception to its public debut.
Get the official story behind the eighth generation of Chevrolet’s legendary sports car in this licensed book featuring engaging text and photography from GM’s archives and Corvette team members. This updated edition of Corvette Stingray is revised to cover the C8’s latest developments, including the 70th Anniversary model, high-performance Z06, and the all-new hybrid E-Ray. Corvette is Chevrolet’s iconic performance car. Its importance and status in the performance-car world cannot be overstated. Thus each new Corvette generation is sweated by Chevy’s designers, engineers, marketing staff, and executives to ensure that it sets the bar higher than the preceding version. With the eighth generation, Chevrolet did more than raise the bar or move the goalpost—they tore down the stadium and rebuilt it from scratch. For the first time ever in a production version, the Corvette featured a mid-engine configuration. Though Corvette engineers had experimented with this engine placement for several decades, 2020 marked the first time Chevrolet had committed it to production cars. The seventh-generation Corvette had prodigious power on tap and excellent performance, but its front-engine configuration had reached its traction limit with increasing horsepower levels. The mid-engine Corvette eliminated any remaining barriers and took the battle to supercar rivals like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren. With the new Z06 and E-Ray versions, Corvette brought even more heat to the competition. Corvette Stingray reveals the story every Corvette fan needs to read.
Featuring the fastest, weirdest, costliest, and most outrageous autos ever invented, this is the ultimate record book for car-crazy kids The world's fastest race cars. Extreme autos. Cutting-edge hypercars. Kids can't get enough motor action, and this great nonfiction book is crammed with facts, stats, and full-page images of the most amazing automobiles on Earth--and beyond. From the Lunar Roving Vehicle, the first car on the Moon, to Bloodhound SSC, which may become the first car to exceed 1,000 mph, it's all here in thrilling detail Reissue
A legend in the car industry reveals the philosophy that's starting to turn General Motors around. In 2001, General Motors hired Bob Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. He launched a war against penny pinching, office politics, turf wars, and risk avoidance. After declaring bankruptcy during the recession of 2008, GM is back on track thanks to its embrace of Lutz's philosophy. When Lutz got into the auto business in the early sixties, CEOs knew that if you captured the public's imagination with great cars, the money would follow. The car guys held sway, and GM dominated with bold, creative leadership and iconic brands like Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, GMC, and Chevrolet. But then GM's leadership began to put their faith in analysis, determined to eliminate the "waste" and "personality worship" of the bygone creative leaders. Management got too smart for its own good. With the bean counters firmly in charge, carmakers (and much of American industry) lost their single-minded focus on product excellence. Decline followed. Lutz's commonsense lessons (with a generous helping of fascinating anecdotes) will inspire readers at any company facing the bean counter analysis-paralysis menace.
At the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, Adolf Hitler presented the prototype for a small, oddly shaped, inexpensive family car that all good Aryans could enjoy. Decades later, that automobile—the Volkswagen Beetle—was one of the most beloved in the world. Bernhard Rieger examines culture and technology, politics and economics, and industrial design and advertising genius to reveal how a car commissioned by Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche became an exceptional global commodity on a par with Coca-Cola. Beyond its quality and low cost, the Beetle’s success hinged on its uncanny ability to capture the imaginations of people across nations and cultures. In West Germany, it came to stand for the postwar “economic miracle” and helped propel Europe into the age of mass motorization. In the United States, it was embraced in the suburbs, and then prized by the hippie counterculture as an antidote to suburban conformity. As its popularity waned in the First World, the Beetle crawled across Mexico and Latin America, where it symbolized a sturdy toughness necessary to thrive amid economic instability. Drawing from a wealth of sources in multiple languages, The People’s Car presents an international cast of characters—executives and engineers, journalists and advertisers, assembly line workers and car collectors, and everyday drivers—who made the Beetle into a global icon. The Beetle’s improbable story as a failed prestige project of the Third Reich which became a world-renowned brand illuminates the multiple origins, creative adaptations, and persisting inequalities that characterized twentieth-century globalization.
The Big Book of Tiny Cars presents entertaining profiles of automotive history’s most famous—and infamous—microcars and subcompacts from 1901 to today. Illustrated with photos and period ads.
For enthusiasts reading magazines such as Motor Trend, Road & Track, and others, David Kimble is no stranger. His brilliant cutaway artwork has been gracing the pages of those publications for years. Whether he illustrated engines, transmissions, full-car chassis, sports cars, race cars, or classics, his cutaway artwork revealed, in excruciating detail, things that a camera lens could never capture. In David Kimble's Cutaways: The Techniques and the Stories Behind the Art, Kimble reveals the secrets, techniques, procedures, and the dedication to craft that is required to produce these amazing illustrations. He covers the step-by-step procedures while producing fresh artwork for this book featuring a McLaren Can-Am car as well as a vintage Harley-Davidson. Although the procedures covered here are unique to Kimble, and pretty much a pipe dream to mere mortals, this title provides an inside look into how he does it. Also included are the stories and tales of how it all started, traveling the world to illustrate cars, behind the scenes with manufacturers, the Corvette years, as well as a gallery of many illustrations. Never before has David Kimble provided a look into his cutaway "skunkworks," or shared the procedures for bringing these beautiful technical illustrations to life. This book is a must-have for any automotive or art fan.
