“It’s enormous. The (original] Mini was the best-packaged car of all time(; the BMW Mini) is an example of how not to do it. The interior space is not much bigger than the old Mini, […]
(EXPANDED FROM 1/4/2014) American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America’s Last Independent, is an update of sorts for a book Patrick Foster published 20 years earlier. However, Foster’s newer book includes quite a […]
(UPDATED FROM 2/1/2020) Brooks Stevens’s proposed redesign of the Studebaker Lark four-door sedan came off pretty weird. That’s too bad, because the concept car could have been a baby 1961-63 Lincoln Continental. The proposed design […]
Geeber recently wrote one of the best overviews I have ever seen about why Chrysler’s dealer networks became so dysfunctional. His comment (below) was in response to, “Lynn Townsend failed to solve Chrysler’s warfare between […]
(EXPANDED FROM 12/1/2019) This may not be a very popular perspective, but I would suggest that the so-called Loewy coupes were at their best in 1955. Although the styling wasn’t nearly as clean as the […]
(EXPANDED FROM 10/23/2020) Old Car Brochures has an unusual marketing piece from Packard. “Story of a Living Legend and the world in which it grows” showcased the automaker’s history as well as its last-ditched effort to […]
(UPDATED FROM 6/26/2020) The Saab 99/900 proved to be the box that crushed the tiny Swedish carmaker. I grant you that this platform was hardly an immediate failure. Even so, the design of the 99 […]
(UPDATED FROM 5/1/2020) American automakers have always had a penchant for extravagant designs that can look overwrought compared to imports. Of course, this has been changing of late as foreign automakers — particularly the Japanese […]
(EXPANDED FROM 6/26/2020) Disaster in Dearborn: The Story of the Edsel is paradoxical. On the one hand, this is a serious history book — unlike so many of the coffee-table decorations that populate the big-box […]
(EXPANDED 10/24/2022) “Lower, longer, wider” was the domestic automakers’ dominant design approach until they were forced to downsize their fleet in the late-1970s due to federal fuel-economy standards. Since that time automakers have at least […]
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