“Obviously you can, since the truck I’m driving is pretty close to 20% larger than I wanted, in overall dimensions. Nobody makes a proper ‘small’ truck for the US market as yet and hasn’t done […]
George Romney may have been one of the U.S. auto industry’s best post-war leaders, but he made eight big mistakes while leading AMC from 1954-62. Some of his bad moves were costly enough to almost […]
(EXPANDED 10/28/2022) A few years ago Richard M. Langworth argued that Ford’s aggressive attempt to overtake Chevrolet in 1954 received more blame “than it deserved” in undercutting the viability of independent automakers (2019, p. 16). […]
The necessity of industry consolidation has long been a popular idea among auto executives and pundits. The basic argument has been that the automotive industry — both in the U.S. as well as globally — […]
Curbside Classic recently posted an unusually detailed discussion in a comment thread about why a merger did not occur between Hudson, Nash, Packard and Studebaker (Shafer, 2015). While the speculation is interesting, I’d question the underlying assumption […]
Keith Crain’s prevously-mentioned Automotive News column illustrates how dramatically expectations have changed about industry volume. In 2014 sales hit 16.5 million units. That was only good for ninth place in the record books. Crain (2014) noted that […]
If I were to own only one Studebaker history, this would be it. As with Richard M. Langworth’s other books written in the 1970s (e.g., Hudson, Kaiser-Frazer and Chrysler), this is a refreshingly “old-school” automotive history. Unlike all […]
This scholarly book has a fascinating chapter on the Chrysler bailout of the late-70s. Author Davita Silfen Glasberg challenges the usual story lines found in the auto buff press, such as that safety and emissions regulations put Chrysler […]
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