Brooks Stevens was a complicated character. For example, he championed ultra-simple car designs but also coined the term “planned obsolescence” to describe an industrial designer’s mission (Adamson, 2003; p. 129). One way that played out […]
Daniel Knowles, the midwest correspondent for The Economist, grew up in the United Kingdom and as a reporter has traveled extensively around the world. So when he recently wrote a book about the automobile, he […]
My perception is that there has been a fairly good gender balance at the auto shows I regularly attend at the LeMay Collections at Marymount. Thus, I wonder why so few women appear to participate […]
Whether John Z. DeLorean was merely a car guy with a tragic life trajectory or a sociopath has been an ongoing debate here at Indie Auto. Thus, I was intrigued to come across David E. […]
“Chrysler says its financial troubles are caused, in part, by safety and emissions laws that penalize it more than GM or Ford. It costs Chrysler ‘almost twice as much as it will cost GM’ to […]
Jack Mueller’s book on Kaiser-Frazer weighrd in on the question of why General Motors did not end up selling the automaker its Rocket V8 engine. He pointed to evidence that the Oldsmobile Division initially showed […]
One of the lingering debates about the early postwar period was when the seller’s market ended. Charles E. Edwards’ (1965) book, Dynamics of the United States Automobile Industry, offered a scholarly dive into the data […]
Automotive historian Thomas E. Bonsall argued that the 1958 Edsel wasn’t a flop and that the Ford Motor Company shouldn’t have given up on the brand so quickly. The “real failure in the Edsel saga” […]
Some of the web’s most important writing is buried in auto blog comment sections. One of my all-time favorites is a soliloquy by Truth About Cars commentator Petezeiss (2014). In response to criticisms of the 2015 Corvette Z06’s weight gain, […]
Business reporters for national newspapers tend to be at their best when they provide detailed, play-by-play coverage of major events in the U.S. auto industry. Unfortunately, they haven’t been as good in analyzing why things […]
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