“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 […]
The plight of postwar car dealers can shed light on when seller’s market ended. Charles E. Edwards’ (1965) book, Dynamics of the United States Automobile Industry, offered a scholarly dive into the data that included […]
Automotive historian Thomas E. Bonsall argued that the 1958 Edsel wasn’t a flop. Indeed, he insisted that the Ford Motor Company shouldn’t have given up on the brand so quickly. The “real failure in the […]
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 […]
“. . . Henry was himself growing a little dizzy with everything happening around him. And the more disoriented he became, the angrier he got. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ford sat through […]
I checked out David Crippen’s (1989) oral history of Virgil Exner Jr. to see if he offered any useful factual details about two lingering historical debates — why the Studebaker Lark as well as the […]
Only rarely will Automotive News publish a historical piece. One such occasion was when it ran a feature about former Chrysler design head Virgil Exner. The thing I find most striking about this article is […]
Indie Auto reader James E. Duvall recently commented about how the Falcon-based Econoline van and truck had such a front-end weight bias that they could flip on their front end under intense braking unless there […]
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