(EXPANDED FROM 11/1/2021) A 1956 Packard booklet hints at how its head James Nance got too big for his britches. A marketing piece titled, “Story of a Living Legend and the world in which it […]
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 […]
The May 1966 issue of Motor Trend included an unusually long article about the woes of American Motors. The piece was written by Editor Donald Mac Donald, so presumably it displayed the magazine’s most sophisticated […]
(EXPANDED FROM 3/31/2023) Compacts and personal coupes generated an outsized amount of media attention during the 1960s, but the most important emerging market segment turned out to be mid-sized cars. Sales rose steadily to the […]
Top General Motors’ designers William Mitchell and Chuck Jordan showed glimmers of adaptiveness in an interview with Motor Trend (1971) magazine. However, the luxury of hindsight allows us to see some of the blinders that […]
(EXPANDED FROM 1/15/2021) The 1953 Hudson Hornet’s styling strikes me as being peak “step down.” As a case in point, this was the last year for the rounded rear end. It looked dated compared to […]
In the “Story Ideas Bank” Stewdi offered a topic that got me thinking: What are the most successful facelifts of all time? The power was out at Indie Auto’s world headquarters for most of the […]
Former Ford Motor Company executive Donald Frey explained to David Crippen (1986) why he thought that the automaker’s “cockamamie” decision-making structure led to major quality-control problems with the 1957 Ford. “As it turned out, preceding […]
I am ambivalent about Charles K. Hyde’s book, Riding the Roller Coaster: A History of the Chrysler Corporation. The American automotive history field desperately needs more scholarly books, and Hyde is a relatively rare academic […]
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