(EXPANDED FROM 1/22/2021) The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry is one of the most important automotive books of the last 50 years. That’s because Brock Yates presented what may very well be the […]
(EXPANDED FROM 12/6/2022) Peter Grist stated that he tried to make this authorized biography of car designer Virgil Exner “as unbiased as possible” (p. 5). Even so, Visioneer has a family scrapbook quality, replete with childhood photos and […]
(EXPANDED FROM 6/14/2023) For good or ill, Brooks Stevens was one of the most influential independent U.S. auto design consultants of the postwar era. Despite some shaky analysis and factual lapses, the best book about […]
Compared to Asphalt Nation (Holtz, 1997), Carjacked focused more on critiquing car culture and less on presenting policy alternatives. Authors Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez also paid more attention to encouraging individual readers to change […]
The authors took a clean sheet of paper and sketched an alternative approach to car design that may seem mainstream today but was decidedly exotic when the book was published in 2010. They proposed a […]
Although written by a former Detroit bureau chief of The New York Times, this book uses high-octane rhetoric to challenge the value of sport utility vehicles when they were just beginning to reach the peak of […]
This collection of roughly 50 essays covers a broad range of topics. For example, Jane Jacobs considered the subtleties of how people could better interact with cars in urban centers; Geremie Barme discussed the “revolutionary” nature […]
Almost all of the material in this book is now dated, but I include Forward Drive as a cautionary tale about heralding change in the American auto industry. Forward Drive was published in 2000. That was […]
This is an older book but stands out as one of the most prominent critiques of the U.S.’s automotive-dominated transportation system. Jane Holtz Kay argued that the car had become to financially, socially and environmentally costly to the […]
I came across this scholarly paper when looking for data on the declining market share of domestic automakers. Lorraine Eden and Maureen Appel Molot present that data in a variety of useful ways. However, what is […]
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