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 best all-around critique […]
Chrome Colossus: General Motors and its Times, is one of the best automotive history books in my library. Author Ed Cray eschewed the usual focus on product minutiae and instead focused on how GM’s growth in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The American auto industry may not want to admit this, but Unsafe at Any Speed is arguably the single most influential automotive book of the last 70 years. As discussed at Curbside Classic (Niedermeyer, 2012), Ralph Nader […]
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