Download or read book How Detroit Became the Automotive Capital written by Robert G. Szudarek and published by Frost Lake Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of the automobile industry through profiles of over 125 automobile manufacturers from Detroit and surrounding suburbs. Information on company founders, key personnel, car specifications, and more, help tell the story of the American automobile industry. Over 500 photographs of automobiles, factories, company logos, and personnel, offer readers further insight into the industry's evolution over the last 100 years. Interesting anecdotes on the first gasoline stations, selling cars, roads, steering wheel placement, and more are also included.
Download or read book How Detroit Became the Automotive Capital written by Robert G. Szudarek and published by . This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Detroit Became the Automotive Capital written by Robert G. Szudarek and published by . This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Detroit Became the Automotive Capitol of the World written by Robert Tata and published by Author House. This book was released on 2013-07-08 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author, a licensed Professional Engineer, has family roots in the Detroit area and has also been employed in an engineering capacity by all Big Three automakers; GM, Ford, & Chrysler. He has often wondered how the auto industry got its beginning in such a place as Detroit, Michigan, way off the beaten path, in an isolated glove-shaped piece of land thrust up between two lakes, where weather can be severe. Ohio and Indiana, who were also very active in the creation of the auto industry, are in the same general area of the country as Michigan and share the same climate. Why would anyone favor this three state area? One would think that other parts of the country would be more conducive to the formation of such an important part of the history of this nation. After all, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana were not members of the original 13 states and therefore have to be considered less developed territories than the original thirteen states around the turn of the 19th century when the American Gasoline-powered automobile was invented. Read how the author has searched for the answers to these somewhat perplexing questions on why Detroit became the Motor City.
Download or read book How Detroit Became the Automotive Capital written by Robert G. Szudarek and published by Frost Lake Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of the automobile industry through profiles of over 125 automobile manufacturers from Detroit and surrounding suburbs. Information on company founders, key personnel, car specifications, and more, help tell the story of the American automobile industry. Over 500 photographs of automobiles, factories, company logos, and personnel, offer readers further insight into the industry's evolution over the last 100 years. Interesting anecdotes on the first gasoline stations, selling cars, roads, steering wheel placement, and more are also included.
Download or read book Detroit City of Industry written by David Lee Poremba and published by Arcadia Library Editions. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detroit is known worldwide as the automotive capital of the world. What is not widely known is that, prior to the birth of the automobile, a tremendous diversity of manufactured goods transformed Detroit from a frontier town into a great industrial city. Another vital installment in a series of books about the Dynamic City, Detroit: City of Industry illustrates a slice of the city's history that is largely unknown. Through a collection of remarkable images that are among the oldest in the city, Detroit is revealed as a thriving, bustling manufacturing town that served as the world's leader in a number of important industries. Bessemer steel, iron, steel rails, freight cars, stoves, lumber, drugs, and cigars are just a few of the products that helped the city build the capital that was later needed to prosper during the automobile era. This book examines Detroit's development from the 1860s through the 1890s, and its evolution into a leading industrial center of the Midwest.
Download or read book The End of Detroit written by Micheline Maynard and published by Currency. This book was released on 2004-09-21 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth, hard-hitting account of the mistakes, miscalculations and myopia that have doomed America’s automobile industry. In the 1990s, Detroit’s Big Three automobile companies were riding high. The introduction of the minivan and the SUV had revitalized the industry, and it was widely believed that Detroit had miraculously overcome the threat of foreign imports and regained its ascendant position. As Micheline Maynard makes brilliantly clear in THE END OF DETROIT, however, the traditional American car industry was, in fact, headed for disaster. Maynard argues that by focusing on high-profit trucks and SUVs, the Big Three missed a golden opportunity to win back the American car-buyer. Foreign companies like Toyota and Honda solidified their dominance in family and economy cars, gained market share in high-margin luxury cars, and, in an ironic twist, soon stormed in with their own sophisticatedly engineered and marketed SUVs, pickups and minivans. Detroit, suffering from a “good enough” syndrome and wedded to ineffective marketing gimmicks like rebates and zero-percent financing, failed to give consumers what they really wanted—reliability, the latest technology and good design at a reasonable cost. Drawing on a wide range of interviews with industry leaders, including Toyota’s Fujio Cho, Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn, Chrysler’s Dieter Zetsche, BMW’s Helmut Panke, and GM’s Robert Lutz, as well as car designers, engineers, test drivers and owners, Maynard presents a stark picture of the culture of arrogance and insularity that led American car manufacturers astray. Maynard predicts that, by the end of the decade, one of the American car makers will no longer exist in its present form.
Download or read book Forging Global Fordism written by Stefan J. Link and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar era As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order. Stefan Link uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. He explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors like William Werner, Ferdinand Porsche, and Stepan Dybets helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war. Forging Global Fordism challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post–World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.
Download or read book Glory Days written by Jim Wangers and published by Bentley Publishers. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The automobile industry is one of the most capital- and marketing-intensive industries in the world today. Common wisdom states that the keys to sales success in the industry are no different than in any other: brand management, product positioning, and brand imaging. But what do these commonly traded buzzwords really mean, and how do they translate into a successful brand campaign? In Glory Days, Jim Wangers uses his 45-year career in Detroit as the basis for explaining successful brand marketing for automobiles: -- Why brand management for cars is not the same as for other "branded" products -- How to position a model for the best possible tie-in promotion -- and how not to -- What it takes to establish and evolve a brand image "Any car maker's greatest asset is their perceived image in the marketplace". Wangers knows what he is talking about, for he was part of the most successful brand marketing campaign to ever come out of Detroit. At a time when such automotive legends as "Bunkie" Knudsen, Pete Estes, and John DeLorean held sway in the Motor City, Jim Wangers created and defined the American musclecar image, devising savvy brand marketing strategies to promote the car that started it all and became a cultural icon: the Pontiac GTO.
Download or read book The E M F Company written by Anthony J Yanik and published by SAE International. This book was released on 2001-08-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the remarkable story of these three automotive giants and the impact they had on the American car industry. Everitt was instrumental in forming the extensive body building industry that characterized Detroit prior to World War II. Metzger established the first automotive dealership in Detroit, if not the country, and served as head of sales of Cadillac during its formative years. Flanders, a genius with machines, masterminded the tools of production for the first Model T.
Download or read book Master of Precision written by Ottilie M. Leland and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1966 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master of Precision is the fascinating firsthand account of Henry Martyn Leland's life and work during the early days of the automobile industry.
Download or read book Conspicuous Production written by Donald Finlay Davis and published by Philadelphia : Temple University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the founding of the American automotive industry in the 1890s, the social and economic community of Detroit was dramatically altered. In this first detailed examination of the relationship between the dominant industry and the social elite of Detroit, Donald Finlay Davis demonstrates how decisions and ambitions in one sphere fed into the other.Detroit's automotive industry was socially divided, roughly along the lines of its own price-class hierarchy, and Davis argues that these divisions influenced community decision-making. Bridging the gap between urban and business history, Conspicuous Production traces how the social aspirations of the "gasoline aristocracy" profoundly influenced the models and marketing decisions of these fledgling companies. The identification of social renegade Henry Ford with the low-and middle-income groups contributed to the Model T being scorned as a vehicle for the upwardly mobile. The Packard-"a gentlemen's car built by gentlemen"-and other luxury manufactures such as Lincoln, Wayne, Lozier, and Northern were embraced by the social elite while the more pedestrian models dominated the market. The author sheds new light on the fate of Detroit's old families; on the ascent of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler; on Detroit's transit policies; and on the Michigan bank crash that precipitated the closure of America's banks in March 1933.Illustrated with early advertisements and promotional photos of classic automobiles, Conspicuous Production traces the mutual influence of industrial and community leadership in early twentieth-century Detroit and asks: Who determined that American technology should serve the masses as well as the classes? Author note: Donald Finlay Davis is Associate Professor of History at the University of Ottawa.
Download or read book Story of the Automobile written by Herbert Lee Barber and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Financial History of the American Automobile Industry written by Lawrence Howard Seltzer and published by A. M. Kelley. This book was released on 1928 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Sack of Detroit written by Kenneth Whyte and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vigorous, provocative... The Sack of Detroit is compelling, bold and stylishly written." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal A provocative, revelatory history of the epic rise—and unnecessary fall—of the U.S. automotive industry, uncovering the vivid story of innovation, politics, and business that led to a sudden, seismic shift in American priorities that is still felt today, from the acclaimed author of Hoover In the 1950s, America enjoyed massive growth and affluence, and no companies contributed more to its success than automakers. They were the biggest and best businesses in the world, their leadership revered, their methods imitated, and their brands synonymous with the nation's aspirations. But by the end of the 1960s, Detroit's profits had evaporated and its famed executives had become symbols of greed, arrogance, and incompetence. And no company suffered this reversal more than General Motors, which found itself the main target of a Senate hearing on auto safety that publicly humiliated its leadership and shattered its reputation. In The Sack of Detroit, Kenneth Whyte recounts the epic rise and unnecessary fall of America's most important industry. At the center of his absorbing narrative are the titans of the automotive world but also the crusaders of safety, including Ralph Nader and a group of senators including Bobby Kennedy. Their collision left Detroit in a ditch, launched a new era of consumer advocacy and government regulation, and contributed significantly to the decline of American enterprise. This is a vivid story of politics, business, and a sudden, seismic shift in American priorities that is still felt today.
Download or read book Fins written by William Knoedelseder and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of Bitter Brew chronicles the birth and rise to greatness of the American auto industry through the remarkable life of Harley Earl, an eccentric six-foot-five, stuttering visionary who dropped out of college and went on to invent the profession of automobile styling, thereby revolutionized the way cars were made, marketed, and even imagined. Harleys Earl’s story qualifies as a bona fide American family saga. It began in the Michigan pine forest in the years after the Civil War, traveled across the Great Plains on the wooden wheels of a covered wagon, and eventually settled in a dirt road village named Hollywood, California, where young Harley took the skills he learned working in his father’s carriage shop and applied them to designing sleek, racy-looking automobile bodies for the fast crowd in the burgeoning silent movie business. As the 1920s roared with the sound of mass manufacturing, Harley returned to Michigan, where, at GM’s invitation, he introduced art into the rigid mechanics of auto-making. Over the next thirty years, he functioned as a kind of combination Steve Jobs and Tom Ford of his time, redefining the form and function of the country’s premier product. His impact was profound. When he retired as GM’s VP of Styling in 1958, Detroit reigned as the manufacturing capitol of the world and General Motors ranked as the most successful company in the history of business. Knoedelseder tells the story in ways both large and small, weaving the history of the company with the history of Detroit and the Earl family as Fins examines the effect of the automobile on America’s economy, culture, and national psyche.
Download or read book Making and Selling Cars written by James M. Rubenstein and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creation of fast food, to the design of cities, to the character of our landscape, the automobile has shaped nearly every aspect of modern American life. In fact, the U.S. motor vehicle industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the world. James Rubenstein documents the story of the automotive industry . . . which despite its power, is an industry constantly struggling to redefine itself and assure its success. Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry shows how this industry made adjustments and fostered innovations in both production and marketing in order to remain a viable force throughout the twentieth-century. Rubenstein builds his study of the American auto industry with care, taking the reader through this quintessentially modern history of production and consumption. Avoiding jargon while never over simplifying, Rubenstein gives a detailed and straightforward account of both the production and merchandising of cars. We learn how the industry began and about its methods for building cars and the modern American marketplace. Along the way there were many missteps and challenges—the Edsel, the fuel crisis, and the ascendancy of Japanese cars in the 1980s. The industry met these types of problems with new techniques and approaches. To demonstrate this, Rubenstein gives the reader examples of how the auto industry used to work, which he alternates with chapters showing how the industry has reinvented itself. Making and Selling Cars explains why the U.S. automotive industry has been and remains a vigorous shaper of the American economy.
