The Life of the Automobile

March 10, 2014
This sweeping attempt to trace the development, dominance, and refiguring of the car offers some terrific glimpses at the vast and varied worldwide story of the automobile. Parisser, a versatile and enthusiastic English historian, offers entertaining vignettes of late–19th-century car pioneers, from German engineer Karl Benz and his first-ever long car trip from Mannheim to Pforzsheim and car maker Louis Renault. Parisser is at his best with encapsulated corporate histories of such automakers as Ford and Nissan. Along the way he offers devastating portraits of “out of touch” executives who oversaw the decline and fall of Detroit’s Big Three car makers in the decades after the energy crises of the 1970s, when “cheap oil and motoring became a thing of the past.” He highlights Roger Smith, the unlamented GM chairman from 1981 to 1990, whose tenure was marked by “business disasters compounded by appalling public relations blunders,” as well as maverick John DeLorean, whose attempt to make luxury vehicles sank “from tragedy, to farce, to movie stardom” thanks to his eponymous vehicle’s role in the Back to the Future movie franchise. Parisser is an enthusiastic writer, but his story gets mired with industrial insider references and descriptions of company mergers.