The People’s Car

The People’s Car
Author: Bernhard Rieger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674075757

At the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, Adolf Hitler presented the prototype for a small, oddly shaped, inexpensive family car that all good Aryans could enjoy. Decades later, that automobile—the Volkswagen Beetle—was one of the most beloved in the world. Bernhard Rieger examines culture and technology, politics and economics, and industrial design and advertising genius to reveal how a car commissioned by Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche became an exceptional global commodity on a par with Coca-Cola. Beyond its quality and low cost, the Beetle’s success hinged on its uncanny ability to capture the imaginations of people across nations and cultures. In West Germany, it came to stand for the postwar “economic miracle” and helped propel Europe into the age of mass motorization. In the United States, it was embraced in the suburbs, and then prized by the hippie counterculture as an antidote to suburban conformity. As its popularity waned in the First World, the Beetle crawled across Mexico and Latin America, where it symbolized a sturdy toughness necessary to thrive amid economic instability. Drawing from a wealth of sources in multiple languages, The People’s Car presents an international cast of characters—executives and engineers, journalists and advertisers, assembly line workers and car collectors, and everyday drivers—who made the Beetle into a global icon. The Beetle’s improbable story as a failed prestige project of the Third Reich which became a world-renowned brand illuminates the multiple origins, creative adaptations, and persisting inequalities that characterized twentieth-century globalization.

The Beetle

The Beetle
Author: H. R. Etzold
Publisher: Haynes Publications
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1990-03-24
Genre: Volkswagen Beetle automobile
ISBN: 9780854298457

People's Car

People's Car
Author: Sarasij Majumder
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0823282430

India is witnessing a unique moment in populism, with sentiments divided between economic reforms that promise fast industrialization and protests that thwart such industrialization. This book offers an ethnographic study of divergent local responses to the proposed construction of a Tata Motors factory in eastern India that would have produced the Nano, the so-called people’s car. Initial excitement was followed by long protests among the villagers whose agricultural land was being acquired for the project. After these protests secured the relocation of the factory, further demonstrations followed, sometimes involving the same participants, seeking to bring the factory back. People’s Car explores this ambivalence concerning industrialization, asking why long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast-paced industrialization. Majumder argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is incommensurable with money and a site specially marked by desire for middle caste small landowners aspiring to futures beyond agriculture. Previous studies of industrialization have generally focused on either demands for development or populist critiques. Moving beyond romantic clichés about urban/rural divisions, People’s Car offers a single analytical and ethnographic framework demonstrating how pro- and anti-industrialization forces feed off each other.

Where Is My Flying Car?

Where Is My Flying Car?
Author: J. Storrs Hall
Publisher: Stripe Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1953953271

From an engineer and futurist, an impassioned account of technological stagnation since the 1970s and an imaginative blueprint for a richer, more abundant future The science fiction of the 1960s promised us a future remade by technological innovation: we’d vacation in geodesic domes on Mars, have meaningful conversations with computers, and drop our children off at school in flying cars. Fast-forward 60 years, and we’re still stuck in traffic in gas-guzzling sedans and boarding the same types of planes we flew in over half a century ago. What happened to the future we were promised? In Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer this deceptively simple question. What starts as an examination of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an investigation of the scientific, technological, and social roots of the economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion technology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution. Hall then outlines a framework for a future powered by exponential progress—one in which we build as much in the world of atoms as we do in the world of bits, one rich in abundance and wonder. Drawing on years of original research and personal engineering experience, Where Is My Flying Car?, originally published in 2018, is an urgent, timely analysis of technological progress over the last 50 years and a bold vision for a better future.

The Socialist People's Car

The Socialist People's Car
Author: Valentina Fava
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"The Socialist People's Car reconstructs the history of Škoda Auto between 1918 and 1964. Based on new archival research, Fava's volume illustrates the contradictions of the Czechoslovak experience, raising the question of how the stratification of foreign technical and organizational knowledge shaped the Czechoslovak production practices and generated a specific technical and organizational culture. The volume not only illustrates how this culture was formed, what its components were, and how engineers and managers performing their professional duties related to the Party's power but also addresses the Party's controversial approach to mass motorization." --Back cover.

Unsafe at Any Speed

Unsafe at Any Speed
Author: Ralph Nader
Publisher: New York : Grossman
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1965
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN:

Account of how and why cars kill, and why the automobile manufacturers have failed to make cars safe.

Curbing Traffic

Curbing Traffic
Author: Chris Bruntlett
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1642831654

In Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, mobility experts Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people. Their insights will help decision makers and advocates to better understand and communicate the human impacts of low-car cities: lower anxiety and stress, increased independence, social autonomy, inclusion, and improved mental and physical wellbeing. Curbing Traffic provides relatable, emotional, and personal reasons why it matters and inspiration for exporting the low-car city.

Strong Towns

Strong Towns
Author: Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1119564816

A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

Hitler's Chariots

Hitler's Chariots
Author: Blaine Taylor
Publisher: Schiffer Pub Limited
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780764332364

This book is the first ever illustrated study on the often photographed - but never fully explained - mechanical marvel, the Mercedes-Benz G-4 cross-country touring car, the vehicle that carried Adolf Hitler across much of Europe before and during World War II. Culled from the rich photo archives of Daimler-Benz, as well as from captured German albums in U.S. archives, this work depicts the G-4 in fascinating images and detailed text. Volume 2 will cover the Daimler-Benz 770K Grosser Mercedes. ILLUSTRATIONS 300 b/w images

The Yugo

The Yugo
Author: Jason Vuic
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1429945397

Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends. Hardly. The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s. Mix one rabid entrepreneur, several thousand "good" communists, a willing U.S. State Department, the shortsighted Detroit auto industry, and improvident bankers, shake vigorously, and you've got The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Brilliantly re-creating the amazing confluence of events that produced the Yugo, Yugoslav expert Jason Vuic uproariously tells the story of the car that became an international joke: The American CEO who happens upon a Yugo right when his company needs to find a new import or go under. A State Department eager to aid Yugoslavia's nonaligned communist government. Zastava Automobiles, which overhauls its factory to produce an American-ready Yugo in six months. And a hole left by Detroit in the cheap subcompact market that creates a race to the bottom that leaves the Yugo . . . at the bottom.