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This is by far the best book i have found on the history of the automobile
and it quickly became the main source for my timeline of
cars.
I found very few errors:
Chapter 6: where he talks about General
Motors acquiring Fisher Body Company as if it were a refrigerator company -
the refrigerator company was actually Guardian;
Chapter 8: the railroad reached
Los Angeles in 1887 not 1885, and that chapter has confusing statistics about
the number of people per car in the USA
Chapter 11: nobody seems to know what "automatic welding" is, but "shot welding" (the technique that made Budd's fortune) was introduced in 1912, and in 1921 Budd celebrated its millionth car body (so it was not invented in 1925); the first diesel car was Citroen's Rosalie;
Chapter 14: Tobuta should be Tobata and Nippon should be Nihon, and the Datsun preexisted them (the owner of both had the rights to manufacture it and he acquired it)
Several chapters analyze the social consequences of the car and make the book
recommended not only to specialists and historians but also to historians
and philosophers.
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