Search results for ""Author Thomas E. Bonsall""

This lavishly illustrated book on the famous automobile manufacturer traces the Studebaker family from its arrival in America in 1736, to the beginnings of the wagon business under John M. Studebaker and his brothers in the nineteenth century, to the family’s entry into the automobile industry in 1902, to the last Studebaker automobile to roll off the assembly line in 1966. The book, however, is much more than the story of a family business; it is also, in microcosm, the story of the industrial development of America. The Studebakers had always been industrialists in the sense that they made their living by manufacturing things, albeit on a small scale. When the Industrial Revolution hit the country with full force, spurred on by the Civil War, it transformed America from a rural-agrarian society into an urban-industrial one. The fortunes of the Studebaker family were transformed with it. As the title suggests, the Studebaker story was mostly one of success. Studebaker wagons and carriages were long noted for their quality and popularity, and so, too, were Studebaker automobiles. The 1953 Starliner and the 1963 Avanti, designed under Raymond Loewy’s direction, are widely regarded as among the most innovative examples of American industrial design. The book deals in detail with the soaring prosperity of the company in the 1920s, the bankruptcy and miraculous recovery in the 1930s, the stupendous success of the early post-World War II period, and the eventual decline of the company’s fortunes in the mid-1950s. It describes the development of such famous models as the Lark, Avanti, and Gran Tourisimo Hawk, with special attention paid to the Avanti II, a surprisingly successful spinoff from the dying company that continued to be produced until 1991. The final chapter, on why Studebaker died, is tightly reasoned and more convincing than previous theories. Throughout, the author has used personal incident and characterization to bring to life the rich, tumultuous history of one of America’s longest enduring industrial empires.

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Few cars in history have grabbed the public’s fancy as much as the ill-fated Edsel—the Titanic of automobiles, a marketing disaster whose magnitude has made it a household word. Remarkably, there has never before been a book that tells the whole story—how the Edsel was planned, created, produced, and marketed. This richly illustrated book is the result of years of research by an award-winning automotive historian with access to the dark reaches of the Ford Motor Company’s archives. The author also interviewed most of the original key Edsel design team stylists, who have supplied additional archival material. The result is a unique history of the Edsel program from the initial discussions in the late 1940s, through the first sketches in the mid-1950s, to the last, unlamented 1960 models. The Edsel story, however, deals with much more than a new brand of car. It was a key component in a deadly serious corporate undertaking at Ford Motor Company following World War II. Ford wanted to remedy years of mismanagement and return the company to parity with General Motors by dramatically expanding Ford’s presence in the burgeoning medium-priced field. The Edsel was the most spectacular failure in that effort, but was only one pawn in a complex, high-stakes chess game that was a thoroughgoing disaster from start to finish. In the case of the Edsel, the failure was the result of almost too many factors to count: poorly conceived marketing, contentious internal corporate politics, bad quality control, and, ultimately, lack of support at the higher reaches of the corporation. The greatest irony of all, though, is that the Edsel—as this book demonstrates in its surprising conclusion—was actually a modest success that deserved continued management support.

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