The Age of Combustion: Notes on Automobile Design

The automobile is the ultimate analog machine and mankind’s most ingenious, seductive and damaging invention. For over a century, cars have provided reference points for our notions of style, status and desire. In design terms, the Age of Combustion was as rich and varied as architecture’s Baroque – and far more popular. And now it is coming to an end, as the internal-combustion engine is superseded by the battery and cars become wheeled computers, running on AI not oil. Together with a wide-ranging introduction, this book reproduces 60 of Stephen Bayley’s popular monthly columns for Octane, the outstanding classic car magazine where, for more than 10 years, he has provided the most consistent and insightful commentary on car culture, often based on privileged access to industry insiders.

Stephen Bayley is an author, critic, consultant, broadcaster, curator and founding director of the influential Design Museum. Over the past 30 years his writing has changed the way the world thinks about design. A lead columnist for Octane, the leading monthly classic car magazine, and the author of Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything, he is one of the world’s most respected commentators on car culture.

Tom Wolfe on Stephen Bayley: ‘I don’t know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design’.