An "astonishing...eye-opening chronicle" (Publisher's Weekly) of backstabbing, infighting, and industrial theft and espionage in the world's biggest business. It makes empires; it destroys economies; it shapes history. Welcome to the world's biggest business--the automobile industry. A hundred years ago there were six highly experimental cars. Today there are close to 400 million cars on the planet: set bumper to bumper on a six-lane highway, they would stretch well over 200,000 miles, more than eight times around the earth. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, is it any wonder that the major car companies wage a relentless war against one another, where (almost) anything goes? Here is the story of all the schemes and deceits, treacheries and shady deals in the battle for the world's car markets since the dawn of the global economy fifty years ago. The first true biography of the automobile, Car Wars gives us the automotive history as seen through the windshield of the car--with stories so spectacular they are often hard to believe. From Gianni Agnelli's deal to make Fiats in the USSR at the height of the cold war and Jose Ignacio Lopez's defection from GM to VW, through Pehr Gyllenhammar's foiled attempt to merge Volvo and Renault, and on to Nicolas Hayek's deal with Mercedes-Benz to build the Swatchcar in 1997, Car Wars is a roller coaster ride down the freeways and the back roads of the world's premier business, and an eye-opening history of the world's best-known and most-loved cars.
Even readers with only a passing interest in cars will be drawn into Mantle's unorthodox history of competition and corporate backstabbing among the automotive giants. Most auto buffs assume the Volkswagen "Beetle" was born in 1934 when Hitler commissioned cunning Austrian-Czech engineer Ferdinand Porsche to build a "people's car." Mantle fills in the story, providing details of Porsche's Nazi Party and SS membership (1923-1929) and his employment of slave labor; further, the VW Beetle's unsung progenitor was Austrian engineer Hans Ledwinka, based in Czechoslovakia, who gave Hitler a detailed drawing of a rear-engined car he had designed, which the Fuhrer then passed on to Porsche. In an astonishing section, Mantle details how General Motors's Opel subsidiary, based in Nazi Germany, manufactured Blitz trucks and fighter-jet engines for Hitler's forces. In 1967, GM received $33 million in tax exemptions from the U.S. government for damages sustained by Allied bombing of its German factories. Biographer of Andrew Lloyd Weber and author of a book about Lloyd's of London, Mantle spins tales that revise modern history: Fiat's Cold War balancing act as its ex-playboy-turned-dealmaker Gianni Agnelli clinched a pact to build cars in the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s; Toyota's ascent from near-bankruptcy in 1950 through its revolutionary production methods; Nissan's start-up in 1930 when its engineers plagiarized a British Austin Seven; Detroit's 1980s' slide from Motor City to Murder City; and the battle for global dominance among European, Japanese and U.S. automakers. Packing in tales involving Renault, Peugeot, Mazda, Ford, Hyundai, BMW, Volvo and Land-Rover, Mantle closes this eye-opening chronicle with a look at the massive smuggling of stolen cars into Eastern Europe and China. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
