Customer Reviews

Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good book. It's well designed, the monochrome photographs are lovely; the text communicates a persuasive vision of the motor vehicle as an art form. But it is not what Mr Bayley claims it to be: "a book about the 80 or so greatest car designs ever".

This ambitious, not to say presumptuous, statement, is no doubt a deliberate provocation. Mr Bayley knows very well that there are millions of car nuts out here who all have our personal greatest cars lists and many of us could even put together a reasonably good justification for our choices.

What makes his 86 (to be precise) a more definitive list of great cars than mine? He doesn't precisely say. He makes a vague statement about them being ones that "changed conventional wisdom, lifted the game, raised the bar", but he doesn't say how. He's a style guru, so you might think he is talking mainly about design in an artistic sense (rather than engineering), but that is obviously not the case with many of his choices. As he says, the original Toyota Corolla was "plain of aspect and technologically unadventurous".

So it seems he also wishes to take into account standards of manufacture and quality control - where the Corolla did "lift the game" in its market segment.

OK, fair enough, but what are we to make of the NSU Prinz? A fine little car perhaps, even "a jewel"; but in the end just a Fiat 600 with Chevy Corvair styling, built to Volkswagen standards. Not enough, I would argue, to make the cut. And the Volkswagen management agreed when they took over NSU and ended its production!

The book is full of such lost causes and design cul de sacs, including the aforementioned Corvair. But the most egregious example is surely the Nash Metropolitan. The inclusion of this object (I cannot bring myself to call it a car), more than anything else, suggests that Mr Bayley is not to be taken seriously. The only field in which this curious artefact "raised the bar" was parody.

And I haven't even got onto the cars he leaves out. Like, for example, everything between the 1908 Model T Ford and the 1934 Citroen Traction Avant! Now I have to confess that I like many of the cars produced in this period. Clearly Mr Bayley does not. But that is not sufficient excuse to ignore the Lancia Lambda - a car that raised the bar far more emphatically than most of those in the book, including the two, admittedly very beautiful, 1950s Lancias included.

But never mind. If you love cars, buy the book anyway (but only the miniature edition - it isn't good enough to be worth the price of the big version). Then make your own list of the cars you'd like to have seen in it.

I bought this for my dad for Christmas and it was a huge success! My parents have it displayed on their coffee table and look through it often! My dad just loves the details about the cars and the great pictures included. Excellent purchase for the price!

I bought this book for my father for christmas, and for my grandfather for his birthday. They both really liked the book. I looked through it some and there are a lot of popular cars that shaped america over the years. The book lists the most memorable car of each year for the past 100 years or so, and somtime a couple of cars for some years. This is a great coffee table peice. This book will definitely stir up a conversation about cars.

I gave this book as a present (to a car-lover), and he reported to me that he was stunned by the beautful pictures, and that he thought that they had featured very interesting models.

I just bought this book for the library I run and was surprised to find that the cover is sueded. It's going to be interesting to shelve......