Customer Reviews

Detroit Dream Cars (Automotive History and Personalities)

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Detroit Dream Cars is supposedly about cars that could have been. but it's, in fact, a book that could have been.

It could have explored some of the most fascinating and significant vehicles ever, but instead sacrifices quality for quantity, touching lightly on dozens of insignificant, lightly modified show versions of production cars, while giving short shrift to the development and reaction to important concept vehicles.

While some new insights and knowledge are evident, most of the descriptions of these organized by marque group of cars appear to be rewritten press releases, with little differentiation of length reflecting each car's importance.

The book's production values are also just fair, although there is a lavish and attractive color section included. Particularly galling is the mismatch of captions to photos. A caption about the important Lincoln Futura (p. 96) underscores a photo of three people in an old convertible by a factory. A photo of Chevy's 1959 racing Sting Ray, (p. 37) which set the styling for the 63-67 production car, is captioned as a "Corvair by Pininfarina." One hopes these errors were because the author never got to approve final proofs, and not from any lack of knowledge. After all, Heilig recently was featured as an expert on a History Channel special on the subject.

Save your money on this one, or better yet, spend it on a subscription to "Collectible Automobile" magazine, which really knows what could have been, and why it often wasn't.