Automotive category: 1940 books

Worldwide bestseller! At last, a comprehensive reference book featuring 1000 of the world’s most interesting historic automobile sites for the auto enthusiast. Listed are names addresses, tel for: museums, collections, homes, birthplaces, factories, racing circuits, gas stations, Route 66, memorials,...

This is the story of VW's timeless classic, the Type 2 Transporter, universally known as the ”Bus”. It is sixty years since the idea of VW‘s Transporter was conceived by Dutchman Ben Pon after seeing motorized trollies conveying components around the British-managed Wolfsburg factory in the mid-1940s....

Infinitely flexible, they have appeared in short, medium and long wheelbase variants, with a host of body styles and conversions for everything from sixwheeled fire engines to motor homes. It is more than sixty years since the prototype was built in 1948 and the Land Rover of today still resembles...

Cars, cars and more cars! Who thought it was a good idea to call a car Gremlin, or Cedric or Touring Bruce? Which will fly first: the Moller Skycar or the pig? Hear about the floating car that sank? Hear about the show car so ugly the company had to promise they'd never build another that looked...

Alfa Mail is about Alfa Romeos. What made them great and what will probably make them extinct. It’s also about other cars too great, good, bad and appalling plus planes, bikes, places, people, prejudice ... and tractors.Motor vehicles are the greatest practical enablers of the 20th Century (even...

In this hilarious collection of stories, Old Autos columnist Bill Sherk describes in vivid detail the trials and tribulations of those brave souls who, throwing caution to the wind and money down the drain, made the fateful decision that would forever change the course of their lives. They went out...

My life as a motoring tragic Was it luck that gave me the chance to race at Bathurst? They say Luck is when Skill meets Opportunity. In my case Luck came when Not-Quite-Enough-Skill overshot the braking marker, speared off the track, and slammed into Opportunity while Opportunity was doing...

In the 1960s the Cortina was an entirely new type of British car, light yet strong, cheap to buy yet roomy. It established a new class of car - the 'Cortina Class' - and Ford's rivals had to rush to compete. Not only was the Cortina the first, it was the best, too; a fascinating, ever-evolving project...

The Lola T70 was the car that Eric Broadley wanted to build for Ford instead of the GT40. He thought the GT40 too conservative in specification for a state-of-the-art sports racing car, so he split with the giant corporation to build the T70 under the aegis of his own company: Lola. Immediately successful,...

Rover's big hatchback saloon of the 1970s and 1980s had all the elements of a superb motor car. It was the work of long-standing Rover engineers, with substantial input from their colleagues at Triumph. The SD1's top models even shared their V8 engines with earlier and much-loved classics from Rover....

The book introduces the reader to the whole cult of the dune buggy, from its earliest beginnings as a crude off-road vehicle in the 1920s, to the explosion of glass fibre-bodied and VW-based fun cars that became the cult transport of teenagers everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s. With histories, production...

This book sets out in graphic detail a hundred tips that cost very little but which will transform your car. For example, how a wire coat-hanger transforms an exhaust system so that it can survive the Sahara Desert, how a tube of bathroom silicone sealer waterproofs an engine, and how a garden chain...

Porsche Boxster and Cayman follows the design and development of this mid-engined sports car and coupe family, from their origins in the company's concerted racing activities in the 1950s and 1960s, to the drawing board, launch and systematic evolution through successive model ranges from 1996 to...

In the modern era, mass-produced motorcycles tend to be Japanese or Italian, with the big four oriental manufacturers dominating the market. However, this wasn t always the case. Until the 1950s, and even into the 60s, British makers such as Scott, Rudge, BSA, Norton and Vincent ruled the roost. These...