Once hostilities were over, factory owners flush with money from war contracts hurried to fill their factories’ capacities with car manufacturing again. However, shortages of raw materials—especially steel—meant that many stayed initially with old-fashioned construction techniques like wood body frames, aluminum body panels, and fabric-covered...
Andre Citroën was one of the automotive industry’s earliest visionaries. Despite humble beginnings, his Citroën marque came to embody all that was original and daring about car design. Citroen produced an array of landmark automobiles that were uniquely French, appealing to the heart as well...
Surely the most extraordinary success story in the history of the automobile, the Beetle began life as a pet project of Adolf Hitler, who commissioned engineer Ferdinand Porsche to design a low-cost vehicle for the German people. Production eventually began post-World War II, under the...
After World War II there was a new automotive revolution. Most soldiers posted overseas had experienced long-distance travel for the first time. On their return home they wanted to be mobile and take their families much farther afield than their fathers had been able to....
From building motorcycle sidecars in a tiny workshop in a seaside town in northwest England, William Lyons’s company evolved into a manufacturer of high-quality sports cars and sedans. Over the decades, the Jaguar marque established a reputation for fast, refined cars, which it continues to...
One of the most iconic power plants in automotive history, Jaguar’s XK straight-six was light, powerful, reliable-and essentially unchanged for almost 40 years. As well as featuring in the original XK120, the unit was used in XK140, XK150, and E-type sports cars, C- and D-type...
Instructed to help restore the UK’s devastated balance of payments after World War II, British car manufacturers hurried to build sports cars to sell in the lucrative U.S. market, where home-grown products were too bulky to match nimble European cars on twisty roads. Few of...
Pickup trucks have been part of the fabric of American society for almost a century, and none more so than Ford’s F-Series. It was the first all-new offering from Ford following the post-war resumption of civilian car manufacturing, and was advertised as “Built Stronger to...
The demands and shortages of World War II meant that transportation in the 1940s had to concentrate on practicality without frills or luxuries—vans and pickups were vital to move food and supplies to where they were needed, and off-road vehicles were required to carry troops...
There was a huge appetite for new cars in post-war America, so car makers rushed into production, working with essentially pre-war body styles. These styles, however, had seen three seasons’ more development than European makes, since the United States had joined the war later. By...