Book Description

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.