American Car Design Now: Inside the Studios of America's Top Car Designers

More and more Americans today are paying attention to how their cars are designed. Auto designers are now celebrities, and the look of your car has become as important as the clothes you wear. According to the New York Times Magazine, You are what you drive. Your car is a bold statement of individual identity. American Car Design Now is the first book to take a critical look at this phenomenon, with in-depth examinations of the creative process behind more than thirty contemporary models that embody the trends of the future, including the Crossfire, Mondeo, Thunderbird, Continental, Mark 9, Bengal, Vizon, Cien, and CTS.

The product of more than three years of research, this volume collects the author's essays and interviews with the design directors of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. The author gained unprecedented access to the notoriously secretive and guarded design studios of these car giants, and the result is an insider's perspective on the making of new American cars, of new American dreams.

American Car Design Now delves deeply into the individual characters behind the industry and shows how their different creative and managerial techniques translate to the finished models. With this unique analytical approach, American Car Design Now is a great addition to the shelves of not only auto industry professionals but designers and car enthusiasts of all types.

About the Author:

C. Edson Armi established himself as the authority on car design with The Art of American Car Design, which was the first book to treat this subject with a critical analysis and which covered the period from 1900 to the present. Armi has been a professor of art history for almost thirty years, previously at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently at the University of California at Santa Barbara.