Tales Of Brilliant Automotive Innovators & Innovations

LONDON – May 18, 2011: In it's 100-year plus history the motor industry has spawned and attracted an unequal share of innovators, dreamers and perhaps even (excuse the pun) cranks. This new book by Arvid Linde celebrates many of them and, in doing so, provides a unique look at automotive history.

Preston Tucker is rightly featured in the title. A maverick American who sailed close to the law, Tucker produced the Tucker Torpedo – a car far ahead of its time in the 1940s. It had a Bell helicopter engine at the rear, independent suspension on all four wheels and a third headlight, which turned with the steering wheel! In this book, Linde gives details of some of the rarest and most inspiring cars ever built and tells the real-life stories of how they came about.

He uncovers some amazing facts – such that John deLorean, the man behind the ill-fated eponymous sportscar, consulted a fortune teller when his company got into trouble.

German engineer, Felix Wankel, spent 34 years developing the engine named after him before it finally achieved success in the NSU RO80. Bizarrely, he allegedly never drove one or any other car and never held a driving licence.

Carl Friedrich Welhelm Borgward, another talented German engineer, produced a small three-wheeled lorry which he called a 'wheelbarrow'. Its official name was Blitzkarren, which means lightning wheelbarrow. Much cheaper than its competitors the Blitzkarren proved very popular and Borgward's company was the largest lorry producer in Germany by the mid-1930s. Later, he would produce a car with a wooden frame covered with tarpaulin – which also sold well. He was eventually tricked into declaring the company insolvent.

More recent automobile mavericks are also profiled in detail by Linde. There's Gerald Wiegert who produced the most powerful supercar ever – the 1250bhp Vector Avtech WX-3 capable of 270mph! Roumen Antonov invented a revolutionary new type of internal combustion engine and a new gearbox while Guy Negre produced an air powered zero emissions car!

There are many more unusual cars in Part Two of this book – such as the Monica of the 1970s with its Formula One engine and the prototype NAMI Belka, designed to meet the instructions of Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev. In Part Three, Linde shows that many 'new' features in cars can often be traced to earlier inventions. The first electric car was built in 1834, disc brakes were invented in 1901 and hybrid cars were not pioneered recently by Toyota but by Ferdinand Porsche in the 1920s.

A 160-page book with 150 illustrations – many of them rare – this will keep automotive enthusiasts engrossed for hours and put a completely different perspective on the history of the car. Anybody who didn't receive it from Santa should buy it for themselves.