Dream Car

Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth.

Dream Car explains how automobility made and unmade industrial modernity across three eras: its emergence and expansion starting in the 1900s, shaped by Fordism, Keynesianism, and the second industrial revolution; its futuristic, high-industrial peak in the mid-twentieth century; and, after the 1970s, its industrial postmodern reality, shaped by neoliberalism and the third and fourth industrial revolutions.

Written as an “open road,” the book invites readers to travel a narrative arc that unfolds chronologically and thematically. Dream Car’s seven chapters have also been structured so that they can be read in any order, determined by whichever theme each reader finds most interesting.The book also includes a musical playlist of car songs from the era and songs about the SV1 itself, including tunes from the funky 2011 musical based on the incident, The Bricklin: An Automotive Fantasy. Ultimately, Dream Car reveals the many aspects of the automobile’s dramatically changing impact on society.

Dimitry Anastakis is the L.R. Wilson / R.J. Currie Chair in Canadian Business History in the Department of History and at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.