Trevor Legate

This was a pretty decent book to read, even though there were a couple of spots that I got bogged down in while reading. It started out really strong, with a solid grounding in the historical aspects of the Daimler and Benz companies (before their merger) that explored the characters involved in the development of both companies, the social developments going on in Germany at the time, and a dash of technical information about the cars to satisfy the more engineering minded of readers. All of this I really enjoyed, but once they introduced the company’s involvement in racing things got a bit out of hand. Obviously this aspect was crucial in selling early models of the vehicles (as enthusiasts and rich people with too much money to burn were prime customers), but it got a bit wearisome hearing about race after race and driver after driver without actually seeing the races (an impossibility in a book, obviously). The author clearly has a penchant for this topic, though, so we’ll let him be. By the end of the book we’ve gotten back into the meat and bones of the company (now merged), exploring design concepts, safety ingenuity, and the business aspects of the company’s development which were much more fun to read about. In a few spots I found myself searching for the images that matched the discussion in the text (a typical weakness of many books of this type), but overall it’s pretty easy to not worry about seeing exactly what you’re reading about when the images reproduced are of extremely high quality and generally well-placed. I haven’t read all of the book about the company out there (yet), but this is definitely a contender!… (mere)