BeigeJournal

Driving Force: The Evolution of the Car Engine, by Jeff Daniels. A history of car engines, from the earliest days through the 1990s, with a chapter per decade. 220 pages extensively illustrated with black-and-white drawings and the occasional photograph. This is a British book, and so there is an emphasis on engines designed in or made in, or at least sold it, Europe, though American and Japanese engines do get plenty of coverage as well. This is a book about mass-production engines, plus those that influenced production engines even if they themselves were not made in volume. There are already plenty of books on race engines and exotic performance engines and this book does not try to duplicate that material.

The book is quite detailed, but with a century to cover in 220 pages it never gets bogged down in truly tedious minutia. As an American I find the European emphasis quite interesting. Though I have some familiarity with American companies that went out of business before my birth, European companies that disappeared or reorganized out of independent existence I knew little if anything about. Also new to me are the peculiarities of historic British vehicle taxation, which for many years was based on piston area, thus giving rise to some very undersquare engines.

One nice thing about this book is that it is new, and covers up through the end of 20th century. Not only are the engines of the 80s and 90s quite interesting, but this also avoids the very pessimistic endings that engine books up to the early 80s have that is so jarring in retrospect. Obviously, what the 90s brought were the finest engines ever, but emissions regulations and wild fuel price swings in the 70s had people writing that the last interesting engines, the last engines that anyone could like, were all past. How wrong they were.

I think it’s a terrific book and recommend it for anyone interested in the subject.