History
The creation of show cars dates back to at least the 1920s, but reached its zenith in the United States in the 1950s, when most of the major U.S. automakers began to exhibit wild, fanciful dream cars. The preeminent dream car maker was GM, which displayed its work at a series of traveling Motorama shows, mounted at tremendous expense, but with considerable value in publicity. In the 1960s American show cars became substantially more mundane, slight variations on typical production models (with a few exceptions, like Chevrolet's Mako Shark prototype), and the practice of building them fell on hard times during the 1970s, when automotive whimsy was a low priority compared to safety, emissions control, and fuel economy. The practice was revived in the 1980s, and remains strong today both in the U.S. and abroad.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)