A year-by-year history of America's most thrilling performance cars, from the '49 Oldsmobile 88 to the present. Easy picture-and-caption format, featuring nearly 1,500 photos, most in full color. Handy timeline with an overview of each period's highlights. Original brochure and advertising artwork.

This is the muscle car history to own--a richly illustrated chronicle of America's greatest high-performance cars, told from their 1960s beginning through the present day! In the 1960s, three incendiary ingredients--developing V-8 engine technology, a culture consumed by the need for speed, and 75 million baby boomers entering the auto market--exploded in the form of the factory muscle car. The resulting vehicles, brutal machines unlike any the world had seen before or will ever see again, defined the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll generation. American Muscle Cars chronicles this tumultuous period of American history through the primary tool Americans use to define themselves: their automobiles. From the street-racing hot rod culture that emerged following World War II through the new breed of muscle cars still emerging from Detroit today, this book brings to life the history of the American muscle car. When Pontiac's chief engineer, John Z. DeLorean, and his team bolted a big-inch engine into the division's intermediate chassis, they immediately invented the classic muscle car. In those 20 minutes it took Bill Collins and Russ Gee to bolt a 389 ci V-8 engine into a Tempest chassis they created the prototype for Pontiac's GTO--and changed the course of automotive history. From that moment on, American performance cars would never be the same. American Muscle Cars tells the story of the most desirable cars ever to come out of Detroit. It's a story of flat-out insanity told at full throttle and illustrated with beautiful photography.

Details the history of America's performance cars, from the 1949 Olds Rocket 88, to the '69 Dodge Charger, to the 2012 Ford Mustang Boss 302, with hundreds of color photos.

The complete history of the world's best-loved trucks. Concentrates on the familiar--and collectible--pickup-truck models, but also includes Ford's medium-duty workhorses and big-rig 18-wheelers. » Popular picture-caption format. Hundreds of vintage and modern photos, period ads, informative text. » Features the most-famous and collected Ford trucks, including the classic 1948-52 F1, 1956 F-100, and modern high-performance Lightening.

Trace the fascinating evolution of American muscle cars -- from their glory days in the early Sixties to the first hints of the modern Muscle Era -- via beautiful large-format photography and informative and insightful text. You'll find not only GTOs and GTXs, but Camaros and Javelins, Mustangs and 'Cudas, Galaxies and Impalas, and even a couple Studebakers •Take a quick trip through the post-1971 landscape to better illustrate how quickly it all fell apart before the first glimmers of a new era of the muscle started to appear in the Eighties.

"Dream Cars: Chronicle of Design and Performance tells the story of extraordinary automobiles from more than a century ago to today. From popular cars that provided glamour and performance at a reasonable price to rare exotics built for the privileged few, these wondrous vehicles are represented in 70 distinct profiles. Each car is illustrated with large-format photography and informative text." --From inside book jacket.

"Muscle & Chrome: Classic American Cars captures all the wonder and excitement of a truly beloved era in automotive history. Informative profiles of 70 vehicles serve to chronicle the burst of design and engineering innovations that followed the end of World War II, the exuberant styling and the 'horsepower race' of the Fifties, and the rise of the youth market and the muscle car in the Sixties." -- Amazon.com.