Customer comments on this selection.
 Spectacular technical overview of automotive engineering
I recently submitted my resume for a management position at an automotive repair tech school, and a friend of mine told me I needed this book. He was right. I'm an EE and I know vaguely how cars work, but I never needed to go much beyond a high-school grasp of four-stroke engines.
This is not an engineering textbook. It's an overview of the current art in the automotive world, covering everything you'll find in a car, not simply the engine and drive train. In addition to Otto-cycle and Diesel engines, it covers transmissions, brakes, tires, interior seating, interior acoustics, electrical system, climate control, analog and digital radio receivers, in-vehicle data networks, body construction, suspension, the works. There is a section on safety, and coverage of the meeting of government regulations in engineering designs. The book goes out of its way to avoid heavy math, and what equations it does present are no more complex than what you'd see in high school physics.
There's a fascinating chapter on "future" technologies for engines, including hybrids, pure electric propulsion, flywheels, fuel cells, and Stirling engines. There's a chapter at the end that summarizes the engineering design process; however, the book itself is not about design but rather the end results of design.
I was expecting a book like this to require superhuman concentration to get through, but it's surprisingly readable, especially since it was developed in Germany and translated from the German. The awkwardness, choppy sentences, and occasional howlers I see in translated technical books are just not there. Much of the book's accessibility comes from its technical art. There is a figure on almost every page (sometimes three or four!) nearly all of them drawn art, with photos only when photos are called for. In a way, the book trades mathematical equations for diagrams, and given the book's mission that approach works very well. I didn't need to know how to design a Diesel engine, I just needed to know how one works, in detail.
The price may seem high, but there's a lot of book here: 640 pages of small print with hundreds of drawings, graphs, and photos. It took about six weeks to work my way through it in the evenings, but it gave me precisely what I needed: A technical grasp of how automotive subsystems work today. If you need to manage people doing technical work in the automotive industry, this book is a must-have. Ditto if you're a trial lawyer doing accident cases, or a government policy type drafting environmental or safety legislation. I would also recommend this book to first-year engineering students intending to specialize in automotive design, or even high-school college counselors who are asked about careers in engineering. It's about as clear a picture of the industry from a technical standpoint as you could expect, given the limitations of a single book.
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