The Cars That Made America

The other reviews cover it. A stone skimming over the surface. Could and should have been so much more.

This series is a nice overview of the development of the car industry and its impact on society, which is obvious from the name of the series (The Cars That Made America"). It's not a biography of any of the major players, although they certainly are there, warts and all. Nor is it a documentary on cars per se. While it does give us lots of biographic details and lots of engineering drawings, etc. the focus of the series is on how cars changed the way we live. The producers succeed admirably.

This mini series as much as I would love to say its a great history of cars in America falls very short. The program constantly repeats itself like most shows on the history channel if they actually played it though without all the recaps of what they actually showed you it would probably be about 2 hours of real content. As for history they don't even mention many american car makers and many others they just touch on this is mainly a story about Henry Ford much more than all the Cars that made America. There were many car manufacturer that sold many cars that are not even mentioned. If you do some searching you will find there were hundreds if not in the thousands of companies that built cars in the United States they only talk about the big three in this show Were is Packard , Studebaker, AMC ,Keiser, Nash ect... They just spend so much time rehashing stuff and going into the personel lifes of the top three automakers. I would love to see an actual history of all the manufactures and what they came up with in innovation. I found this show a waste of time for the most part some good info but could have been so much better

A good series Which I enjoyed. However, the 3rd Episode was quite Chevy biased and was not kind to Ford. I am a Man of good Morals, but Lee Iacocca was quite a genius and is portrayed as a stuffy Man of Morals, while John DeLorean, a Creative man, but Someone whose ego was huge, which held him back from being great, was Made to look like an automotive genius, and His Cocaine arrest was played down.. Questionable, yep, questionable...

The one thing that I found lacking in an otherwise very good series is the almost complete disregard for the independent carmakers. In many cases these companies and the people who ran them took the point for Automotive innovation, while the big three simply copied their innovations. Companies like Studebaker, Nash, Hudson aren't even mentioned.