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Driven- Inside BMW- the Most Admired Car Company in the World

2 stars (Nice history, boring read,) - As an auto industry follower, I can appreciate this book as a sort of historical reference for someone perhaps doing research. But as enjoyable reading, it falls far short. The book goes into a painfully detailed history of company events. In fact, I felt the title was a bit misleading, since it made me expect some interpretation as to why BMW is as admired as it is. Instead you basically get a chronology of events. 1 stars (Poor workmanship and limited insights) - Despite his years of experience as an auto journalist, Kiley is a sloppy writer, doesn't seem to have a clue about the mechanics and history of automobiles, and provides little in the way of new insights into what has made BMW successful. To give one example, he asserts that in the late 1960s BMW was unique in offering a wide range of engines in its cars and boosting the power of said engines almost yearly. In fact, both were standard Detroit practices at the time. This error is a byproduct of Kiley's urge to gush about everything BMW has ever done. Apparently the company's inarguable achievements are not enough--he must create additional "firsts" for it. To give another, I'll quote Kiley from page 12: "The higher the horsepower and the lighter the vehicle, the easier it is for engineers to achieve better low-end torque (power at low revolutions of the engine)." Sorry, but the weight of the vehicle has absolutely nothing to do with the torque curve of the engine. In addition, high horsepower usually comes at the expense of low-end torque because of inherent tradeoffs in engine intake system design. More troubling, all of the material is not Kiley's own. One poorly written section on Active Steering (a recent technical innovation that Kiley inaccurately credits entirely to BMW) left me wondering whether my own understanding of the system was incomplete (it was). So I Googled "steering transmission ratio" and found Kiley's words verbatim on a website that predates...
John Wiley - Sons Inc :: Industries - Automobile Industry :: Business & Economics & Finance :: Business & Economics :: David Kiley :: :: Driven- Inside BMW- the Most Admired Car Company in the World