Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth.

Written as an “open road,” the book invites readers to travel a narrative arc that unfolds chronologically and thematically. Dream Car’s seven chapters have been structured so that they can be read in any order, determined by whichever theme each reader finds most interesting. The book also includes a musical playlist of car songs from the era and songs about the SV1 itself.

Dimitry Anastakis teaches history at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. A scholar of postwar Canada, his primary research examines Canada's role in the North American auto industry. He is the author of Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971 (University of Toronto Press, 2005) and edited The Sixties: Passion, Politics and Style (McGill-Queens University Press, 2008. His work has appeared in various academic journals and magazines such as The Walrus.

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