A red Saab 92, the first production car from the Swedish manufacturer. It was on the market from 1949 to 1955.

*Top,* an Aston Martin Valkyrie, a limited-production hybrid sports car introduced in 2017; *above,* a Wikov 35 “Kapka,” the first Czech streamlined car, from 1931.

An Italian-designed BMW Isetta micro-car in Germany, produced from 1955 to 1962.

*Top,* a Cisitalia 202, one of the most memorable cars manufactured by the Turin industrialist and sportsman Piero Dusio’s company, produced from 1947 to 1952; *above,* an early 1970s Buick Riviera, which marked General Motors’ entry into the personal-luxury-car market segment.

The second generation of the Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, produced by General Motors from 1963 to 1967.

*Top,* an Alfa Romeo 8C Berlinetta from 1937; *above,* a Duesenberg Model J, intended to compete with the most luxurious and powerful cars in the world when it was introduced, in 1928, a year before the stock-market crash that led to the Great Depression. (Duesenberg Automobile & Motors Company went bankrupt in 1937.)

A tower of Volvo 140s in Sweden. More than a million of these cars were built between 1966 and 1974.

A DMC DeLorean, a rear-engine, two-passenger sports car and the only car brought to market by the fledgling DeLorean Motor Company, produced from 1981 to 1983.

*Top,* a four-door Volvo 140 in Sweden; *above,* a Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, circa 1959–61.

Heaven on Wheels

A new book offers a dazzling survey of the most exceptional cars ever designed, from a Corvette Sting Ray to an Aston Martin Valkyrie, to a BMW Isetta micro-car

In his 1936 essay “Farewell, My Lovely!,” E. B. White humorously and poignantly mourns the bygone heyday of the Ford Model T. Introduced in 1908, the car quickly “enthroned” an eager American populace, then ran out of road within 20 years. The vehicle succeeded in ways that today seem unworkable. It was stylish, accessible, technologically revolutionary, and above all, affordable. “It was the miracle God had wrought,” says White.

At the start of his forthcoming book, The Atlas of Car Design, automotive journalist Jason Barlow notes that White, affectionate as he was for his Tin Lizzie, may have lagged a few years behind the times. “By the 1920s,” Barlow writes, the Model T was “derided as a farmer’s car.” But perhaps what “Farewell, My Lovely!” falls victim to is an affliction felt by so many car enthusiasts—that tenderness for the vehicles of our past.