Dimitry Anastakis

Dimitry Anastakis’s Dream Car is a landmark achievement in Canadian business history. On the surface, it recounts Malcolm Bricklin’s ill-fated Canadian sports car, but at its heart it is about far more: the automobile as the defining site where technology, culture, and visions of the future converged in ways that transformed the 20th century. Anastakis makes a convincing case that the car was central to modernity, and that today’s electric vehicle revolution, led by Tesla and its competitors, may mark the threshold of a new industrial era.

What makes the book so powerful is how Anastakis uses failure to illuminate success. Rather than dismissing Bricklin as a colourful hustler, he asks why the venture appealed, why it failed, and what this reveals about entrepreneurial risk, industrial policy, and consumer culture. His nuanced chapters on risk, the future, and entrepreneurship go beyond conventional business history, rooting analysis in Schumpeter while challenging us to reconsider how personalities, business models, and structural forces shape economic outcomes.

The book also demonstrates extraordinary breadth. From tariffs and trade to marketing, gender, and cultural symbolism; from production technologies to the politics of regional development, Anastakis interweaves economic, political, social, and cultural contexts with elegance and depth. Readers come away with insights not just into Canada’s place in the auto industry, but into global questions of innovation, risk, and industrial change. Above all, Dream Car is engagingly written, richly researched, and intellectually ambitious—business history at its very best.