How Just One Mistake Destroyed The World's Greatest Engine Company

Read the first chapter of How Britain Stopped Making Things free: https://mettlehistory.co.uk ___________________________________________ This the loudest engine ever made. This engine isn't only loud. But it is among the most prolific heavy-duty engines ever manufactured. At its peak, this engine put American infantry onto the beaches at Normandy, drove the Sherman tanks across France, and ran in more than one in three trucks on the American interstate for nearly fifty years. Two-stroke architecture. A power stroke every single revolution. A supercharger geared directly off the crankshaft. Five million units built. Forty percent of the American heavy-duty market. But by the early 1990s, every on-highway version of this engine had been pulled from production and the sound was gone from the interstates inside a decade. So why did the company that built five million of them abandon it? This is the story of the Screaming Jimmy and Detroit Diesel. And it starts with one engineer refusing to let his own committee kill it.