In 1980, Jerry Hirshberg ended a 16-year stint as an executive designer at General Motors, where he headed design for Pontiac and Buick, and accepted the position of founding director and eventually President of Nissan Design International, Inc. This unique corporate hybrid has become a creative hotbed of automotive innovation, producing such cutting edge designs as the first Nissan Pathfinder, Altima, Maxima, Pulsar NX and Quest minivan, the Infiniti J30 and the Mercury Villager for Ford. Along the way, owing to an intriguing fixture of the agreement he forged between NDI and Nissan, Hirshber...