HISTORY OF CARS
PETROL AND DIESIAL
Benz was granted a patent for his automobile
on 29 January 1886, and began the first
production of automobiles in 1888, after
Bertha Benz, his wife, had proved—with the
first long-distance trip in August 1888, from
Mannheim to Pforzheim and back—that the
horseless coach was capable of extended
travel.
When Were Cars Invented
The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm
Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft,
deserves credit for being the first modern
motorcar in all essentials.
Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed
only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it
achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per
hour. By 1909, with the most integrated
automobile factory in Europe, Daimler
employed some seventeen hundred workers
to produce fewer than a thousand cars per
Model T
Given the American manufacturing tradition, it was also
inevitable that cars would be produced in larger volume
at lower prices than in Europe. The absence of tariff
barriers between the states encouraged sales over a
wide geographic area. Cheap raw materials and a
chronic shortage of skilled labor early encouraged the
mechanization of industrial processes in the United
States.
This in turn required the standardization of products and
resulted in the volume production of such commodities
as firearms, sewing machines, bicycles, and many other
items. In 1913, the United States produced some
485,000 of the world total of 606,124 motor vehicles.
Henry Ford and William Durant
Bicycle mechanics J. Frank and Charles Duryea of
Springfield, Massachusetts, had designed the first
successful American gasoline automobile in 1893,
then won the first American car race in 1895, and
went on to make the first sale of an American-
made gasoline car the next year.
Thirty American manufacturers produced 2,500
motor vehicles in 1899, and some 485 companies
entered the business in the next decade. In 1908
Henry Ford introduced the Model T and
William Durant founded General Motors.
Automotive Industry Growing Pains
Ford’s mass production techniques were
quickly adopted by other American
automobile manufacturers. (European
automakers did not begin to use them until
the 1930s.) The heavier outlays of capital and
larger volume of sales that this necessitated
ended the era of easy entry and free-wheeling
competition among many small producers in
the American industry.
Car Sales Stall
By 1927 replacement demand for new cars
was exceeding demand from first-time owners
and multiple-car purchasers combined. Given
the incomes of the day, automakers could no
longer count on an expanding market.
Installment sales had been initiated by the
makers of moderately priced cars in 1916 to
compete with the Model T, and by 1925 about
three-quarters of all new cars were bought
“on time” through credit.
GM Introduces ‘Planned Obsolescence’
Market saturation coincided with
technological stagnation: In both product and
production technology, innovation was
becoming incremental rather than dramatic.
The basic differences that distinguish post-
World War II models from the Model T were
in place by the late 1920s—the self-starter,
the closed all-steel body, the high-
compression engine, hydraulic brakes,
syncromesh transmission and low-pressure
balloon tires.
World War II and the Auto Industry
The automobile industry had played a critical
role in producing military vehicles and war
matériel in the First World War. During World
War II, in addition to turning out several
million military vehicles, American
automobile manufacturers made some
seventy-five essential military items, most of
them unrelated to the motor vehicle. These
materials had a total value of $29 billion, one-
fifth of the nation’s war production.
Rise of Japanese Automakers
Engineering in the postwar era was
subordinated to the questionable aesthetics
of nonfunctional styling at the expense of
economy and safety. And quality deteriorated
to the point that by the mid-1960s American-
made cars were being delivered to retail
buyers with an average of twenty-four defects
a unit, many of them safety-related.
Moreover, the higher unit profits that Detroit
made on gas-guzzling “road cruisers” were
made at the social costs of increased air
pollution and a drain on dwindling world oil
