Ford Model T
Simple, rugged, cheap and comical-looking today, it put the nation on wheels, especially when it went into mass production in 1913. World production had reached more than 15 million when its life ended in 1928. The Ford Model T came with soft and hard tops and with two or four doors. It also came with various types of truck bodies and even was converted into racing cars. A Ford Model T Touring car sold for $850 in 1908, but for as low as $260 in 1925. There was even a four-wheel drive chassis attachment for the car, sold in 1923, enabling it, as Ford said, to go "in mud, sand and snow without the use of tire chains."
Ford Motor Co., possibly the only auto manufacturing company centralized in the United States during the late 1890s and early 1900s, impacted the automobile industry with its Model T Ford. By 1921, Ford's Model T held 60 percent of the new-car market, giving the company a major advantage over other American car manufacturers located in New England.
By the 1940s and 1950s, the Ford's reputation was a doctrine of familiarity to automobile consumers.
A Modest Proposal for a New Model T
Even his most ardent admirers will admit that the first Henry Ford was a bumpkin genius, a mechanical visionary possessed of an ethical rigidity. Old Henry's hard-shell moralizing and his crackpot politics are well documented. We know of his famed hatred of academics ("history is bunk"), his isolationism, his arm's-length admiration of Adolf Hitler and his poisonous hatred of Jews (a gift, historians say, from a man he idolized, Thomas Edison). We know Ford's goon squads spied on employes and bashed the heads of early union organizers while the boss man, cloaked in Victorian piety, allegedly raised an illegitimate son in secret. We know that, like so many movers and shakers of history, Ford was a shameless hypocrite.
But for all his faults, Ford's contribution to civilization must rank beside those of Bell, Darwin, Freud and perhaps even Einstein. He literally moved modern mankind with his Ford Model T. In 1890, at the dawn of the automotive age, 65 percent of the population lived in isolation in rural America. The cities were fetid warrens with streets reeking of manure. (Historian James J. Flink estimated that in New York City, before the age of the auto, horses deposited 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine on the thoroughfares each day. More than 15,000 draft horses died of exhaustion in the city each year.)
In the country, where the populace was bound to a geography usually no more than five miles from home, the cheap Ford car multiplied each person's reach, opening up new areas for social and economic interchange. Not only did the automobile energize urban and suburban life, but it also created economic strength for medium-sized cities, our much-revered "heartland," where the national ethos still percolates.
Along with the Ford Model T came Ford's moving assembly line, his revolutionary $5-a-day wage scale, his eight-hour day, and his profit sharing, all of which set patterns worldwide. Ford's genius lay in his flinty, country-boy fascination with simplicity. His notions about an automobile were clear-cut: "I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be constructed of the best materials by the best men to be hired."
When the Ford Model T was introduced in 1908 it cost $850. When the 15,000,000th Tin Lizzie rolled off the River Rouge line in 1927 (after export to every corner of the globe), the price had dropped below $300. The secret of the car's success was its ability to move, albeit slowly, in all kinds of weather and terrain, plus its cast-iron engine that was particularly indestructible and repairable by the most ham-fisted of mechanics.
In a sense, Ford's notion of a car for the masses was reborn in the mind of Hitler, whose "People's Car," the Volkswagen, never got into production during the Third Reich, but rose up in post-war Germany to rival the Ford Model T as the most successful car design of all time. Like the Ford Model T, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche's Beetle was a symphony of elementary themes. With a small, air-cooled engine at the back that, much like the Ford's, was easy to repair, the VW was the stuff of legend-a machine that developed quasi-human qualities of loyalty and pluckiness.
Since the disappearance of the Beetle in Europe and the United States, the "car for the multitudes" market has been fragmented by a variety of marques. Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Ford, Chrysler, GM and others are all in the basic transportation business, but no company has succeeded with a breakthrough machine suited to a T, as it were. The leaders of our domestic industry have convinced themselves that they cannot compete here in small cars, that the rice-bowl nations have an insurmountable advantage in cheap labor. I remain unconvinced. There is a place in the great international marketplace for a new Ford Model T, and it could be created on these shores. The key to its success is not cheap labor, but a breakthrough design.
The new people's car would, I imagine, be a miracle of composite construction that would be as significant as the Ford's use of vanadium steel and the VW's employment of an aluminum engine and transmission. The new automobile would be a simple box with sufficient room for four adults or equivalent cargo. It would carry its small engine and transaxle-easily removed and maintained-up front, where it would offer crash protection. I imagine a sophisticated yet elementary 4-cylinder overhead cam-shaft engine of about 91 cubic inches (1.5 liters). This would produce 60 to 70 reliable horsepower and offer good performance and excellent economy for a package weighing about 1,600 pounds. Overall length would be a stubby 130 inches. By comparison, this new Ford Model T would be nine inches shorter and 260 pounds lighter than a Yugo. The price: $4,500.
Simple design elements would increase the probability that the car could be assembled entirely by robots, drastically cutting into the labor-cost argument. There would be no "styling" to fraudulently disguise the box. The car would have no flashy interior appointments: no fake wood anywhere, no color-keyed interiors or cut-pile carpeting. The body work would be a series of flat planes and simple angles, no curved glass to add expense and complication. Like the drive train, the fenders, bumpers, hood, etc. would be rudimentary in shape and easily replaceable. Underneath, the car would have a rugged suspension and brakes, making it suitable for operation in the Third World. It would be a solid example of form follows function.
The challenge is open to all. Honda has already upped the bidding with its tiny "City" mini-car (presently not available in this country), but even that is too elaborate to qualify. There can be more of even less. The question is: Do our men in Detroit still have the will to pull it off before someone else does?
The Washington Post
January 4, 1987
Author: Brock Yates