Automobiles: Wheels in Motion
The automobile is a preeminent feature of the urban environment. The modern city is premised on car travel, and it was the mass production of the motorcar that greatly influenced its shape. Wide access to the experience of automobile speed was, in turn, enabled by the acceleration of car production.
Henry Ford did not invent the motorcar. Nor was his Model T a particularly good motorcar. Ford was not even the first to use a moving assembly line. But he was the first to “mass produce” a car, a phrase that he was also the first to use. As a result, the time taken to assemble a Ford chassis fell from just under 12.5 hours in the spring of 1913 to 93 minutes a year later. Greater eficiency led to big falls in price: the Model T cost \$950 in 1909 and \$360 in 1916, a fall in real terms of more than two-thirds.
Ford realized his aim of building a car “so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.” Between 1908 and 1927, Ford sold a total of 15 million Model Ts. Other car manufacturers followed suit, so that between 1908 and 1923 the average price of a car fell from \$2,126 to \$317 (in 1908 dollars). At the same time, annual sales rose from just 64,000 to 3.6 million. For its period, this rate of difusion was extraordinary. Indeed, economic historians Tim Leunig and Hans-Joachim Voth argue that mechanizing the production process of the car (as with cotton spinning) was as valuable in terms of consumer welfare as inventing the Internet, and much more valuable than inventing the mobile phone.39
Weighing up the costs and benefits of the motor vehicle is not easy. Its significance and the lived experience of driving are full of complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Undoubtedly, in the early twentieth century, the car represented freedom for many and, arguably, had a greater impact on women than on men. Notably, the automobile appeared at the same time that women were striving for freedom in the home and in politics. At first, women were almost exclusively passengers. It was the electric automobile that gave upper-middle-class women the freedom to leave home and break free of the control of their husbands. In her book on women and the car, Virginia Scharf traces the critical role of the automobile in facilitating the sufragettes’ mobilization, allowing the regional and cross-country campaigns that led to women winning the right to vote in the 1920s.40 However, women had no place then in the actual manufacture of cars, while from early on the racial division of labor was built into the Ford factory.
Time and Motion
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