Automotive Transportation II: Cars

Cars.  Automobiles that is.

With this entry, we pick up where we left off with trucks and where we started off with walking.  That is, our series of posts on changes in transportation.

 

Allegedly the first American automobile.  In the 1890s cars started to be manufactured, and as they were fairly primitive, some were also built at home.  Perhaps the first car in Wyoming was built by Laramie physician, Dr. Frinfrock.

Perhaps this one is the most obvious, and perhaps it nearly completes the circle, sort of, we began with walking.  We have another yet to go, but to most people the revolution brought about by cars is the most obvious.  Perhaps for that reason, and also for the reason that we've really touched heavily on this topic in numerous prior posts, we're not going to really dwell on it as much. There's no real reason to belabor the obvious too much.

The common myth, which we've already explored and pretty much destroyed, is that everyone rode horses until cars came about, and then everyone switched to them. As we know, there was never an era when everyone rode horses, and in the United States, bicycles were they really early rival for urban personal transportation to the horse, not the automobile.  Bikes were cheap, easy to store, and easy to maintain.  Early automobiles, by contrast, were extremely expensive and hard to maintain.  And as a rule, people weren't going all that far, in modern terms, anyhow.

Which isn't to say that automobiles didn't have a toehold by the late 19th Century.  They did.  And in a role that the early nickname for them reveals. They weren't called the "horseless carriage" for nothing. That's exactly what they were.

 

Buick, 1907.  Note the right hand drive.

Automobiles, even if not extremely widely spread, for economic reasons, did command interest pretty rapidly.  Their advantage was in fact revealed by their nickname, as was their basic design. They were horseless carriages.  Just as horsed carriages, however, were beyond the means of most, the horseless carriage was as well, although they did spread down into the middle class early on.  In terms of the amount needed to acquire one, they were amazingly expensive, which makes it surprising to see how widespread they really were.  A multiplicity of manufacturers made an appearance early on, some of which are still with us today.

1897 Oldsmobile.

As is well know, it was Henry Ford who sought to change all of that.  Before Ford, cars were virtually all hand made, even if made to a single design.  Ford applied the techniques along employed in some other industries, such as the firearms industry, and acted to mass produce a car, that car being, as everyone well knows, the Model T.  Aiming that car specifically at a mass market, it was targeted to be affordable to the men making it, and as time when on, and production efficiency increased, the price of the Model T dropped.

 

Early Model T touring car.

The Model T was truly a revolution in autos. The Tin Lizzy, introduced in 1908, was a tough, durable, but primitive automobile.  It bridged the gap from truly primitive vehicles before it, and more modern ones that would follow it, but the fact that it was readily available to so many in the American, indeed the global, market meant that for the first time many people could afford a car, and they did buy one.

 

Later model Model T, still in use in the late 1930s.

With the Model T, the introduction of cars came extremely rapidly.  Before that, cars had been the domain of the wealthy, the eccentric, or the pioneering.  After that, they came increasingly to be everywhere, occupying both a place in the carriage house and on the more humble curb.  And contrary to the common myth, Ford catered to its market, making the Tin Lizzy in a variety of models, with touring cars (open topped multiple seat vehicles) and roadsters (two seat convertibles), being amongst the options.  Multiple colors were also offered.

Like any revolutionary device, however, whether it be a mass produced car or a smart phone, imitators were soon to follow, of course.

Manufactured all the way up to 1927, the Model T became obsolete nonetheless surprisingly fast.  By 1915, Ford engine parts supplier the Dodge Brothers were operating a rival automobile company.  General Motors started operating in Flint Michigan the same year that Ford introduced the Model T.  Chrysler would form in 1925.  Louis Chevrolet opened his car plant in 1911.  The wagon make Studebaker, beat them all to the punch and had been working on automobiles since 1897, and even manufactured electric automobiles in the first decade of the automobile age.  By the 1920s there were dozens of automobile manufactures offering a mind numbing number of vehicles.

 

Legendary Jordan advertisement that launched modern advertising.

Indeed, in this era it was the automobile industry, with the Jordan Motor Car Company leading the charge, that introduced modern advertising. Advertising based on nothing other than image alone, which is exactly what that company did with its famous "Somewhere West of Laramie" advertisement, featuring the legendary enigmatic starting phrase that "Somewhere west of Laramie there's a bronchobusting, steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about."  Those reading the ad probably didn't know what Jordan was talking about, but they knew that they wanted one of his coupes.

While the car didn't replace the horse in many of its roles, the car had come to dominate the urban streets by the 1920s.  The age of the bicycle was over in the United States, and urban horses were very much on the way out in urban areas for conventional personal transportation.  Cars had taken over the taxi trade, and cars were now in the police patrolling role.  Cars had come in where the bike had started too, and they were offering daily, if somewhat expensive, transportation to hundreds of dangerous novice drivers.  The future appeared pretty clear, and Americans were crazy about cars.

Indeed, by the 1920s, the car was changing the very nature of the streets.  Paving wasn't new to cities by any means, and streets had been paved with cobble stones back into antiquity, but cars changed the amount of acreage that was paved.  Paving is unnecessary for animal transportation to an extent, although it serves wheeled vehicles, including wagons, of any type.  But cars very much favor paving, and the process of paving the urban landscape was well in swing by the 1920s.  While already discussed, of course, in terms of trucking, the increased number of cars also aided in the linking of towns via paved roads, something that wasn't really needed prior to the internal combustion engine.

Paving machine, about 1920.

Although Ford expanded its Model T production overseas, Europeans and other peoples were not nearly as enamored with cars as Americans.  Perhaps because their cities had been so long established for other means of transpiration, and perhaps because of their economic situation simply being different, while cars very much came into European societies by the 1920s, they didn't achieve the same overarching status that they did in the United States and Canada at the same time.  Americans were just berserk over automobiles by the 1920s, willing to spend a fair amount of their incomes to obtain one, and to maintain one. Europeans generally were not.  A real difference in modern American (and Canadian) culture, vs. European cultures, had already become clear in that regards.

 

Dusenberg touring car.

From fairly early on, cars took on a multiplicity of types.  Big Touring Cars were built for over the road trips with at least a few passengers, with some of the roads being pretty bad being considered, were a popular early type.  From the widely available Model T touring car, to expensive automobiles, these cars were larger serviceable cars.  Some European manufacturers, aiming for a different market, setting the standard for size and durability. Rolls Royce, fore example, built a touring car so durable that it was the platform for the excellent British armored cars used in World War One.  In contrast, coupes and roadsters, two seaters, were offered by most car companies even if only on a model that was otherwise built as a touring car, offering motorist a car that that had previously been occupied by the horse drawn dog cart.  In other words, an automobile really aimed at single men, or occasionally businessmen who didn't transport more than a single passenger.   Hard sided cars, with permanent roofs, began to replace touring cars by the late 1920s, in the form of sedans, which has been the standard for cars ever since.  By the 1930s, very large cars then known as "station wagons", "depot hacks", "estate cars", "suburbans" or "carryalls"  served the purpose of durable taxi, or hack, from train stations and hotels.  While some of these names are recognizable now, in terms of their descendants, none of them were, at that time, what they later became.  Indeed, a person would have to go to a vintage car show or watch an old movie in order to see one. 

Model T sedan.

 
Model T roadster.

With competition heated for automobiles in the US in the 1920s, its no surprise that innovation was rapid as well. By 1927 the durable Model T was clearly wholly obsolete, and Ford, for  the second time in its history, introduced an automobile called the "Model A".  Originally Ford used that name for a primitive vehicle built from 1903 to 1904, but starting in 1927, it came back out with its second Model A.  A really modern car, the Model A was a huge success but was only built until 1931.  Starting the in 1932, the Model B took over, with their being an engine option for the first time which not only allowed the purchaser to buy something other than a 4 cylinder engine, but to actually have that choice be a V8 engine.  The era of the modern car had really arrived. By the mid 1930s, all the car manufacturers then in business, and in spite of the Great Depression weeding a number of them out, there remained a lot, was changing models yearly, rather than sticking with a single long manufactured model.

"LongBeachFord" by Los Angeles Times photographic archive, UCLA Library. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LongBeachFord.jpg#mediaviewer/File:LongBeachFord.jpg

 

Model A.

In Europe, the production of cars had likewise increased, and the spread of automobile manufacturing had commenced in Japan as well.  Nowhere but the US was the market as advanced as in the US, but it was there.  American manufacturers themselves spread to Europe with Ford's entry into the European market being particularly notable. As in the US, there were a multiplicity of types, but as a rule European cars were simply not as widely purchased by their public.  Price was part of the reason, and this inspired Nazi Germany to actually create a program whereby a worker could set aside funds in the hopes of acquiring a cheap German car, that car being Ferdinand Porsche's Volkswagen, or 'People's Car".  None were ever delivered during the horror of the Third Reich, although the Volkswagen plant did produce a car that was Jeep sized during the war, with that car being the Kubelwagen.  The VW "Bug" of course, would revive after the war and live on, Model T like, forever.

 

The 1937 Cord, an extremely advanced luxury car of the 1930s which would not survive the Depression.

 

1937 Chrysler Airflow.

While the US automobile industry took a pounding during the Great Depression, and while some automobile makers on the margins, like Jordan, were casualties, as were brand names like LaSalle that were made by bigger makers (General Motors in that example), the American automobile industry endured the Depression surprisingly well.  In the late 1930s, when  global rearmament commenced due to the German threat in Europe, surplus North American capacity in existing operating plants meant that North America had a vehicle production capacity like non other.  The United States, and to a lesser extent Canada, became the supplier of vehicles to the Allies.  Moreover, North American capacity was so vast that it simply dwarfed Axis production.  While every army that fought in the war used vehicles, including vehicles in the "car" class, American production alone was so vast that every single Allied army as equipped to some extent with American vehicles. To take the classic "car" class American vehicle of the war (although in military terms its a 1/4 ton truck), the Jeep as an example, Jeeps were found in the armed forces of every single Allied army during the war, including the Red Army.  Indeed, the Red Army was almost entirely dependent upon American motor vehicles for transportation by the end of the war.

It can't be said that cars advanced, like trucks did, during World War Two.  By and large, the cars that came out right after World War Two were the same models that were being offered in 1941.  No new automotive technology was really developed that was applicable to cars during the war, except for the perfection of conventional four wheel drive, which showed up, in terms of cars, only in Jeep class vehicles.  Regarding those, of course, the Jeep did go into civilian production by Willys, with Willys always having been a manufacturer that specialized in rural vehicles.  It soon had competitors from overseas, interestingly enough, demonstrating the global spread of the Jeep during World War Two.

 

M38A1, which in its civilian expression was the CJ5.  The CJ series of Jeeps went into production right after World War Two and while the designators have changed to YJ and TJ, they've basically never stopped.

By the late 1940s, however, American cars did begin to evolve towards big.  Cars of the 1920s and 1930s, save for touring cars, were surprisingly small.  Cab space was often quite tight, even in cars that appear externally large.  This began to rapidly change in the late 1940s, however.

In part that might reflect an enormous improvement in roads that occurred during the 1930s.  Automobiles of the 1930s were still all suitable for rural roads. They had high clearance, compared to modern cars, and they were relatively stiffly suspended.  During the 30s, however, most highways most places had become modern, and urban paving was the norm.  This in turn reflected itself in the late 1940s with cars starting to have lower and softer suspensions, and in turn they grew larger as well.  Larger engines also began to make the appearance, particularly in Fords which had pioneered the V8 engine.  Chevrolet's remains 6 cylinders at first, but in the mid 1950s Chevrolet also introduced a V8 for its regular car line. By the late 1950s V8s had become the American norm, even though 6 cylinder vehicles were still available.  Also during the 1950s some American cars had become simply enormous.

 

1954 Chevrolet Deluxe.

They probably bordered on absurdly enormous, and they began to shrink back down in the 1960s. By that time, however, the Station Wagon had evolved into a family vehicles that was very large and designed to carry an entire family and their stuff.  Station wagons were a staple of the 1960s and early 1970s, before being eclipsed by smaller vehicles and mini-vans in the 1980s.  At the same time, the same vehicle that had evolved into the station wagon had also evolved into Carry Alls and Suburbans, large family vehicles that were built on truck frames and which really were a type of truck.  Suburbans are still with us, even though station wagons are not.

 

1950s vintage Pontiac Super Chief.

Cars of the 1970s were generally powerful vehicles reflecting an American love of the open road.  Racing inspired cars even entered the public market by the late 1960s, and were sold throughout the 1970s, in the form of "muscle cars", sports cars with a high power to weight ratio that were capable of speeds in excess of any legal limit.

Still, the 1970s ushered in a change when the price of gas, and gas shortages, made fuel economy an American concern for the first time.  As fuel economy had been a concern everywhere else in the world, this made foreign imports really viable.  The Japanese and European manufacturers, devastated by World War Two, had largely recovered and had been focusing on their domestic markets, which demanded fuel economy. Cars like the Datsun, Toyota, or Fiat were suddenly marketable in the US, and the Japanese in particular, who had focused on making really good small cars, were able to make huge inroads into the American market.  The American market was permanently changed, and the number of American manufacturers declined to a "big three".

The shock of the fuel, and following fiscal, crises took American manufacturers a very long time to adjust to, but they have.  That takes us to the current market. If the Model A was a "modern car", as I've referred to it here, cars of the last ten years, with many American cars being prime examples, are "post modern". So much safer, longer lasting, and better than anything that's come before them, they can't even really be compared to cars of the 80s or 90s.  They are much, much better, longer lasting, and safer.  Oddly, Americans are now less interested in cars as well, which reflects perhaps a new post modern view of them.  For the first time, really, Americans now view cars the same way Europeans have for a long time, just a way to get around, if they really need one.

Body by Fischer.