“I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” he said. “It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise.
“But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”
That announcement was treated with more than a little skepticism. The Ford Motor Co. was only four years old, and two previous Ford ventures had gone bankrupt. Yet the car was everything he said it would be, and more.
These days, historians often talk about the Model T in terms of the way it was produced, namely, the assembly line, the great innovation that enabled Ford to make a whole lot of cars faster and cheaper than anyone had ever dreamed possible.
But that wasn’t the real meaning of the car. In his superb book Ford, the Men and the Machine, British writer Robert Lacey summed it up perfectly: “Henry Ford threw himself into every detail, insisting on getting small things absolutely right; going for innovation when it tested properly but sticking to the tried and true when it did not."
Most importantly, “he never lost sight of the ultimate overall objective. He had a vision (and) from all the improvisation, hard thought and hard work came a machine that was at once the simplest and the most sophisticated automobile,” in the world.
The car came out in October, 1908. By the end of the winter the company stopped taking orders, because they had sold in advance as many cars as they could produce for the next eight months.
The car was not that cheap at first - something like $20,000 in today’s money. But everyone had to have one. It was made for farmers, and for a world without good roads. But it spurred politicians to build roads, and, as many historians have noted, transformed America into one community.
The Model T, and the processes that created it, embodied the best of the automobile industry. Ironically, however, the car came to foreshadow the sort of problem that would later leave the industry vulnerable to foreign competition.
Having created it, Henry Ford was reluctant to make new and better cars. When World War I ended, half the cars in the world were Model Ts. Ten years later, when Ford finally agreed to move on, his company had fallen hopelessly behind General Motors, never to catch up. There are a couple of lessons to be learned here, about the nature of both success and failure.
The mystery is why it seems so hard for today’s domestic automakers to learn either one.