FROM THE ARCHIVES:A century ago a car cost more than a teacher's annual salary – but that was about to change with a drop in car prices thanks to Henry Ford's adoption of the assembly line. This contemporary editorial pondered the effects of the coming changes.
THE POSSESSION of a motor car will soon be within reach of moderate incomes. Even the ordinary man will be in a position to wear out rubber instead of shoe leather. According to recent news, an American firm is building many thousands of cars for Europe at £50 apiece. At present one can buy a car for £160. In twelve months, we are told, a third of the money will suffice.
Enterprising assistant teachers, with their minimum salary, will in future motor to and from schools. In America the demand for motor cars is enormous. Everybody motors in the land of the Stars and Stripes. A big demand provokes a big supply, and from a big supply a fall in price follows automatically. The owners are, for the most part, their own chauffeurs, and for this popular service cars of 20 h.p. and 30 h.p. are built.
It is the fashion in some quarters to belittle these cheap cars. Yet the Germans recognise in them a serious challenge to their own motor industry. It is true that most of the Americans of whom we speak get a new car every three years. But the worthlessness of the preceding vehicle is not the legitimate inference. A democracy loves change. Moreover, a shabby motor car is as intolerable as a shabby suit of clothes. Nor does it follow that ... the American who motors has more ready money than his brother in Europe who walks. He simply avails himself of the easy instalment systems everywhere in vogue ...
The luxury of the few is rapidly becoming the necessity of the many. In England the change has been swifter, and there has been a very marked intervening stage in the evolution. We refer to the motor bicycle, with its indispensable “trailer”.
Does £50 represent the lowest possible price? Even in America, and even in motor cars, there is a bed-rock limit. It is constituted by the cost of labour and the intrinsic value of the materials employed. The figure quoted will seem to most men the irreducible minimum. And yet it may well be otherwise. Business conducted on a large scale is a weird thing. It almost seems to be endowed with a creative faculty. It evolves order out of chaos and profit out of nothing. A firm which can produce and sell 100,000 motor cars may make a handsome gross profit, though the profit on each car be almost negligible. Moreover, big firms will dispose of one “line” at a loss for the sake of the advertisement which enables them to sell another “line” at a large profit.
Who knows but that, before the close of the present century, the rich will have abandoned their luxurious cars for still more luxurious Nieuports and Deperdussins [both French aircraft]? The poor will then enter on the inheritance thus relinquished.
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