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The Formative Years of Automotive Transportation

Many people don't realize that back in the late 1700s, European engineers started tinkering around with motor powered vehicles. Steam, combustion and even electrical motors were in development by 1850s, but determining which type of engine would eventually power the automobile was still up for grabs.

At Service King Park Cities in Dallas, TX we are happy to be sharing some interesting factoids about the earliest years of automotive transportation, when great inventors came up with brilliant, life-changing innovations almost every day.

In the beginning, the electric vehicle was the most popular thing on the market, but unfortunately a battery did not yet exist that would enable a car to move fast over a long distance. Even though some of the earliest speed records were established by electric vehicles, they failed to stay in production past the first 10 years of the 20th century.

The steam-driven vehicle lasted well into the 1920s, but the price to manufacture steam-powered engines was much higher than the newer gas-powered engines. Not only was there a major price problem, but the risk of a boiler exploding also kept the steam engine from general acceptance.

Eventually, the combustion engine consistently beat out the competition, and soon the early American automobile pioneers such as Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford built extremely reliable combustion engines, rejecting the ideas of steam or electrical power from the beginning.

Vehicle production on a large commercial scale began in France in 1890, but didn't happen in the United States until the beginning of the 1900s. Back In those days, the European car industry consisted of smaller independent firms that would turn out a few automobiles by using precise engineering and built by hand.  

American automobile plants were essentially assembly line operations back then, which meant using parts that were made by small independent suppliers and putting them together at the plant. In the early 1900s, the United States had about 2,000 companies producing one or more models. By 1920 the number of car-related businesses had decreased to about 100 and by 1929 in shrunk down to 44. In 1976, the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association (MVMA) had 11 members, while the same situation occurred in both Europe and Japan simultaneously.

The first car produced for the masses in this country was the three-horsepower, curvy Oldsmobile. 425 sold in 1901 and 5,000 in 1904; a model that is still highly coveted by car collectors. The company prospered, and from 1904 to 1908, 241 automobile-manufacturing firms went into business in North America. One of these was the Ford Motor Co. that was organized during the summer of 1903, and produced a total 1,700 cars during its first full year in operation. Subsequently. Henry Ford began manufacturing the Model T in order to be an affordable car for the average Americans, and 1920 Ford sold more than a million vehicles.

 Service King Park Cities, 5115 Lemmon Ave., Dallas, TX 75209 

Sources: Wikipedia and SafeMotorist.com

 

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