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Modet T
Ford would build some 15 million Model T cars. It was the longest production run of any automobile model in history until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972. Before the Model T, cars were a luxury item: At the beginning of 1908, there were fewer than 200,000 on the road. Though the Model T was fairly expensive at first (the cheapest one initially cost $825, or about $18,000 in today’s dollars), it was built for ordinary people to drive every day. It had a 22-horsepower, four-cylinder engine and was made of a new kind of heat-treated steel that made it lighter and stronger than its predecessors had been and it could go as fast as 40 miles per hour. No car under $2,000 offers more,” ads crowed, “and no car over $2,000 offers more except the trimmings.”Ford kept prices low by sticking to a single product. By building just one model, for example, the company’s engineers could develop a system of interchangeable parts that reduced waste, saved time and made it easy for unskilled workers to assemble the cars. By 1914, the moving assembly line made it possible to produce thousands of cars every week. However, As tastes changed, the era of the Model T came to an end and the last one rolled off the assembly line on May 26, 1927.
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