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that rate of growth with computers but it happened with cars at the beginning of the 20th century. It was a bit slower in other parts of the world but during the first decades of the 20th century people switched to cars. They took up less space, were not producing horse manure and were cheaper to run.
ELECTRICITY & MASS PRODUCTION Why is the Ford Model T so important for car history?
Henry Ford’s idea was: “What if you had a car that was as reliable and powerful as a touring car but as cheap as a runabout?” That’s what the Model T ended up being because he used vanadium steel to build a very light, small but powerful engine. It wasn’t quite the cheapest car when it came out in 1908 but it had this amazing engine that could get it over rough country roads. It became really popular and people customised them, such as farmers hooking them up to machinery.
This new kind of car was cheaper, powerful and more versatile. Ford then drove down the price by optimising manufacturing. The Model T came out in 1908 but Ford didn’t establish a moving production line until 1913, and that was just for the car’s magneto ignition. However, the moving production was so efficient that he eventually moved the whole car production onto that.
This caused an incredible collapse in the price of the car and an explosion in volume. By 1921, Model Ts were 57 percent of the cars manufactured in the world! However, if you look at a Model T now they are very weird cars. It has three pedals – none of which is the clutch, accelerator or brake. If you put a modern driver in a Model T, it would end in tears.
Nevertheless, it was the first successful car ‘product’. There were hundreds of carmakers at the beginning of the 20th century but the Model T found a formula that you could mass produce. It’s the combination of the product itself being extremely desirable and then the method that was used to make it could be copied by other carmakers. It was the ‘iphone moment”’ of car production.
The history of electric cars is surprisingly old. Why did they fail to compete with petrol cars at the beginning of automotive history?
At the beginning of the 20th century, electric cars were very briefly more popular than internal combustion engine cars in America. However, they had very bad batteries. Electric cars are only good today because of batteries that were initially developed for laptops and camcorders.
Because of their bad batteries, they were initially marketed as ‘Women’s
Cars’. This is because you didn’t have to be ‘strong’ to throw the starter handle and electric cars weren’t messy. It was assumed that ‘real men’ (who were all supposedly mechanics) would put up with a slightly less reliable petrol car in return for better performance. In those days when you bought a car, you had a set of tools that came with it because you were expected to look after it yourself.
The other ‘girly’ thing about electric cars was that men liked buying them for their wives. It meant that they couldn’t get very far because the battery would run out. This is why some people think
“Electric cars were very briefly more popular than internal combustion engine cars in America”
that Henry Ford (despite building the most successful car in history) didn’t give his wife a Model T and instead bought her an electric car because that’s what women were expected to drive. There is sexism in the history of the car but Bertha Benz is the original example of why this is wrong.
‘INTERNET OF MOTION’ What do you think the future of the car will be?
There are a lot of problems with cars. Electric cars fix some problems but we need to avoid falling into an historical trap. The mistake that people made in the 1890s was that a horseless carriage was going to fix all the problems to do with horse-drawn vehicles. They thought cars would take up less space, reduce traffic and pollution and stop road accidents like horses kicking people. All these predictions turned out to be wrong and cars turned out to be something completely different. The mistake we could be making with electric cars is if people say: “We’ll replace the petrol engine with an electric one and everything will be the way it was before.”
Getting rid of the petrol engine does stop greenhouse gases to some extent but you still have to charge the car from sustainably produced electricity. We’re still not using 100 percent renewable energy but it doesn’t address the main problem. We only use cars four percent of the time and they mostly just sit around so they’re a waste of space and money. We pay for them but it’s becoming more and more inconvenient to own a car, and rightly so.
What’s interesting is that we’ve seen this flowering of alternatives to cars during the last ten years. It has become more feasible for more people to not have cars, except for those who live in rural areas. Most who live in cities in particular can live without them. They can use public transport, car-sharing clubs, ridehailing, scooters and electric bicycles. You can stick together all these modes of transport by using your smartphone. This is what I call an ‘Internet of Motion’ because it’s much easier to use buses when your smartphone tells you when the next one is leaving.
We’re seeing more attempts to knit together these various non-car forms of transport into a coherent alternative. We’re not there yet but it’s definitely getting better. It’s really telling that young people are learning to drive less and doing it later because these days owning a car is more hassle than it’s worth for a lot of people. I think that’s good and ultimately we do want fewer cars on the road. We’re going to look back at car ownership and think that was very weird. We’re also going to be astonished at the level of car accidents and deaths that we were prepared to put up with.
What has the car’s overall impact been on the world?
It has influenced all sorts of things but I think it imprisoned us while making us feel free. There are aspects of owning a car that do give you freedom. If you pay to own a car, you have the freedom to jump in and go places. However, in practice you’ll get stuck in traffic and you have also tied yourself down for that freedom.
There’s a quote: “The car freed us in the 20th century but in the 21st century we’re going to free ourselves from the car.” The car is still a symbol of freedom and liberation, but that’s an echo from the 1920s and I wonder whether young people still think that. It’s very contradictory and hard to encapsulate but I think that’s what it is. It’s that paradox of a technology that both liberates us and imprisons us.