History of automobile industry pdf

History of automotive technology
History of cars timeline
Who invented the automobile

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When Were Cars Invented?

The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, deserves credit for being the first modern motorcar in all essentials.

Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour. By 1909, with the most integrated automobile factory in Europe, Daimler employed some seventeen hundred workers to produce fewer than a thousand cars per year.

Nothing illustrates the superiority of European design better than the sharp contrast between this first Mercedes model and Ransom E. Olds‘ 1901-1906 one-cylinder, three-horsepower, tiller-steered, curved-dash Oldsmobile, which was merely a motorized horse buggy. But the Olds sold for only $650, putting it within reach of middle-class Americans, and the 1904 Olds output of 5,508 units surpassed any car production previously accomplished.

The central problem of automotive technology over the first decade of the twentieth century would be reconciling the advanced design of the 1901 Mercedes with the moderate p

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46a. The Age of the Automobile

Cruising in automobiles such as the Duesenberg pictured above was popular in America, but this typically Sunday afternoon family past time was largely discontinued during the depression.

Perhaps no invention affected American everyday life in the 20th century more than the automobile.

Although the technology for the automobile existed in the 19th century, it took Henry Ford to make the useful gadget accessible to the American public. Ford used the idea of the assembly line for automobile manufacturing. He paid his workers an unprecedented $5 a day when most laborers were bringing home two, hoping that it would increase their productivity. Furthermore, they might use their higher earnings to purchase a new car.

Ford reduced options, even stating that the public could choose whatever color car they wanted — so long as it was black. The Model T sold for $490 in 1914, about one quarter the cost of the previous decade. By 1920, there were over 8 million registrations. The 1920s saw tremendous growth in automobile ownership, with the number of

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AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY. The automotive industry includes the manufacture of automobiles, parts, and accessories. 20th-century Cleveland is part of a nearly worldwide automotive culture dependent on this industry. The city has played a major role in the rapid and revolutionary rise of the automotive industry since the 1890s, largely in the Midwest. In fact, only Detroit has a better claim to being the heart of the automobile revolution. The automobile was developed in Germany and France in the 1880s and 1890s, with Americans making only minor contributions to the technology. However, when Americans read newspaper accounts of the Paris-Bordeaux automobile race of 1895, in which 9 of 22 vehicles finished a 727-mi. course, they recognized that the automobile had come of age, and American inventors and manufacturers scrambled to enter the market.

In Cleveland, as elsewhere in the U.S., the horsecarriage and bicycle manufacturers were best equipped to become automobile makers, and ALEXANDER WINTON was one of the first. Winton, a Scottish immigrant with metalwork