| inbluevt | Date: Wednesday, 2013/09/04, 1:34 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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A HUNDRED YEARS ago Henry Ford and his engineers perfected an idea whose time had come: the moving assembly line. By putting the car on a conveyor belt, they cut the time taken to assemble a Ford Model T from 12 hours and 30 minutes in 1913 to just one hour and 33 minutes the
following year. That made the car a lot cheaper to build and opened up a
mass market for it. By 1918 its list price was down to $450, or just over 5 months’ pay for the average American worker, against the equivalent of about a year and a half’s pay when the car was launched a decade earlier. Cars became a personal badge of status, and in timecarmaking became a badge of national virility.
But since the 1950s the automobile has come to be seen as dangerous, dirty and noisy. In response it has been ever more strictly regulated, which has imposed additional costs. After the financial crisis the entire industry slumped spectacularly in many rich countries. Two of America’s big three carmakers, Chrysler and General Motors, went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by taxpayers. In Europe car sales last year were the lowest since 1995. The battery-driven cars that were
supposed to solve the pollution problem have so far been an expensive
flop. The motor industry seems to be in dire straits.
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Message edited by inbluevt - Wednesday, 2013/09/04, 1:35 AM |
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