How long have automobiles been around

To meet the challenges of market saturation and technological stagnation, General Motors under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. The goal was to make consumers dissatisfied enough to trade in and presumably up to a more expensive new model long before the useful life of their present cars had ended. Thus engineering was subordinated to the dictates of stylists and cost-cutting accountants.

General Motors became the archetype of a rational corporation run by a technostructure. As Sloanism replaced Fordism as the predominant market strategy in the industry, Ford lost the sales lead in the lucrative low-priced field to Chevrolet in and By GM claimed 43 percent of the U. During World War II, in addition to turning out several million military vehicles, American automobile manufacturers made some seventy-five essential military items, most of them unrelated to the motor vehicle.

Because the manufacture of vehicles for the civilian market ceased in and tires and gasoline were severely rationed, motor vehicle travel fell dramatically during the war years. Models and options proliferated, and every year cars became longer and heavier, more powerful, more gadget-bedecked, more expensive to purchase and to operate, following the truism that large cars are more profitable to sell than small ones.

Engineering in the postwar era was subordinated to the questionable aesthetics of nonfunctional styling at the expense of economy and safety. And quality deteriorated to the point that by the mids American-made cars were being delivered to retail buyers with an average of twenty-four defects a unit, many of them safety-related. The era of the annually restyled road cruiser ended with the imposition of federal standards of automotive safety , emission of pollutants and , and energy consumption ; with escalating gasoline prices following the oil shocks of and ; and especially with the mounting penetration of both the U.

After peaking at a record In response, the American automobile industry in the s underwent a massive organizational restructuring and technological renaissance. Managerial revolutions and cutbacks in plant capacity and personnel at GM, Ford and Chrysler resulted in leaner, tougher firms with lower break-even points, enabling them to maintain profits with lower volumes in increasingly saturated, competitive markets.

Manufacturing quality and programs of employee motivation and involvement were given high priority. Functional aerodynamic design replaced styling in Detroit studios, as the annual cosmetic change was abandoned.

Cars became smaller, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and much safer. Product and production were being increasingly rationalized in a process of integrating computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing.

The automobile has been a key force for change in twentieth-century America. During the s the industry became the backbone of a new consumer goods-oriented society. By the mids it ranked first in value of product, and in it provided one out of every six jobs in the United States. In the s the automobile became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry, one of the chief customers of the steel industry, and the biggest consumer of many other industrial products.

The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands.

The automobile stimulated participation in outdoor recreation and spurred the growth of tourism and tourism-related industries, such as service stations, roadside restaurants and motels. The construction of streets and highways, one of the largest items of government expenditure, peaked when the Interstate Highway Act of inaugurated the largest public works program in history.

The automobile made a dramatic change in the way people travel. There is no simple answer to the question of who invented the automobile and when. It has been a work in progress, developing over the past several hundred years. To better understand the history of the automobile, it could be helpful to look at a time line and see how all the pieces fit together.

This time line describes the invention of the automobile and its development with a focus on American automobiles in the twentieth century. This happens many years before anyone else is even thinking about automobiles.

However, the car remains a sketch on paper and is never actually made. This self-propelled car is not a car like the ones we see today. It is more similar to a cart and does not have a seat. This vehicle is a tractor for the French army. It has three wheels and moves at about 2. It is considered to be the first tramway locomotive. With this journey of kilometers including the return trip Bertha Benz demonstrated the practicality of the motor vehicle to the entire world.

It was Carl Benz who had the double-pivot steering system patented in , thereby solving one of the most urgent problems of the automobile. The first Benz with this steering system was the three-hp 2. This was the birth of the horizontally-opposed piston engine. Always installed at the rear by Benz until , this unit generated up to 16 hp 12 kW in various versions.

When you think of the very first car, what do you imagine? Or a quaint little buggy with thin, oversized tires driven by a man wearing a top hat? What did the very first cars look like, and how have they changed over the years?

The first automobiles actually ran on steam and electricity. You may also be surprised to learn the first vehicles were developed in the late s. It was an energy source that had been used for many years to power trains. Despite improvements, there were still a lot of shortcomings. Steam-powered vehicles took a very long time to start up and the range was limited. In the early s, inventors around the world began building electric-powered buggies.

A few decades later inventors in England and France created vehicles that were much closer to modern-day EVs.