In 1913, the United States produced some 485,000 of the world total of 606,124 motor vehicles. This in turn required the standardization of products and resulted in the volume production of such commodities as firearms, sewing machines, bicycles, and many other items. Cheap raw materials and a chronic shortage of skilled labor early encouraged the mechanization of industrial processes in the United States. The absence of tariff barriers between the states encouraged sales over a wide geographic area.

Given the American manufacturing tradition, it was also inevitable that cars would be produced in larger volume at lower prices than in Europe. Great demand was ensured, too, by a significantly higher per capita income and more equitable income distribution than European countries. With its vast land area and a hinterland of scattered and isolated settlements, the United States had a far greater need for automotive transportation than the nations of Europe. The new firms operated in an unprecedented seller’s market for an expensive consumer goods item. In 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T and William Durant founded General Motors. Thirty American manufacturers produced 2,500 motor vehicles in 1899, and some 485 companies entered the business in the next decade. Frank and Charles Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, had designed the first successful American gasoline automobile in 1893, then won the first American car race in 1895, and went on to make the first sale of an American-made gasoline car the next year. Henry Ford and William Durantīicycle mechanics J. This would be overwhelmingly an American achievement. 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 price and low operating expenses of the Olds.

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. Olds‘ 1901-1906 one-cylinder, three-horsepower, tiller-steered, curved-dash Oldsmobile, which was merely a motorized horse buggy. Nothing illustrates the superiority of European design better than the sharp contrast between this first Mercedes model and Ransom E. 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. Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour. The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, deserves credit for being the first modern motorcar in all essentials.

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