DETROIT - AMIGA TECHNICAL INFORMATION INSTALLING TO HARD DRIVE Step One: Insert disk 1 into the internal drive and disk 2 into the external drive if you have one. Turn the machine on. The Workbench will load. Double click on the disk icon labelled "DETROIT". A window will open, showing three icons. Step Two: Double click on the icon that says "HDInstall" and select the device to which you wish to install the game. You may install to the Hard drive partition of your choice, to RAM or to PCMCIA Card. Step Three: You will be asked to specify a directory name into which the game files will be installed. The default name is DETROIT. Press enter to accept this name. To choose a different name, backspace through the default name and type in your own choice. Press enter when finished. Step Four: The computer will install disk 1 and then prompt you for the second disk if it is not in an external drive. The installation will continue automatically after you insert the disk (you do not need to press a key to continue). You will then be prompted to insert the third disk. The machine will display "Installation Complete" when it has finished installing the game. Click on this screen to return to the workbench. PLAYING FROM HARD DRIVE Double click on the icon representing the hard drive partition or device to which you installed the game. then double click again on the game directory. The game icons will appear. Double click on the icon named "DETROIT" to begin playing the 32 colour version. If you have an A1200, or an A4000, then click on the icon named, "DETROIT_AGA" to play the 256 colour version PLAYING FROM FLOPPIES Note: We recommend that you backup your disks before attempting to play the game. Step One: Ensure disk 1 is write enabled and insert it into the internal drive. Insert disk 2 into your external drive if you have one. Turn the machine on. The workbench will load. Double click on the disk icon labelled "DETROIT" A window will open showing three icons. Step Two: Double click on the game icon named "DETROIT" to play the 32 colour version. If you have an A1200 or an A4000, then click on the icon named "DETROIT_AGA" to play the 256 colour version. The title screen will appear; click on it to continue. The machine will prompt you to change to the second & third game disks at the appropriate time. Follow the on screen instructions. Note: When playing from floppy disks, you may prefer to reduce the number of "disk swaps" required by disabling music and sound effects (in the configuration panel, in the Administration Building) DETROIT - OWNERS MANUAL Thank you for buying this product. It is the result of a great deal of hard work and careful thought, and we hope that it will give you many hours of enjoyment. We are proud of our games, but we know that they can never be perfect. If you have any ideas about how we can improve, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please take the time to fill out the enclosed registration card. We can then add you to our mailing list, and keep you informed of new products and special offers as they come out. Please read the file on your game disk entitled README.TXT for information on changes made and additional features added to DETROIT after this this manuscript went to press. TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome to DETROIT Objectives Installation The Game Interface The Basics Starting Off in DETROIT The Main Factory Screen Essential Concepts Setting The Game options Getting Things Rolling Summary Of Game Play The Roads Must Roll: Producing Your First Car The One To Buy: Creating The Demand and Supplying It. Shifting Into High Gear he Car of the Future:Designing New Automobiles Your Own Personal Growth Industry: Expansion and Innovation Charting Your Progress Feedback: Gauging Your Progress with Reports Analysis: Finding Trends Over Time With Graphs WELCOME TO DETROIT Objectives DETROIT begins in the year 1908. The streets of the world are filled with horse drawn carriages and wagons, and no one has even heard of gas stations or auto mechanics bills. You're going to change all that. You are a bright young entrepreneur with a dream: to use the new technology of the assembly line to bring the automobile to the average man, and thereby to build a company that will last a hundred years and reach every corner of the globe. You start with a single factory, one sales office, $60,000 in capital funds and the design for a prototype car. From that foundation, you will guide your company's expansion, while constantly working to stay ahead of your competitors by creating better and better cars for your factories to produce. You'll make marketing decisions, hire and fire your employees, build and modernise your factories, invest in research to stay on the cutting edge of automobile technology, and incorporate that technology into successful designs for new cars. Your goal is to see to it that your company survives to the year 2008, and, in the process, becomes the most successful automobile manufacturer in the world. Happy Motoring! Installation For complete instructions on how to install DETROIT and where to find help if you need it, please refer to the technical Supplement and Tutorial booklet The Game Interface DETROIT is designed to be played equally well with a keyboard and mouse, or with a standard keyboard alone. Since most players prefer to play with the mouse this manual assumes that you have one. If you don't, you can find a complete list of keyboard commands on the included icon card The Mouse and the Pointer In general, clicking the left mouse button executes a command, and clicking the right mouse button causes the game to exit the current screen without executing any of the commands you may have entered. When you are told to click on something, assume that you should use the left mouse button unless the instructions specifically say otherwise. On every screen that appears in the game, you will see a number of command buttons, which appear as small rectangular boxes with keywords for various commands on them. Clicking on a command button is the easiest way to give instructions to DETROIT. In many cases when you click on a command button, additional screens or "panels" will pop up on your monitor with more command buttons or more information, or both. Most of the time the buttons are obvious but on some of the game screens they have been incorporated into the scenery. When the pointer is over a hidden button, the pointer symbol changes from a red "X" to a green arrow, and a message appears in the message box (which will be described a little further on) telling you what that button does. Most panels will have a button labelled Done or Exit, which you should click when you want the game to save your changes or execute your commands and then close the panel. Some panels will offer you a lettered list of choices, and expect you to highlight the one you want. You can do this by clicking directly on your choice, or by clicking and holding down the mouse button while dragging the pointer through the list until the one you want is reached, then releasing the mouse button. The Keyboard Input Box Sometimes, when you select a command button, a small rectangular window called a keyboard input box will pop up. This happens when DETROIT wants you to type in some information. If DETROIT is asking you to name something, such as your company, your save file, or the new car model you just designed, you should type in the name from the keyboard and press enter. The first letter of any such entry must be a character, not a space if you type a space accidentally press Escape and start over. If you want to edit the text already in the box, use the left arrow key to back up without erasing the entry. The mouse commands will not work when the keyboard input box is in use. Sometimes, when DETROIT is asking you for a number instead of a name, the use of the keyboard is given as an option instead of a requirement there will usually be two mouse command buttons nearby, one with a plus sign and one with a minus sign, which you can use to enter in the requested number. Clicking on these buttons raises or lowers the value in the box until you have the number you want. If you click on one of these buttons and hold the button down, the numbers will scroll rapidly in the indicated direction. If the number you want is very large, however, you can simply type the value in from the keyboard. Press Enter when you finish to return to mouse command mode (the mouse will not work while you are in keyboard input mode). To exit keyboard input mode without executing your changes, press the escape key. The Menu Mover DETROIT has a special feature to allow you to customise the appearance of your game to a certain extent. Each of the pop-up panels that appears on the screen will have a small yellow box in the upper left hand corner. By clicking on this box, and then clicking elsewhere on the screen, you can relocate the panel to any position you like. Once changed, the panel will show up in that position whenever it appears for the rest of the game, even after saving and restoring. When you begin a completely new game, however, your settings will be lost. In a multiplayer game, each player can customise the location of his own panels separately - the game will remember which arrangement goes with which player and will bring up the right one at the right time. If you click on the Menu Mover box and then decide you don't wish to relocate the panel after all, just right click and the panel will return to its original position. THE BASICS Starting Off in DETROIT Each time you start up DETROIT, you will be given the option to start a new game, load a previously saved game to continue playing it, or quit back to DOS. If you have already played and saved a game, you can select the Load button at this point. You will be given a list of up to twenty saved games to choose from, each preceded by a letter Highlight the game you want to load, then click on Use, and your game will be loaded and ready to play. If you are starting a new game, click on Start. The computer will present you with a number of panels that will appear only when you first begin a game, and not thereafter. Set the Number of Players First, you will be asked to set the number of players for the game. Each game can have up to four players. If there are fewer than four players, the remaining slots will be played by the computer. The first slot is automatically set to human and can't be changed. (We have assumed that the first player will be human; if this is incorrect, we apologise.) Each of the other three slots can be toggled between computer and human by clicking. Choose a Starting Territory Next, you will be presented with the territory Map screen. DETROIT divides the world into sixteen territories: Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, North-eastern USA, South-western USA, South-eastern USA, North-western USA, Canada, South America, Southeast Asia, Australia, Africa, China, Japan, India, and the Mid East. Choose one of these territories to be your starting area by clicking on it. Since DETROIT strives for historical accuracy, not all starting territories are equal. For your first game, we recommend starting in North America or Northern Europe. Later, for more of a challenge, you can choose other territories as your home base. In general, when lists of territories are displayed, your starting region will have a check mark beside it. Name Your Company and Your Car Once you have selected your starting territory, a keyboard input box will appear. Type in the name of your company ("Megabux Autos" for example), and press Enter. your company name may have up to fifteen characters in it, which may be letters, numbers, or spaces. Then do the same thing to name your prototype automobile. Once you have baptised your company and your car, you will be presented with the Main Factory Screen, and can begin playing. To Exit DETROIT At any point in the game, you may edit DETROIT by pressing Alt-X and confirming that you wish to edit to DOS. Your current game will not be automatically saved, however. If you want to keep your current game, use the disk icon or the file cabinet in Administration to save it before exiting. The Main Factory Screen. This screen shows a picture of your company's headquarters. At the bottom of the screen is a wood grain bar with a variety of information on it, called, simply enough, the Info Bar. Keep an eye on the Info bar, because there are several useful things on it. The Info Bar At the left hand edge of the Info Bar is a square box. When you start a game, this box will say "Jan 1908". As time progresses, this box will update to show you the current month and year of your game. At the right hand edge of the Info Bar is another square box. When you are on the main factory screen, this box shows a calendar-like grid called the Month End icon. Clicking on this box ends your turn. When you are on most other screens, this box displays a silhouette of a factory. Clicking on this icon returns you to the Main Factory Screen. When you call up a report or a graph to see your company's progress, this box holds an icon of a stack of papers under a red arrow. Click on this icon to close the report. The centre section of the Info bar shows you three things. At the top centre, your company's current funds are displayed, followed by your company's name. At the bottom centre is the message box. Whenever your pointer is over a command button, obvious or hidden, a message will appear in the message box telling you what that button does. Sometimes this may be your only source of information, so pay attention. Also, if you try to do something that the game doesn't permit, the message box will say "Message Present" to let you know that somewhere else on the screen, a panel has popped up explaining what you did that caused the problem. The Game Tools Between the message box and the End Turn/Return to Factory icon are six smaller icons. The first icon, the floppy disk, allows you to quickly and easily save your game at any point. The other five "gateway" icons will, when clicked on, take you instantly to one of the five main game areas as shown below. Floppy Disk: Saves your Game Bar Graph: Takes you to the Administration Office Screen World Map: Takes you to the Sales/Factory Screen Tools: Takes you to the Research Screen Newspaper: Takes you to the Marketing Office Screen Automobile: Takes you to the Design Screen Saving Your Game There are two ways to save your game for later play. The easiest way is to click once on the disk icon which appears on the info bar. You will be shown a lettered list of available game slots. Click on the slot you want to use, and enter the name of the saved game into the keyboard input box that appears. If you click on an already-occupied slot (one with a name other than "Empty"), you will overwrite the old game stored there, so be certain that's what you want to do before you do it. Up to twenty games may be saved at one time. Your game file will be saved in whatever directory DETROIT is being played from. The game in the A slot will be saved as DETROITA.SAV, the one in the B slot as DETROITB.SAV. and so on. The Factory Embedded in the picture of the factory are six hidden buttons, each corresponding to one of the buildings in the picture. These buildings are the places where you will manage the various aspects of your company. As you move your mouse pointer around on the screen, you will know when you encounter a button because the pointer will change to a green arrow and a message will appear in the message box telling you what building you are pointing to. Clicking on the button takes you inside the building, where you can get to work running your business. The use of each department will be covered later in this manual. Essential Concepts The two most important concepts in DETROIT are the ones most important to real businesses everywhere: Time and Money. Time: Beginning and Ending a Turn DETROIT is an entirely turn based game and has no real time component. Game time runs in months and years. Most operating costs are figured monthly, although a few aspects of the game are figured yearly, such as the inflation rate. You alone determine when the month is over by clicking on the Month End icon on the Info Bar. The number of game actions which may be performed during that month is limited only by your strategy and patience. After the Month End button has been selected, you will be presented with a Month End Summary Screen, showing all the possible game actions with a check mark displayed next to those you have taken. A confirmation box is also displayed. If you discover that there are further actions you'd like to take before declaring the month over, click on "No" and you will be returned to the Main Factory Screen. If you are certain you have done everything you wish to click on "Yes". If you are playing the game in single player mode, your company's Profit/Loss report (which will be explained later) will appear. When you are done reading it, click on the Close Report icon to begin your next turn. If the game is being played by more than one human player, a warning flag will appear to give the players the opportunity to change seats so that the next person's turn can begin. Money As should be obvious, money is very important in DETROIT. Every player starts with the same $60,000 in capital funds the speed with which that amount increases (or decreases) is the only measure of how well your company is doing. Most operating costs are deducted monthly, but some expenses are subtracted from your company's funds instantly, such as the cost for opening new sales offices and upgrading factories. Money from car sales accrues monthly. There are both obvious and easily controlled costs such as employee wages, and less controllable expenses such as transportation charges. You should always have more cash on hand than you think you will need. If your company funds ever drop to zero, you may take out up to three loans to save your company - but after the third strike, your company will go bankrupt and the game ends. Inflation will increase your operating costs as time passes, and wages will have to rise as well if you expect to keep and increase your work force. This will necessitate raising the prices on your cars - but raise them too fast, and you could wind up with a stockroom full of unsold autos, and a bankrupt company! If you get into a cash crunch through poor planning, you can turn to the bank for a loan, but the bank can be stingy and will expect a high rate of interest on the money it lends. DETROIT and Reality DETROIT is, above all else, an entertaining strategy game. We have endeavoured however to make it as historically accurate as possible without losing playability. The game takes into account issues such as the change in demand for different types of cars over the years, historical rates of inflation and wage increase, and differences in demand from one territory to another. For the easiest starting conditions, you may want to begin your business in North America or Northern Europe. For a more difficult game, you might pick China or Africa as your starting location. File Management You can, at any time, save your current game of DETROIT by clicking on the disk icon. You may also access the save file command, as well as other file management commands and the game options commands, from the file cabinet in the Administration office. From the Main Factory Screen click on Administration, and then click on the picture of the file cabinet at the right edge of the screen. Save: Allows you to save your current game. As with saving from the disk icon, click on the slot to which you want to save the game and enter the name into the keyboard input box. Load: Allows you to load a previously saved game to continue playing it. This option is also available at game start. Your current game will not be automatically saved. When you restore a saved game, your original save file remains. If you wish, you can assign the game a new name the next time you save it, so that you can go back and replay the game from the earlier save point if you want. Restart: After confirmation, this option will end the current game (without saving it) and return you to the start of the game. Quit: This option allows you to exit to DOS after confirmation. Your current game will not automatically be saved before exiting. You can also exit to DOS at anytime by pressing alt-X. Setting the Game Options. Select the Configure option in the file management menu to set the game options for DETROIT. Sound: Toggles the game's sound effect on and off. Music: Toggles the game's music on and off. Dissolve: Toggling this option changes the screen-exit effect from a gradual dissolve (when ON) to a slow fade (when OFF), which may speed up the transition on some computers. Delay: Use this option to set the length of time that message panels will remain on your screen before disappearing. Hold down the left mouse button to scroll rapidly through the settings. GETTING THINGS ROLLING Summary of Game Play There are several independent facets to DETROIT, all of which work to determine your company's success. When the game begins, you have a car design, some money and minimal facilities (one sales office and one factory in your chosen starting territory). Your first order of business is to get your prototype built and marketed so that your company has income to rely on for expansion. The next step is to invest in research, for without research, you will never have new parts to use in your cars and they'll quickly become obsolete. Once your technicians have made some advances, you will need to design new cars, put your factories to work making them, and get your sales offices selling them. When your company is securely grounded, you'll want to think about expanding into new territories: first by opening sales offices supplied by factories that already exist, and later by setting up new factories to supply sales offices in distant parts of the world. You will also need to make decisions along the way about what types of cars to sell where, when to upgrade your factory facilities, and when to stop production on car models that are no longer selling well. If you make wise decisions, your company will grow and prosper - but if you are foolish, bankruptcy lies around every corner. The Roads Must Roll: Producing Your First Car At game start, you have the following assets: one factory and one sales office in your starting territory; the design for your first car; and $60,000 in your checking account. What you don't have is cars to sell, so your first task will be to build some. Hiring, Firing, and Paying Your Employees In order to get your autos built, you need people to work for you. Employee relations are handled through Administration. Clicking on the Administration building on the main factory screen brings up the Administration Office with its four hidden buttons. The use of the File Management option has already been covered, and the use of Reports and the Bank will be covered later Click on the Personnel door to bring up the Personnel Menu. There are four buttons at the top of the screen (Benefits, Assm, Tech, and Done), a column showing the total monthly wages paid to all your employees, and two smaller inset panels where you will do your hiring and set wages. You can hire two types of employees: Assembly workers (shown as "Assm workers") to put your cars together, and Technicians, to work in your Research department. (You don't need to hire people for your sales offices they are automatically staffed) In each panel, a column of information appears. Avail tells you how many workers are available for you to hire. This number will change from month to month depending on the wages you set. Idle tells you how many workers you have hired but not assigned to job sites. Emp tells you how many workers you have who are assigned, and Wages is the monthly pay rate you have set for them. The subtotal will tell you how much money you are spending on your employees for that month. To put more people to work, click on Hire for the type of worker you want. A keyboard input box will appear. Enter the number of employees you want to hire, either with the mouse buttons or the keyboard, then click on Wage to set their monthly pay rate. If you want to lay off some employees, click on Fire and handle it the same way. Once you have hired some workers, click on Benefits to set aside a percentage of the total wages you are paying to be used for benefits for your workers. You don't have to give your workers benefits but it might be a good idea. Putting Your Employees to Work Once you have people hired, you have to give them work to do. Assembly workers need to be assigned to Factories, and Technicians need to be assigned to Research. There are two different paths you can take to assign your workers. Assembly workers are assigned through the Factories subpanel in the Sales/Factories section, and Technicians are assigned through the research Menu panel. On the Research screen. In addition, you can access either of these two screens directly from the personnel panel. Either way, you end up at the same set of screens. If you are assigning new employees, the personnel screen is the most direct, but if you are shifting your employee assignments around, you may find it more convenient to go straight to the appropriate area from the Main Factory screen. If you enter the Sales/Factories screen from the Main Factory, you will be shown the Territory Map. Click on the territory to which you want to assign factory workers. There will be a separate Sales/Factories panel for each of the sixteen world territories in DETROIT. If you enter the Sales/Factories screen from the Personnel screen, the panel for your starting territory will automatically show up. To assign workers to your factory, first be sure that you are in the correct territory screen. At the start, the panel for your starting territory should show one sales office in the Sales box and a level one factory in the Factory box. DETROIT allows you to have only one factory per territory - the number indicates how modern your factory is, not how many of them you have in that area. Click on Detail in the Factories box. This panel allows you to start, stop, and modify your assembly lines. Click on one of the assembly lines to highlight it, then click Model. A panel will pop up showing a list of your current car models. Highlight the model you want on that line (your prototype is your only option at the start) and then click Use. That model will show up on the selected assembly line. Next, click Assign, and a keyboard input box will appear. Enter in the number of workers you want to start working on that line. (The maximum number you can assign to a single line is two hundred and fifty five.) Repeat this process for each assembly line you want to get running. If you want to shift your workers around, highlight an assembly line and click on Free. Enter in the number of workers you want to free up by taking them off that line. Once the workers have been freed up, you can reassign them to another line with the Assign button. If you want to stop one of your assembly lines entirely, click on Stop. The use of the rest of the buttons on the Factory panel will be explained later. When you have opened sales offices or set up a factory in more than one territory, you can use the Prev and Next buttons on the Sales/Factory panel to cycle through the sixteen territories until you find the one you want to adjust. Clicking on List will show you how many sales offices you have in each territory, and what level factory, if any, is there. Once you've staffed your factory with workers, you want do the same thing for your Research department by assigning your newly hired Technicians to various projects. If you are already in the Personnel Menu, click on Tech to bring up the Research Menu. If you are at the Main Factory screen, click on the Research building to bring up the Research screen, then click on the picture of the lab technician to access the Research Menu. There are a total of seven hidden buttons on the Research screen When you access the Research Menu either through Personnel or through Research, a panel will pop up showing a list of the seven systems and parts that go into one of your cars: engines, brakes, suspension, cooling systems, body design, safety features, and luxury options. You can assign Technicians to do research on any or all of them. Highlight the part you want to be researched, then click on Assign. Set the number of Technicians for each research department with the keyboard input box in the same way you assigned Assembly Workers to your factory. (The maximum number you can assign is to one project is two hundred and fifty-five.) When you click on done for each part, a check mark will automatically appear in the box by that part on the main Research panel If, later on, you want to stop research on that part, you can manually toggle off the check box by clicking on it. Even if there are Technicians assigned to the part, no research will take place unless the check mark appears If you want to shift your Technicians around, highlight one of the parts, and click on Free to free up workers by taking them off that project They can then be reassigned to a different department with the Assign button. The One To Buy: Creating the Demand and Supplying It. Now that your factories are rolling, you have to do something to let people know that you have cars for sale, and get them interested in buying. You also have to see to it that your dealers have cars to sell to them. In other words, you have to market your wares, and get them out to the lot so they can be bought. Selling Your Cars From the Main Factory Screen, click on the Marketing building. The Marketing Office screen will appear, with the Info Bar at the bottom. You have several choices for what media to use to advertise your autos, but not all of them are available at the start. In order to advertise on Radio and Television, you'll have to wait until they've been invented. There are six hidden buttons on the Advertising Screen. Five are your marketing options, and the sixth brings up a quick reference Marketing List The Marketing List will give you a summary of the advertising expenditures you've set for each territory. Clicking on Prev and Next will let you cycle through the territories. Marketing decisions must be made separately for each territory in which you are trying to sell cars. Clicking on Billboards or Sports will bring up a keyboard input box with plus and Minus buttons. There is a minimum cost associated with each choice, and the price will increase over time as inflation takes its toll. Clicking on the plus button will cause the minimum amount to show up in the window. If you don't want to spend that much, either click on the minus button to change the amount back to zero, or right click to exit the panel, and go in search of more economical advertising medium. Magazines, Radio, and Television are slightly different. Clicking on these options will get you a list of various speciality markets in which you can advertise your cars. In Magazines for example you could choose to target Sports publications, or Women's magazines, or any of the others. For Radio and Television, you can decide what kinds of programs you want to air your commercials on. Highlight the publication or program area of your choice, and click on it. You will get a keyboard input box like the one for the other three options, which can be dealt with in the same way. You can't target specific models to specific markets, however there is no way to advertise just your sports cars in sporting magazines, or just your family wagons on television sitcoms. Advertising costs, like most costs, are deducted from your funds at the end of each month. Getting the Cars to the Buyers Now that your clever advertising campaigns have stirred up public interest, you have to get those cars into the showrooms. From the Main Factory Screen, click on the Sales/Factories building. The Territory Map will appear, with icons indicating where you have opened sales offices or factories. Sales offices are represented by a light blue building icon, with a number showing how many offices are open, and factories are represented by a black building icon where the number represents the factories level. At the start, you will see one of each icon in your starting territory (Refer to Territory Screen to see how the territory map would look with a sales office and factory in each territory) Click on the territory for which you want to adjust your sales offices or your factory. The Sales Offices and Factories panels will appear. (You saw these earlier when you were assigning your assembly workers and getting the assembly lines rolling. As explained before, you can also get to these panels through Administration: Personnel, if you choose.) The Next and Prev buttons on this panel allow you to cycle through the territories. In the Office panel, click on Detail. A screen will pop up showing you a list of models and prices, with a number of command buttons. Your prototype will appear in the first slot, highlighted. There are two things you need to do to get your cars to the dealers: the first is to establish supply lines from your factories so the cars will be shipped, and the second is to set the price. Both of these things are done from the Office Detail panel. A single factory in one territory can supply sales offices in a number of other territories, if it is making enough cars. When you begin the game you will have only one factory and one sales office, both in the same territory. Click on Supply Line. You will notice that you can have up to three supply lines for each territory, and that your starting territory is listed in the first slot. This shows that you already have one supply line automatically running from your factory in your starting territory to your sales office there. Any time you have a factory and a sales office in the same territory, that factory automatically becomes the first supply line for that office. Thus you do not need to do anything to set up the supply line for your first sales office. When you have factories and sales offices to several territories, arranging supply lines becomes a more complicated matter. This will be covered later, in the section on expanding your company. Setting a good price for your cars is crucial to your company's success, so DETROIT gives you a number of options for pricing your automobiles. Pricing strategies must be set individually for each territory. Make sure you are on the right panel before you start, then click on Office Detail Highlight one of your current production models from the lettered list, then click Price. A keyboard input box will appear, with a number of command buttons nearby. This panel automatically appears in the Single pricing mode, which allows you to set the price for a single model of car in a single area. The other three modes (Model, Territory, and Global) are useful only after you have multiple models of cars being sold in several territories, so they will be covered in the section on expanding your company. Use either the plus and minus mouse command keys or direct keyboard input to specify the price in dollars for the selected model. Click Done or press Enter when finished. on the displayed list of production models, the price will appear next to the model name and the box will turn into a check mark. As long as the check mark is toggled on, that model will be sold at that price in that location. If you decide not to sell that model from that showroom, click on the check mark to toggle it back into a box, and that car will no longer be offered for sale in that territory. SHIFTING INTO HIGH GEAR If your factory is building cars which are selling, and your company is operating at a profit you're off to a good start. It's time to think about what your next product is going to be, and to start extending your company's reach. The Car of the future: Designing New Automobiles Your prototype, great car though it is, won't stay in style forever. Your company is going to have to come up with something new to offer consumers if you want it to last more than a few years. Here's where your investment in Research pays off. Obtaining New Technology If you have invested in Research, sooner or later your Technicians will come up with some new automobile technology. When they do, at the start of the month a panel will appear informing you that new developments have been made. To find out what your people have come up with you can go to Research and call up the Systems Details panels. To see what the new part looks like, and to put it into a new car, you need to head over to your Design department. Designing a New Car From the Main Factory Screen, click on the Design building. The first page of the design worksheet will appear with your prototype car design displayed. There are two pages to each car design, the first for designing the body and look of the car, and the second, click on functional components that will make it run. To get from the first page to the second, click on Part. On the second page, click on Body to return to the first page. To begin an entirely new design, go to the first design page and click on New. The first design page shows you a summary of the components in the design for each car, and has command buttons to let you page through your current designs or load an old design from the Archives (the use of the Archives will be explained later). You can have up to sixteen current designs at a time. A picture of the car currently being worked on appears on the right side of the screen to the upper right hand corner of this inset display will be either the word "New" indicating that this design is in development, or a number such as "1/16" to indicate which of your sixteen current designs you are presently looking at. Most of the actual design work is done on the second page of the design worksheet. The one exception to this is the body of the car, which you specify on the first page. All other components the engine, brakes, suspension, cooling system, and luxury and safety features - are added from the second page. On the right hand side of the first page are the buttons that allow you to design the body for your new car. First, you need to decide what type of car you're building - a sports car? A van? A compact? Click on the Type button to cycle through your options. A basic body design for each vehicle type will be presented. After a basic type has been selected, you can then modify any or all of the three body sections (front, middle, and back) until the car is exactly to your liking. Highlight the section of the body you want to design, then click on the plus and minus keys to cycle through your options. Mix and match them to until you have the exact combination you want. Use the Colour button to select a colour scheme for your new model. When you are happy with the body of your vehicle click on Part to start designing the rest of it. The second page of the design screen has four boxes, one each for the Engine, Brakes, Suspension, and Cooling System. In each box, click on the plus and minus keys to cycle through the available choices for each part. If you want more information about a particular component click on Detail to pop up a screen with the design specifications. To add luxury or safety options to the new car, click on either the Luxury or Safety button. A list will pop up, showing which of each of these options has been added to the design. If you are starting from scratch, these lists will be empty. the small inset panel at the bottom allows you to cycle through the available options with the plus and minus keys. Click on Detail to get more information about the feature. To add an option to the car, highlight one of the lettered slots and click Use. The option that appears in the inset window will be added to the design. Likewise, if you highlight an option on the list and click Remove, that option will be taken off the car. You can add up to ten luxury and five safety options to one car. To return to the first page of the design, click on Body. Your design options will be very limited at first, until your Technicians provide you with enough new components to give you a decent selection to choose from. Once you have more than one design on the boards, you can click on Prev and Next on the first page of the design sheet to cycle through your current designs. When you fill up all of the sixteen available slots with car designs, you will have to make room for more, either by saving some of your current designs to the Archives or by getting rid of some designs. To file a design away in the Archives, click on Put, and the current design will be saved directly to the Archives. If you are unhappy with a design and want to get rid of it completely, click on Del, and after confirmation the current car design will be deleted permanently from your records. Sometimes, you may want to make modifications on an already existing design. If the design is current, you can simply make whatever changes you like, then save the new design under a different name. If the old design has been saved in the Archives, click on Get. The first page of the Archive records will appear. Click on the design you want, then click on Use, and the design will be put back onto the current list, assuming there is room for it (Click on Prev/Next on the Archive panel to page through the rest of the Archive records if the one you want isn't on the first page.) To see what a sample car design looks like, look at the design specifications for your prototype This is a very simple car, of the "Family Sedan" type. By clicking on Part, you can see that the only components the car has are the engine - a four-cylinder in line - and a simple hand brake. It has no suspension or cooling system, and no luxuries or safety devices. There's a lot of room for improvement. Testing Your New Design When you have designed a new car to your satisfaction, return to the first page of the design worksheet, and click Make. This directs your Technicians to make and test a prototype of your new automobile. A keyboard input box will pop up to allow you to name your new design, and ask you to confirm your decision to have the test car built. Then your test drivers will start putting the new car through its paces to check its performance. The testing screen allows you to choose which of five performance checks you want to put your new car through, and to watch the car as it is tested. Initially, the view screen at the top right shows an interference pattern. Once you start testing the car, this window allows you to watch the testing as it progresses. The five available testing categories are Acceleration, Braking, Handling, Capacity, and Fuel Economy. To order a test, click on the test name. The cost of the test will be added to the computer printout in the lower right quarter of the screen. Each test costs a different amount. To select all of the tests at once, click on Test All. When you have selected the tests you want, click on the button that says Run. The cost for materials and testing will be deducted from your funds, and the view screen will show you the car as it is put through its paces. If you don't wish to watch the tests as they take place, left click on the view screen as each test begins and the results will be instantly displayed. The testing results are read as follows; Acceleration: shows you how long in seconds it takes the car to go from zero to sixty miles per hour. Braking: tells you the distance required in feet for the car to go from seventy miles per hour to a full stop. Road Handling: gives you the number of gees at which the car stops holding the road. Capacity: "Seating" tells you the number of people the car can carry, and "Cargo" is the holding space the vehicle has in cubic feet. Fuel Economy: shows the miles per gallon of gasoline the car get in the city and on the highway. The Overall rating of the car is a percentage value showing how well that car is predicted to market as that type of vehicle. Different types of cars will require different emphasis in design: a van needs more cargo space than a sports car, while a sports car requires better acceleration than a van. Using the Archives You can have up to sixteen current car designs in production at any time. If you exceed that number, but still want to hang onto your older designs you will have to store them in the Archives. To reach the Archives, go to the Main factory Screen and click on the Archives building in the upper left part of the screen. The Archives panel will appear. Click on Put, and you will see a list of your sixteen current designs. To move one to the archives, highlight it, then click on Use, and the design will be taken out of the current list and stored. You can also bring an older design back from the archives if you discover a need for it. From the main archive panel, click on Get. A list of the first twenty archived designs will appear. You can archive a total of one hundred designs. To see the rest of the archives list, click on Prev and Next to cycle through the pages of the archives until you find the one you want. When you've located the design to be loaded, highlight it, then click on Use. The current design list will appear. Highlight an empty slot and click on Use in that window. The selected archive design will move to the current list. If you highlight an occupied slot on the current list and click Use, the selected current design and the selected archived design will swap places. If you should happen to use up all the space in your archives, or if you just want to keep your archive lists short and easy to handle, click on Delete from the main archives panel. The archived design list will appear. Highlight the design you want to get rid of and click Use. The game will ask you to confirm your instruction; if you are sure you won't ever want that design again, click Yes. Once a design is deleted from the archive, it's gone forever, so be sure you're finished with it before you confirm. Your Own Personal Growth Industry: Expansion and Innovation Opening up New Territories Setting up sales offices and factories in new territories greatly adds to the complexity of your game, and is essential. For your company's continued growth since a factory can supply sales offices in more than one territory if it is producing enough cars, you probably want to start your expansion by adding sales offices in territories close to your starting territory. The farther away from the factory your sales offices are, the higher the hidden incidental costs such as transportation fees will be for getting the cars to the showrooms. Because of this, it might not be a good idea to try to supply all your world-wide sales offices from a single factory. To open a new sales office, go to the Main Factory Screen and click on the Sales/Factories building. The Territory Map will appear. Click on the Territory you want to expand into. The Sales and Factory panels for that territory will appear. In the Sales Offices section, click on Open The cost of opening the new office will be immediately deducted from your company's funds. If you want to shut down a sales office, click on Close. Closing a sales Office is not free - it costs one-half of what it cost to establish the office in the first place, and as with Open the money is deducted immediately. Therefore,the game will ask you to confirm any office openings or closings. Since the deduction from your company's funds takes place straight away and cant be undone, decisions to open and close offices should be made with some care. You can open up to ten sales offices in any one territory. New icons will appear on the territory map each time you establish a sales office or factory in a new territory. Opening a new factory is very similar to opening up a new sales office. Click on Raise to establish a Level One factory in that territory. Clicking on Raise again will improve the level of your factory by one. A higher level factory is more efficient, but expansion gets progressively more expensive as the factory level increases. Clicking on Lower will downsize your factory at a cost of one third the price of expansion. As with sales offices, costs for improving or downsizing your factories are immediately deducted from your company funds Pricing and Supply on a Global Scale Once you have more than one model of car to sell, more than one factory producing your cars, and more than one territory to sell them in, pricing and supply become more complicated. The possible strategies for arranging your supply lines and setting your price strategies multiply enormously. To set up new supply lines for a territory, or change existing ones, go to the Main Factory Screen and click on the Sales/Factories building. The Territory Map will appear. Click on the territory where you want to adjust your supply lines or prices. The Sales Office/Factory panel will appear. Each territory has its own panel, so make sure you're in the right territory before you start making changes. If you wind up in the wrong territory, clicking on Prev and Next will allow you to cycle through territories until you find the right one. Clicking on List from any territory panel will give you a summary of the number of sales offices and the level of the factory, if any, in each territory. In the Sales Offices section of the panel, click on Detail, then on Supply Line to get the three slot lettered list of supply lines for that office. If there is no factory in your new sales area, you will have to arrange to have the cars shipped in from elsewhere. Click on one of the three lines to highlight it, then click on the plus and minus buttons to cycle through the available territories until you find the one you want. Naturally, you have to have a factory established in a territory before you can use it as a supply line. To stop shipping cars, cycle through the territories until you find the "None" option. You may remove the automatic in territory supply line from a factory in the same area, if you wish. When your supply lines are set, click on Price. You will have to set the initial price for each separate model of car you want to sell from that office using Single mode as described earlier. The other three buttons can be used to make more sweeping changes in the prices of your cars. Clicking on Model allows you to raise or lower the cost of a particular model of car in every territory. It doesn't matter which territory panel you are currently using - the change will be applied everywhere that model is being sold. Use the plus and minus keys or direct keyboard input to change the price on that model by percentage of the current cost, not by dollar amount. To lower the price, click on the minus key until you get negative numbers. Clicking on Territory changes the price for every model of car being sold in the current territory. Again, the change is in percentage of the current prices, not dollar amount. Similarly clicking on Global allows you to adjust the prices on every model in every territory. Note that if you are selling a particular model of car in a certain territory there must be a supply line going to that territory from a factory which is making that particular model of car. It's pointless to tell your salespeople to sell "Megabux Electras" if none of the factories that are supplying them with cars are producing Electras. Once you've supplied your new sales area with cars, and set the pricing strategy, be sure to remember to head over to marketing and spend some advertising money in that new territory, if you want your cars to sell. Using the Bank The bank is the place to go if you are expecting a cash crunch, are looking to finance a costly new expansion, or want to put some of your money away to accrue interest for a while. To get to the bank, go to the Main Factory Screen and click on Administration. When the Administration Office appears, click on the phone. The banking panel will pop up. The top section of the panel shows your current funds (in Checking), your funds in savings, and the current yearly interest rate accrued on your savings. (Your checking account does not earn interest). To transfer money from checking to savings, click on Check. A keyboard input box will appear for you to enter the amount of money you want to transfer. Likewise to shift money from savings to checking, click on Save and enter the amount. The bottom section of the panel shows your current loans, and the yearly interest rate the bank will charge you for the use of its money. To take out a loan, click on Loan and enter the amount in the keyboard input box. If the bank agrees to the loan, the money will be added to your checking account. If the loan is denied, the box will clear when you press enter, and you'll have to try again. Click on Term to set the length of time you want the loan to cover. This will determine the size of your monthly payments. The minimum payment on your loan will be deducted from your checking account automatically at the end of each month. If you want to pay more than the minimum in a given month, click on Repay and enter in the amount. It will be deducted from your checking account and the amount remaining on your loan will be reduced. CHARTING YOUR PROGRESS So by now you've hired people, put them to work in the factories and in your research department, advertised your product, set the price tag, and got the cars shipped to the showroom. Maybe you've even expanded your operations already. Your cars are selling, but you need to plan for the future. Or perhaps your cars aren't selling, and you need to figure out where the problem lies. Your trusty staff of researchers and accountants stands ready to assist your business decisions with a wide variety of reports and graphs to show you just how well your company is or isn't doing. (Note: Some additional reports and graphs may have been added to DETROIT since this document went to press. Please see the Technical Supplement and Tutorial booklet for details.) Feedback: Gauging Your Progress with Reports. Reports give you a picture of how well your company is doing in the short term. Each report shows the figures for the month just past, and only for that one month. To get reports, enter the Administration Office screen and click on the pile of papers in the centre of the desk. (if you do this in the first month, you will see that there are no reports available, since you have not started production yet). A menu of available reports in the first two columns and graphs in the third one. Click on one of the report buttons to bring up that report. All reports are free with the exception of the Demand report, which must be commissioned from an outside research agency and paid for when ordered. Click on the stack of papers under the red arrow pictured at the right end of the info bar to close a particular report or graph. Many of the reports and graphs have word-toggles you can click on to obtain more information or change the way the information is presented for viewing. all text that appears in red is associated with a toggle and may be clicked on to change the display. When you are finished reading reports, click on Done to return to the Administration Office. PROFIT/LOSS The Profit/Loss Report is the most basic indicator of your company's health. In addition to being available through the Report menu, these figures are automatically presented to you at the start of each new month. The first column shows you your company's itemised expenses, while the second shows your income by territory. Click on Income to toggle your view of your profits between model and territory. TERRITORY This report gives you detailed information on how well you are doing in each territory in which you have an installation. Click on the territory name to cycle through your territories (only those areas in which you have sales offices or factories will appear) There are five columns of information on this screen, each of which can be toggled between two different sets of information. To toggle the column, click on the column header Toggles: First column: model name/model type Second column: the number of assembly lines making each car/the price of the car in that territory Third column: the number of cars built in that territory in the previous month/the labour costs for making each car Fourth column: the number of cars sold in that territory in the previous month/the material costs for making each car. Fifth column: the number of cars in stock in that territory/ the profit made on each car at the current price MODEL This report tells you how well each of your models is doing in each territory. Click on the model name to cycle through your current models. There are four columns of information on this sheet, each of which can be toggled between two sets of information. To toggle the column, click on the column header. (The column titled "Territory" does not toggle) Toggles: Second column: the number of assembly lines making each car/ the price of the car in that territory. Third column: the number of cars built in that territory in the previous month / the labour costs for making each car. Fourth column: the number of cars sold in that territory in the previous month / the materials costs for making each car Fifth column: the number of cars in stock in that territory/ the profit made on each car at the current price COMPARE This report is your main source of information on how well your competition is doing. from this report you can see the expenses, income, and profit or loss margin for each of your three competitors. (There are no toggles on this screen.) MARKET T This report shows your marketing expenses arranged by territory. Click on the territory name to cycle through the territories. Click on the word "Territory" to toggle the display between the sums for each territory to the total sums for all territories. MARKET M This report is very similar to Market T, except that your marketing expenses are arranged by media type. Click on the media type to cycle through the available media. Click on the word "Media" to toggle the display between the sums for each media type to the total sums for all media. DEMAND This report is the only report that costs you money to acquire. To obtain a demand report, select a car model to get a report on by clicking on it, then click Use. You may get a demand report on only one model per month. Select the territories you wish a report on by clicking on them. You may select as many territories as you like, at a cost of $100 per territory. Click on Use to order the report. The game will ask you to confirm the order. when you do so the cost will be immediately deducted from your company's funds and the demand report will appear on the screen showing you how many cars could have been sold in that territory in the past month. The demand in a particular territory may change from one month to the next based on your competitor's actions, your own advertising, or other factors. Once ordered, the demand report cannot be changed until the next month - you may not change the model type or add to or subtract from the territories list. The second and subsequent times you order a demand report, you will first be given the option of ordering a New report or viewing the last demand report you purchased (click on Old). Only the last report is available. DISTRIBUTION This report shows you the supply lines for each of your sales offices. Click on the territory name to cycle through the territories. By clicking on any column heading you can change the display to show you the transportation costs involved in maintaining each supply line. Analysis: Finding Trends Over Time with Graphs Graphs allow you to gauge your company's progress over an extended period. The information available in the graphs is more concise and therefore less detailed than the information you can get from reports. Graphs can be accessed from the same place reports are accessed. Click on one of the buttons in the third column of the Reports/Graphs menu to bring up a graph. Click on the stack of papers icon at the right side of the info bar to return to the Reports/Graphs menu, and click Done to return to the Administration Office Profit The vertical axis on this graph shows you your profits for each month, compared to those of your competitors. By clicking on the scale indicator for the vertical axis, you can toggle the scale for a range of settings from tens of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars. Only those scales which are appropriate for the profit levels shown will be available, however, so if the most any company made in any month shown was $2000, you will not be able to change the scale to anything greater than thousands of dollars. The horizontal axis displays seven months of profit records. A year's worth of records are kept stored at a time. To access months not currently visible on the screen, click on the first or last month displayed. Production The vertical axis on this graph shows you how many cars you and your competitors built each month. The vertical axis scale can be changed to range from tens to hundreds of millions of cars produced per month. Only those scales which are appropriate for the production levels shown will be available, however, so if no company produced more than sixty cars in any month shown, the scale will not go above tens of cars. As with profits, the horizontal axis displays seven months worth of production records, and up to a year can be viewed by clicking on the first or last month displayed to scroll the printout. Sales The vertical axis on this graph shows you what your income from car sales is for each month, compared to those of your competitors. The numbers shown are for total income over all models of cars being produced. The vertical axis scale can be changed to range from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales per month. Only those scales which are appropriate for the sales levels shown will be available. As with profits, the horizontal axis displays seven months' worth of sales records, and up to a year can be viewed by clicking on the first or last month displayed to scroll the printout. Subsys Level This graph shows you what level of advancement your automobile subsystems have achieved, relative to those of your competitors. The vertical axis shows the percentage of the level possible in the game that you have reached for each of the seven systems. There is a built in limit to the rate at which you can acquire new technology through research, so you should not expect to reach 100% quickly, even if you put maximum investment into your research department. The horizontal bar shows each of the seven systems, abbreviated as follows: ENG = Engines, BRA = Brakes, SUS = Suspension, COO = Cooling, BOD = Bodies, SAF = Safety, and LUX = Luxury. DETROIT - KEYBOARD COMMANDS The keyboard commands for DETROIT have been set up to be as straightforward as possible for players who can't (or don't wish to) use a mouse, or for players who find some aspects of the game easier to work with through the keyboard. Most of the game can be played from the keyboard by following a few simple rules. A few screens, however require special information. Command Buttons: Nearly all commands which are represented through mouse command buttons can be executed from the keyboard by pressing the letter key highlighted on the button itself. For plus and minus buttons, use the plus and minus keys except (or those on the second design screen (see accompanying diagram). Lettered Lists: Press the letter of the item you want to select it from a lettered list. In some cases the item can be deselected by pressing the letter a second time. Exiting Screens: Press Escape to exit the current screen. Each time the key is pressed, you will go back one level, so it may be necessary to press it more than once to get all the way out. In many places, pressing D (for "Done") will also allow you to exit. Archives: To access the archives, go to the Main Factory screen and press C. Model Testing: To test your new car designs, press the first letter of each test desired. (Acceleration = A, Braking = B, and so on) Press T to select all the tests, and R to run. Reports and Graphs Profit/Loss: To toggle from income by territory to income by model, press T. Territory: To toggle each column of information, press the number of that column (i.e. to toggle the third column, press 3). To cycle through the territories, press N. Model: To toggle each column of information (ignoring the first which does not toggle), press the number of that column. To cycle through the territories, press N. Market T: Press T to see marketing totals. Press N to cycle through the territories. Market M: Press T to see marketing totals. Press N to cycle through the media types. Distribution: Press N to cycle through the territories. Press 1 to toggle between supply lines and transportation expenses. GAME TOOLS F4 Save Game F5 Jump To Administration F6 Jump To Sales/ Factories F7 Jump To Research F8 Jump To Marketing F9 Jump To Design F10 Jump To Factory Esc Close Report ADMINISTRATION P Personnel F Files R Reports/Graphs B Bank MARKETING T Television L Marketing List B Billboards S Sporting Events M Magazines and Newspapers R Radio RESEARCH B Brakes Detail C Cooling Detail S Suspension Detail A Safety Detail E Engine Detail R Research Menu L Luxury Detail DESIGN PAGE TWO 1 Previous Engine 2 Next Engine 3 Previous Brake 4 Next Brake 5 Previous Suspension 6 Next Suspension 7 Previous Cooling 8 Next Cooling TERRITORY MAP A Northern Europe B Southern Europe C East Europe D North East USA E South West USA F South East USA G North West USA H Canada I South America J Indonesia K Australia L Africa M China N Japan O India P Middle East NEWS! EXTRA GAME FEATURES! READ THIS, DON'T IGNORE IT!!! Several features were added to the game after it shipped, and a couple were modified. Here are the details, plus some clarifications of existing, unchanged rules. We also have an apology to make. In order to print this file: 1) Turn on your printer 2) Change into the directory that you installed DETROIT to. So, if you installed DETROIT into the default directory, type CD\DETROIT 3) Type PRINT README.TXT MODEM PLAY Just before the launch of the game, problems were discovered in the modem play module. Rather than delay the launch, we decided to ship the game with the modem option removed, and make a fixed version available free to all users as soon as it is ready. We apologise deeply for this, and hope you understand that everyone WILL be able to get this option soon, and for free. The fastest way to get hold of this update is to download it. It will be available on our own BBS and on CompuServe & Genie. We will make announcements on these boards as soon as the update is ready. Again, we really are sorry. DIFFICULTY OPTIONS After you select the START option, you will see the DIFFICULTY MENU. This gives you several levels of difficulty at which you can play the game. When following the TUTORIAL, select the MEDIUM difficulty button. SOUND EFFECTS On slower machines, playing sound effects may slow the game further, so you may wish to turn sound effects off. Also, AdLib samples play the quickest, so owners of AdLib compatible cards (e.g. SoundBlasters), may wish to use the SETUP program, and choose AdLib as their sound card. STRIKE RESOLUTION MENU If your workers go on strike due to low wages, you will be presented with the Strike Resolution Menu. This presents you with the workers' wage demands and a box for you to make a counter offer. If the workers accept the offer, you have avoided a strike. If not they strike, and will produce nothing that month. The Strike Resolution Menu will return every month until the strike is resolved. WORLD WAR I, THE GREAT DEPRESSION, WORLD WAR II, OIL CRISIS During the World Wars, the Depression and the 1970's oil crisis, the Demand for your automobiles will fall drastically, so don't be surprised by sudden cuts in profit. AUTOMATION & WAGES The amount which you pay each assembler reflects not only their actual salary, but also all of the equipment which you have in your factory for them to use, so they may seem high. Also, over time, each factory you own will become more and more efficient. This reflects the effect of modernised equipment and automation. However, this modern hardware will cost you: the amount you pay per assembler will rise steadily, over and above inflation. PUBLIC DOMAIN TECHNOLOGY Technology becomes publicly available if 3 companies have developed it not 2. UPDATING MODELS When you Update an existing model, any existing stock will be converted into stock of the new model. For this, you will be charged a fee equal to twice the difference in the Material Costs between the old and new model. MODEL'S OVERALL RATING AND MATERIAL COST On the top left hand side of the Car Design screen, you will now see the Model's Overall Rating and Material Cost. BODY BUTTON The BODY Button, to the right of the TYPE Button, represents the FOUR basic body styles available for your car designs. BUY BUTTON If you wish, you may now buy a car design from a design team outside of your company. This will cost a substantial amount. To do this, use the BUY button, at the top left corner of the Car Design screen. BODY TECHNOLOGY LEVELS As you research new Body Technology Levels you will be able to design new types of cars, such as Compacts. CHECKING & SAVINGS In the Banking Menu, the CHECK button moves money from your Savings to your Checking account. The SAVE button does the opposite. These were reversed in the manual. LOANS In order to change the TERM of your loan, you must FIRST change the Term to the length you wish, and then request the loan. Once a loan has been taken, there can be no negotiating a new Term. MEGA-MENU A new Menu has been added to the game. It combines all the menus in the Sales & Factory screen into one. Once you become comfortable with the Menus in the Sales & Factory screen, you may find this one to be quicker. Because of the number of buttons on this screen, it was impossible to include any keyboard hot keys, so you will need a mouse to use it. STOP BUTTON On the left side of the Factory Menu is the STOP button. This will free all workers on a line, and clear the Model being produced by that line. To use the button, highlight the line you wish to affect, and hit the STOP button. CLOSING SALES OFFICE & FACTORIES Closing a Sales Office or Factory earns you money. A Sales office that is Closed will generate $2,500, while a Factory that is Lowered will generate 1/3 of what it would cost you to buy that factory. SUBSYSTEM REPORT GRAPH The Subsystem Graph represents Technology currently being INCLUDED in a production vehicle and not those Technologies that have been developed but not incorporated in a production vehicle. PRINTING REPORTS You may only print reports that have a printer icon below the exit report button. This includes all written reports, but not the Graph reports. NUMBER PAD In order to use the Number Pad on your keyboard, you must have the NUMLOCK key activated. DETROIT - TUTORIAL QUICK START TUTORIAL This tutorial is meant for the player who wants to get started playing DETROIT right away. If you follow it step by step, it will take you through the first month of a typical game and show you how to control all of the major elements you'll need to get your business going. Once you 're familiar with the basics, you'll probably want to consult the manual to get all the details and learn about those features not covered here. Precise numbers to use for various aspects of the game (worker wages, car prices, and so on) have been deliberately left out of this tutorial. Many players prefer to discover the best numbers to use through trial and error. If you would like to have some numbers to ensure that you will make a profit in the early stages of the game, please see the card included elsewhere in the game package. This tutorial assumes that you are playing DETROIT with a mouse. If not please see the Keyboard Command Card included in the game materials for the keyboard equivalents of the Mouse commands. When the tutorial says to click on a command use the left mouse button unless the instructions specifically say otherwise. Clicking on the right mouse button will usually allow you to exit the current screen or panel; use this if you accidentally wind up somewhere you don't want to be while you are following this tutorial. DETROIT is a turn-based game, so you don't have to rush while working through this tutorial. Take your time. Getting Started Start DETROIT by following the instructions in the Installation and Loading section of this booklet. You can click any mouse button to move through the title screens quickly, if you wish. You will see the Start Options panel superimposed on the Main Factory Screen (which will be described in a moment). Click on the Start button. The Player Setup panel will appear. It should show Player 1 as human (that's you, we hope) and Players 2 through 4 as the computer. You don't want to change this now, so just click on Done. Next, you will see the Territory Map with the sixteen game territories shown in different colours. (You may see some animation on this screen, and on most of the other screens in the game. Don't worry about it - nothing is happening to your game. It's just there for your amusement so relax and enjoy it.) Put the mouse pointer on the North-eastern section of the USA (which is brown) and click. A keyboard input box will appear for you to enter the name of your company. You can press Enter to accept the default name ("Company 1") if you want but that's pretty dull, so we suggest you choose something more interesting. The name can be up to fifteen characters and contain letters or numbers. When you start typing, the default name will automatically vanish and your new name will appear. Press Enter when you've finished. A similar panel will appear asking you to name your first car model. Again press Enter to accept the default or just start typing to give it a different name. Press Enter when you're done, and the Main Factory Screen will appear. At the start of the game, you have $60,000 in funds and one fully designed and tested model of car to sell. You begin with one factory in your starting territory which has one assembly line running, producing your first car model, and one sales office in your starting territory, which is selling it. You have enough assembly workers hired to man your single assembly line, and a small number of research technicians on your payroll waiting to be assigned to development projects. You will start out with some initial numbers automatically assigned for workers, wages, prices, and so forth, but these numbers, while they may be reasonable values to use, are not optimal. You'll have to experiment (or refer to the enclosed card) to determine which numbers are actually best. Take a Look at Your Factory The Main Factory Screen is where you will access the various departments that make up your company. Most of the screen shows the factory itself with its six buildings. Clockwise from the top right, they are: Design (light blue), Research (pink), Sales/Factories (blue roof and skylight), Administration (grey), Archives (red brick), and Marketing (brown with billboard) in the centre. At the bottom of the screen is the wooden Info Bar. From the left, the Info Bar shows: * The current month and year of your game (it should say "Jan 1908") * Your company's current funds ($60,000) * The rectangular Message Box, which will often tell you useful things * Your company name * The six toolbar icons (see below) * The Month End button (with the calendar grid pictured on it) On this screen, and on most of the other main screens in the game, there are mouse command buttons worked into the scenery itself. The manual will give you a complete list of all the buttons on each screen and what they do, but for this tutorial we'll only be telling you about the ones you need to use right now. You can tell when you've found a hidden button on the screen because the mouse pointer will change shape from a red "X" to a green arrowhead, and a description of that button will appear in the Message Box on the Info Bar. Design a New Car Although in a real game you won't want to start off by building new cars right away, for the purposes of teaching you the game, that's where this tutorial is going to start. Move the mouse pointer over the Design building, checking in the Message Box to make sure you have the right building, and click. The first page of the Design Worksheet will appear. Your first car will be showing in the display box in the top centre. You can have up to sixteen current designs at one time. The black numbers in the upper right corner of the display window tell you which design you're currently looking at (right now it should say "1/16", since you are looking at your first (and only) stored design out of the sixteen maximum you can save as current.) The other areas on this screen tell you some of the specifics of the car you are currently looking at. It has a four-cylinder 747 cc engine, a hand brake, and not much else. It's of the "family sedan" type. To start a new car, click on the button marked New, located at the top of the column to the left of the display window. The display window will go blank, and the top right corner of the display window will change to read "New". The first thing to do is to set a body type for your car. There are four basic body types: two-door, four-door, van, and truck. Your new car will be a two-door so click on the button marked Body until you see "Body Style: 1" appear just below the display window. Next, click on Type to select the functional type of car you're trying to build. The type indicator is just below the button marked "Next." Keep clicking on Type to cycle through types of cars you can build until you come to Family Sedan, and stop. Your new product will be a two-door family sedan to go with your four-door family sedan. Now, you need to design the body of your new car. Under the display window, find the three-letter list. The first slot should be highlighted. This slot controls the design of the front section of your car. Click on the mouse button marked with a Plus sign, and watch the car change. (Use the Minus key to back up) Stop on the choice called Front 2. Now click on the second slot to highlight it, and use the Plus and Minus keys to look at the options for the centre of your car. Select Middle 2. In the same way, highlight the third slot and set the back of the car to Rear 3. To move to the second page of the design worksheet, click on the Part button (second from the top in the column at the left side of the display window). On this screen, you can see pictures of the internal components of your car. At the moment, you only have one model of engine and one type of brake available and none of the other four systems that might be included (Suspension, Cooling, Safety Options, and Luxury Options.) Later, if you invest in Research, you will have more to choose from, but for now your new family sedan is going to have to have the same internal systems as your original family sedan. Go to the box marked "Engine", and click once on the Plus button. This will bring up a picture of your engine, a 747 cc four-cylinder, and install it into your new design. Go to the box marked "Brakes" and click once on the Plus button to add a hand brake to the car. Then click on Body in the upper right-hand corner of the screen to return to the first page of the design worksheet. Your new family sedan is now ready to be tested. Click on Make to instruct your technicians to build a prototype car. A keyboard input box will appear. Type in the name of your new model of car and press Enter. When you are asked to confirm the building of the car, click on Yes. The Testing Screen will appear. Note If you want to make an alteration to a design that already exists (don't do this now!) you can do so by bringing up the old design, making the changes, and then clicking on Make. When the keyboard input box with the name of the original design appears, simply press Enter. You will be asked to confirm that you want to replace the old design with the modified design. If you click on Yes, your old design will be removed and replaced with the modified car. Test Your New Car Before putting your new car on the market, you'll want to have it tested to see how well it's made. For simplicities sake you're going to order the full range of possible tests. At the bottom of the column of readouts on the left side of the screen, click on the button marked Test All. Notice on the printout at the bottom right that the testing costs have been added to the total. Just above the printout click on the red button marked Run. The materials and testing costs will be immediately subtracted from your company funds, and the view screen at the top right will show you what happens as your new car is put through its paces. The Overall rating that appears near the bottom of the left column of readouts is a number on a scale of zero to one hundred. The closer the number is to one hundred, the better the car performed. When the tests are completed, click on the Return to Factory box (the square at the far right end of the Info Bar that has a silhouette of the factory pictured on it.) Hire Some Workers From the Factory Screen, click on the Administration building (grey, at lower left). The Administration Office appears. Move the pointer to the door on the far wall, check that the Message Box reads Personnel Office, and click. The Personnel Menu will appear. There are two boxes on this panel, one for Assembly Workers and one for Technicians. You will notice that you already have some of each type of worker on the payroll. Your technicians are listed as idle because you haven't assigned them to projects yet (you'll do that in a moment.) In the Assembly Workers box, click on Hire. A new kind of panel, called a keyboard input box, will appear. this panel will have a text entry window and various mouse command buttons which will be different on different keyboard input boxes. Click on the Plus sign to add assembly workers to your payroll. (You can hold down the button to scroll the number more quickly.) Click on Done, and you will see the totals change. Your new assembly workers are on the payroll, but are still idle. In the same box, click on Wages. Set the assembly workers' wages in the same way that you set the number of workers. Then click on Hire in the Technicians box and hire some technicians, and click on Wages to set their pay. Click on the Done button in the upper right-hand corner to exit the Personnel Menu and then click on the Return to Factory box. Note In addition to Factories and Research Labs, you also have Sales Offices as part of your company (as you'll see in a moment.) However, your Sales Offices are automatically staffed - you do not need to assign workers to your Sales Offices. Start a New Assembly Line From the Main Factory Screen, click on the Sales/Factories building (blue roof with skylight, on the lower right.) The Territory Map will appear. You will see a light blue Sales Office building and a black Factory building near the North eastern USA, your starting territory. Click on the North-eastern USA territory to bring up the Sales and Factories Menu for that area. Your next step is to get your factory producing your new family sedan. First, you want to upgrade your factory's equipment so that it can produce cars more efficiently. In the Factory box, click on Raise. This increases the level of technology in use in your factory, at a cost which increases at the level of your factory increases this cost will be immediately deducted from your funds when the factory is improved, so you will be asked to confirm your expansion order. Click on Yes, and your factory will go to technology level two. Next, in the Factory box, click on Detail. A panel will appear showing you the five assembly lines that could run in that factory. Line 1 should already show that you have a number of workers putting together your first model of car. Click on Line 2 to highlight it, then click on Model. A lettered list will appear of all your sixteen current models of car (only the first two slots will have models in them at this point, of course, because you've only created two models.) Click on your new family sedan to highlight it, then click on Use. Your new family sedan will be started on that line. Click on Assign to put workers on that line. Use the Plus button to put the idle workers you hired in Personnel to work building your new family sedan. Click Done when you finish. Your car will now be produced. Sell Your New Car In the Sales Offices box on the Sales and Factories Menu, click on Detail. A lettered list will appear, showing you what cars are on sale at that office and for what price. A check mark by the name of the model indicates that it is being offered for sale. You will see that your original model is already on sale for a certain price, and that your new family sedan is on the list but not being sold (since the box is not checked.) To start selling your new design, click on the list to highlight the new family sedan, then click on Price. A keyboard input box will appear. While you can use the Plus and Minus buttons to set prices for your cars (as with other keyboard input boxes), you will probably find that it's tedious to wait for the numbers to scroll up to the right price. Instead, simply type in the number and press Enter. This alternate method of entering numbers will work on all keyboard input boxes. Set prices for both of your models, and click on Done when you finish. Your new family sedan is now on sale in the North-eastern USA, alongside your original model. Click on Supply to set the supply lines so your dealers will have cars delivered to their showrooms. A panel with a three-slot list will appear, showing where the cars on sale at that location are being shipped from. You have a factory in the North-eastern USA, so the first supply line for each model is automatically set so that cars come in from that area. Since the supply line is already set you don't need to change anything here, so click on Done to get out of Supply and then click on Exit to get out of the Sales Office Detail box. Open a New Sales Office Now you're going to expand your operations a little by opening a new sales office in a different territory, one where you don't have a factory. On the Sales and Factories Menu, click twice on Next. This button, and the Prev button, allow you to cycle through the sixteen territories in the game (each territory has a different menu.) You should now be at the menu for the South-eastern USA territory. In the Sales Offices box, click on open. Opening a new office costs money so you will be asked to confirm your decision. Click on Yes, and the cost will be automatically deducted from your company's funds. Click on Detail. You will see that neither of your cars is being sold in the Southeast yet. Highlight your family sedan, and set the price the same way you did above. Click on Supply and notice that you don't have any supply lines set up to bring your cars from the factory to the showroom. the first slot on the supply list should already be highlighted. Click on the Plus button. "NE USA" should appear on the list. Your family sedans will now be shipped from your factory in the North-eastern USA to your sales office in the Southeast. Click on Done to return to the Sales Detail Box. Highlight your new family sedan, set the price, and start a supply line running from your factory in the North-eastern USA just as you did for your family sedan. Then click on Exit to get out of the Sales Office Detail Box. Just to see a summary of your company's facilities, click on List. A panel will appear showing you where you have sales offices and factories. You should see one sales office and a level two factory in the North-eastern USA and a sales office in the South-eastern USA. Click on Done to close the panel, and then on Done to close the main Sales and factories Menu. Click on the Return to Factory box to get back to the main screen. Invest in Research In order to get new technology for your cars, you need to invest in research and development. You have hired Technicians, but you need to assign them to projects. Move the mouse pointer to the Research building (pink, lower right) and click. The Research Screen will appear. Put the mouse pointer over the technician at the bottom centre of the screen and click to bring up the Research Menu. You will see a list of the seven automobile parts that go into making up your cars. Click on Engines to highlight that component, then click on Assign. Click on the Plus sign to assign five technicians to do research on automobile engines, then click on Done. In the same way, highlight Brakes and assign five technicians, then do the same thing with Suspension. When you've finished, click on Done to exit the Research Menu and then on the Return to Factory box to return to the main screen. Fire Some Workers In order to fire some workers, you first have to take them off of their current assignments so that they become idle. Click on Sales/Factories, and then click on North-eastern USA to bring up the Sales and factories Menu for that territory. In the factories box, click on Detail. Click on Line to highlight it, then click on Free. A keyboard input box will appear. Use the Plus button to enter the number five and press Enter. You will see that the number of workers on the line decreases, and the number next to "Idle Workers" goes to five. Click on Done to get out of the Factory Detail box, then Done again to exit the Sales and Factories panel, then click on the Return to Factory box. From the Main Factory Screen, click on the Administration building. In the Administration Office, click on the Personnel door to bring up the Personnel Menu. In the Assembly Workers box on the Personnel Menu, click on the button marked Fire. A keyboard input box will appear. Use the Plus key to enter the number five in the box and press Enter. You will see that those five idle workers have been taken off the payroll and added to the Available Workers group. Click on Done to exit the Personnel Menu and then on the Return to Factory box to return to the main screen. Advertise Your Wares If you want people to buy your cars, you have to advertise them. From the Main Factory Screen, click on Marketing (the brown building in the centre.) The Marketing Office screen will appear. You will need to spend money on marketing separately for each territory in which you have a sales office. Money spent on advertising is subtracted from your company funds at the end of each month. Move the mouse pointer over the billboard with the car on it (outside the window) and click. You can now use the keyboard input box to spend money on billboard advertisements. Click on Prev or Next to cycle through the territories until NE USA is showing. Click on the Plus sign to spend money on billboards (the cost will go up by preset amounts for each type of advertising) Click on Next until you find the panel for SE USA, and again click on the Plus sign, then click on Done. You are now advertising your cars on billboards across the entire Eastern United States. Move the mouse pointer over the papers on the desk and click. From this panel you can spend money to advertise in newspapers and magazines. Again there is a separate panel for each territory. Use the Next and Prev buttons to locate the North-eastern USA panel. The slot for Newspapers should already be highlighted. Click on the Plus button to spend some money on newspaper ads. Click on Business to highlight that line, then click on the Plus button again to spend some money advertising in business magazines. Change to the panel for the South-eastern USA, spend money on newspapers and business magazines in that territory the same way you did in the Northeast, then click on Done. Click on the Return to factory box to get back to the main screen. End Your Turn Now you are ready to end the month and see how well your business strategies have done for your company. Click on the Month End box (the square at the right end of the Info Bar with the calendar grid on it.) The Month End summary panel will appear. Each of the actions you have taken within the past month will have a red check mark by it. Actions you have not taken will not be marked. Since you have done everything you need to this month, click on Yes to confirm that you want to end the month. (If you click on No you will be returned to the Main Factory Screen to take more actions.) The screen will dim briefly to show time passing. Depending on how well you did in the first month, you may see a Newsflash - a panel showing a newspaper and giving you some additional information. To continue after you've read the Newsflash, click any mouse button. If you do not receive a Newsflash, you will go directly to your Profit/Loss statement (see below.) Check Your Progress At the start of every new month, you will be presented with your company's Profit/Loss statement - the most basic indicator of your company's health. The first column details your expenses for the current month, while the second details your income. The total profit or loss for the month appears at the bottom of the left column. Initially, the right column shows you your Income by Territory. Move the mouse pointer over the column heading that says Income and click. The column will then display your Income by Model instead. Click again on the column heading to return to income by territory. When you are done examining your balance sheet, click on the Close Report box (the square now appearing at the right end of the Info Bar, showing a stack of papers with a left-pointing red arrow superimposed.) You will return to the Main Factory Screen to start your second turn. Keep an Eye on the Competition A useful thing to do at the start of each new turn is to check on how your competitors are doing. Find the Administration building again and click on it. When the Administration Office appears, move the mouse pointer over the papers spread out on the desk in the lower centre of the screen, and click. The Reports and Graphs Menu will appear. The fourth selection in the first column says Compare. Click on this button to bring up a report on your competitors profits and losses for the month. Your company appears at the top with your three rivals below. If you have done better than all or most of the competition you are off to a good start. If not, you may need to restructure your company. When you are done reading the Competition Report, click on the Close Report box to return you to the Reports and Graphs Menu. Click on Done to close the menu and return you to the Administration Office screen. Save Your Game While still in the Administration Office, move the mouse pointer over the file cabinet at the right side of the screen and click. The File Management and Game Options Menu will appear. Click on the second button from the top, marked Save to bring up the Saved Game List. You can store up to twenty saved games. At this point, all the slots should read Empty, and the slot marked A should be highlighted. Click on this slot. A keyboard input box will appear. Type in a name for your game and press Enter. You will see a message that the game is being saved, followed by a message saying "Game Saved OK!" Right click to exit back to the Administration Office. You can now continue this game, or start over and begin a new game. (To do this easily, return to the file cabinet in the Administration Office and click on Restart.) Shortcuts for Quicker Navigation: The Toolbar Icons Once you are familiar with the basic purpose of each department you may find it faster and easier to navigate between them using the Toolbar Icons, the six small picture boxes that appear on the Info Bar just to the right of the Message Box. In order from left to right, they are: Disk Icon: Click here to go straight the Saved Game List and save your game. Bar Graph Icon: Click here to go to the Administration Office. World Map Icon: Click here to go to the territory map for Sales and Factories. Drawing Tools Icon: Click here to go to Research. Newspaper Icon: Click here to go to the Marketing office. Auto Icon: Click here to go to the Design worksheet In addition, you may prefer to handle some aspects of the game with the keyboard instead. The keyboard commands can be found on the enclosed Keyboard Command Card. This ends the Detroit Tutorial. For more details and additional game options, please refer to the Detroit Owner's Manual. MANUAL NOTES AND NEW FEATURES Notes Firing Workers In order to fire workers, you need to first make them Idle. Do this by using the Free buttons on the Research Menu and Factory Detail screens to remove workers from their current research projects or assembly lines. Then go to the Personnel Menu and use the Fire button to lay them off. Car Colour On the first page of the Design worksheet in the upper right-hand corner, is a colour grid. Use the greater-than and less-than arrows under the grid to cycle through the colours until you find one you like for your car. The colour of the car has no effect on how well it sells. Design Worksheet The layout of the buttons and displays on the first page of the Design worksheet have been altered from that described in the manual. No buttons have been removed or added. Model Price The Model Price button in the Sales Office Detail keyboard input box no longer changes the model price by a percentage. Instead, simply enter in the price in dollars for that model and the price will be changed to that value everywhere the car is being sold. Close Reports Icon The Close Reports Icon has been split into two buttons. The top half (stack of papers and arrow) functions as described in the manual. The bottom half which shows a printer, allows you to print out a hard copy of the report currently showing on the screen (See below in the Additions section for more on this option.) Supply Lines and Marketing When selecting territories to target for marketing or to use for supply lines, you will only see the territories in which you've put facilities. Model Report In the Model report, the numbers you can see for the cost to build the car are displayed even if the car is being built in another territory and shipped in. This is so you can see what profit you are making on the car in each territory, if you have it priced differently in different regions. So, for example, if you are selling your first model car in the South-eastern USA, but are building them in the North-eastern USA, you will still see building costs listed for the South-eastern USA, even though you are not actually building the cars there. Car Types Not all types of cars can be built at the start of the game. More modern types of cars (compacts, hatchbacks, and so on) will appear as time progresses. New Features Newsflashes At times in the game, you will see a Newsflash at the end of the month. Newsflashes will describe current events that might be of interest to your company. Updating Models If you wish to update a model of car - for example, to put in a new brake system without starting from scratch on the Design worksheet, simply bring up the old model, make the change, and click on Make. When the name box appears with the old model name in it, press Enter. When you are asked if you want to replace the old design, click on Yes and the model will be updated. (The original design will be lost.) Public Domain Technology After two car companies have discovered a new technology, it will automatically become available to the other two car companies. Printing Hard Copies of Reports You can now get printouts of your company's reports if you have a printer compatible with the program. To print out a report, click on the Printer icon at the right end of the Info Bar, underneath the Close Reports icon. To print reports using the keyboard, press F3. Strikes If you do not keep your workers happy, they may go on strike and halt production. When this happens, a Strike Resolution panel will appear to give you options for how to settle the strike. New Reports There are three new Reports for you to use to gauge your progress. Model Comparison. Click on the Model Comp option to see reports on how your prices stack up against those of your competitors. Click on the territory name to change to other territories, on the model name to view other models of your cars, and on the competitor company's name to view the other competitors. Consultant Report: Click on Consultant to hire an outside expert to evaluate your company and its product line. This report, like the Demand report, needs to be purchased. Once the first report has been purchased, you can choose to view the most recent report you bought or to order a new report. Media Review Report: Click on Media Rev to see what the critics think of your current models. Click on the company name to see what they think of your competitors' products. Click on the page number to view the other pages of the report. The Mega-Menu A new option has been added to the Sales and Factories panel. Between the Sales Offices box and the Factories box is a button labelled Mega-Menu. Clicking on this button brings up a screen in which all the functions of the Sales Office Detail and the Factor Detail panels have been combined into one panel for easy reference and access. Once you are familiar with the game, you may find this panel to be more convenient to use than the normal panels. STRATEGY HINTS Save your game frequently at first in case disaster strikes. Invest in research. It's worth it. Be sure to advertise. If a particular type of car isn't selling, it's because there's no demand for it. Some types of cars will not sell at all at the start of the game Since there are historical aspect to DETROIT, not all territories will have a demand for cars at the start of the game. Demand will develop in more areas as time passes. Look out for Newsflashes telling you when a territory is ready to start buying. Demand level varies by season. Plan accordingly Demand always drops drastically during wartime. If sales are poor, consider opening more sales offices, spending more on marketing, or improving your cars. It's better to have several smaller factories than one large one. The more lines you have running, the greater variety of cars you can produce. Build the cars near the consumers to save money on transport fees. There is an optimal number of workers for each assembly line and research project. If you go above that number, you will get less benefit from each new worker. Improving the level of a factory allows you to make the same number of cars with fewer workers. It also allows you to fit more workers on a line without overcrowding them. Don't hesitate to fire workers and stop assembly lines if you're building up too large a stock supply. While having a small stock its a good thing in case demand suddenly increases, too large a stock is a waste of resources. Keep an eye on your labour cost for your assembly lines by checking the Model Report to see what you're spending. If you're spending too much, cut back on the number of workers. Look after your workers. Pay them decent wages and give them benefits. Striking workers don't make you any money. Workers that get benefits are more productive. Upgrade your cars whenever possible. Demand is higher for cars fitted with the cutting edge of technology. An expensive car with the latest options will sell better than a cheaper outmoded car. Obsolete cars won't sell. Expand your company. Try to find territories where demands exists and where your competition isn't producing, and sell your cars there. A captive audience will pay more. Keep your prices competitive, but be sure to make a decent profit. You're here to make money, not friends. ============================================================================================================== DETROIT - THE OPEN ROAD - Part 1 =======================--------- TYPED BY SHARD - DTL INTRODUCTION ------------ To the man on the street in the late nineteenth century, it was clear that the horse was in all ways superior to the automobile. The horse was almost a member of the family. It was friendly, hard working and reproduced itself, could survive on nothing more than grass and water and, if its owner was drunk or ill could find its own way home without guidance. The automobile by compasirson was noisy, unreliable, smelly, dangerous, and constantly in need of repair. It also required decent roads to run on, which were in short supply in the Unites States at the turn of the century. Yet, despite its obvious shortcomings, within a hundred years of its invention the automobile totally replaced the horse as a means of transportation in most Western nations. In the process, it caused major changes in society, changes unequaled by any other technological innovation of its time. It opened doors between deeply divided urban and agrarian communities, single handedly created the suburb, brought about the demise of the blacksmith and the coachmaker, greatly expanded the tourist industry by giving the average worker unprecedented freedom to travel, turned petroleum into a critical commodity, and spawned a host of service industries devoted to automobile care and maintenance. In short, it redesigned the face of every nation to which it came, and no nation more than the United States. Although the automobile originated in Europe, it was in the United States that it first reached its full potential. From the year that the US overtook France as the leading producer of automobiles to the time more than seventy years later when it succumbed to the challenge of Japan, America was undisputed King of Cars, and the city of Detroit was the place where the king held court. By the fortunate accident of being the city closest to the homes of three of the most influential figures in the history of the American car - Ransom Eli Olds, Henry Ford and William C Durant - Detroit became the center of the new industry. The city`s history is inextricably linked with that of the American automobile, sharing its rise to glory and its fall from grace. THE FIRST AUTOMOBILE -------------------- The coining of the word "automobile" preceded the development of the genuine item. Frenchman Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir built a two-cycle internal combustion engine in 1860, and came up with the term (literally, "It moves by itself") to describe the vehicle he hoped to power with his engine. The actual automobile ended up being built by a group of men from another country entirely, using an engine based on Lenoir`s design. In 1876 a German engineer named Nikolaus August Otto made a critical breakthrough by successfully modifying Lenoir's two cycle noncompression power unit into the first modern type four cycle, compressed fuel internal combustion engine. The four cycle "Silent Otto" as it quickly became known, was far more powerful and efficient than the two cycle engines built previously, and had a higher thermodynamic efficiency than the popular steam engine as well. It was rapidly adopted for small power plants. The thought of using it to propel a vehicle seemed a natural extension, and two of Otto's countrymen were soon captivated by the idea. Benz and Daimler Go into Business Credit for building the first gasoline engine automobile is generally given to Karl-Friedrich Benz of Karlsruhe, Germany. He constructed his first car in 1884 and christened it the Motorwagon. It was a three wheeled vehicle with a top speed of 10 mph. Two years later Benz was granted a patent for the world`s first practical automobile. Only a few months after Benz put his car together, a pair of engineers working for Nikolaus Otto also built a self-propelled vehicle using Otto`s engine. Their names were Gottlieb Daimler and William Maybach, and in the next few years they would be responsible for many significant improvements on Otto`s basic design. It was Benz, engineering company, however, that became the first to produce automobiles in the hope of selling them. Up to that time any vehicles that were built were strictly experimental models, one of a kind items of interest onlt to their creators. By 1888 Benz had built a limited number of his cars, but found no buyers. A year later both Benz and Daimler exhibited their cars at the Paris World Fair, where the automobiles were received with a remarkable lack of interest. The auto industry was off to a slow start. Two years after the disappointing debut at the World Fair, Daimler and Maybach decided to start making automobiles for sale and formed Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft together. By that time, Benz had started to find a limited number of customers for his cars, mostly rich men who regarded them as expensive toys and curiosities. Meanwhile, in France, one of the few people who had been intrigued by the possibilities of the automobile when he viewed it at the Paris World Fair was a very successful bicycle manufacturer named Armand Peugeot. Peugeot was an engineer by training, and was intrigued by the idea of a self propelled vehicle. His first attempt to create one took place in 1889 and resulted in a steam powered tricycle. Shortly thereafter, he was approached by a man named Emile Levassor, who was building Daimler engines in France through a licensing agreement with Gottlieb Daimler. Levassor tried to sell Peugeot on the overall superiority of the Daimler gasoline engine as a power unit, and Peugeot, who had been having trouble with his steamer, was not difficult to convince. Workinhg together, the two men constructed the first Peugeot gasoline-powered automobile in 1890. The Automobile Gets Rolling Peugeot was a good engineer and an even better salesman. To interest the diffident public in his cars, he entered one in the big Paris to Brest bicycle race in 1891. The car completed the race at an average speed of 10 mph, and finished dead last. In spite of the late finish, however the event was a stroke of advertising genius, for it was the first long-distance journey ever made be an automobile and no one had expected the vehicle to be able to finish at all. The number of orders for the Peugeot car soared. By 1893 there was sufficient traffic on the streets of Paris for the French police to institute the world`s first license plates. In 1894 an event just for automobiles was held from Paris to Rouen, an 80 mile course. It was more of a publicity stunt than a race; awards were given for nearly every conceivable category, and some went to cars that didn`t finish, or didn`t even start! The officials received over 100 entries although only 26 vehicles showed up for the elimination trials. Seventeen of those qualified and an additional eight were added in later, making a field of 25. A steam tractor won with a speed of just over 11 mph, but it was disqualified on the grounds that it wasn`t really an automobile, so the prize went jointly to Peugeot and another carmaker named Panhard. The following year, the event became a true race, with the course extended to 732 miles, and speed and stamina being the only qualities judged. Twenty cars started, of which nine finished Those entries employing the more durable gasoline engines badly outclassed the six steam powered cars entered, a sign of things to come. The winning time was 48 hours and 48 minutes, or an average speed of about 15 mph. The New Century By the time of the turn of the century, the automotive industry was gaining momentum. In 1902, France produced a total of 12,000 cars, a major increase over the few hundred built only seven years previous. At the Paris motor Show that year, a car was exhibited that was capable of speeds up to 50 mph. The technology of the automobile was being rapidly improved, with old designs being perfected and new ones appearing yearly. One, two, four, and six cylinder engines were made, and the first V8 engine was built for the 1903 Paris-Madrid race. Travel by car at the turn of the century, while it might have been enjoyable to those with a sense of adventure, was far from a pleasure trip. The only matter of real concern to early car designers was that the vehicle have a reliable propulsion system, and all other issues were secondary. Automobiles lacked even the most rudimentary safety features, and were all open topped, offering no protection from the weather. European roads were in a sorry state of disrepair (though not by comparison to American roads of the time, it must be admitted) and road maps were non-existent. There were no service stations or garages. Motorists carried extra gasoline in cans in the back of the car and, if the driver forgot to fill his reserves, he might have to walk many miles to find a chemist carrying fuel fit for his vehicle. There were no schools that taught driving and no standard rules of the road - learning to drive was a trial and error process, mostly error. No set of standard controls existed; most cars had a steering wheel and a brake lever, and little else, and the location of those two obJects varied from car to car. To make matters worse most early motorists were rich men with next to no knowledge of mechanics. They had little idea how to maintain or repair their cars when things went wrong, which they often did. THE AUTO COMES TO AMERICA The development of the automobile took a somewhat different path in the United States than it did in Europe. The largest single factor affecting this was the condition of American roads, which was abominable. While Europe had a long standing coach trade, resulting in reasonably good roads in most countries, the U.S. was largely agrarian at that time. At the turn of the century, only 171 miles of paved road existed in the entire nation. Americas First Automakers The Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 was a notable event for American inventors. Two devices were publicly displayed for the first time: one was the telephone, by Mr. Alexander Bell, and the other was a two cycle gasoline engine built by Mr. George Brayton. A patent attorney named George B. Selden saw the device, conceived of the idea of using it to propel a vehicle, and submitted the first patent application for his concept in 1879. Selden`s car ran on liquid fuel and featured a clutch and a steering wheel. The patent was granted in 1895 after many revisions; Selden had delayed deliberatly hoping to keep the patent viable for as long as possible, but he became afraid to wait any longer because other inventors were rapidly conceiving automobile designs of their own. Although he was granted the patent, there is no evidence that Selden built any cars from his design until many years later. If you lived in Lansing Michigan in 1886 and happened to be outside after dark on a summer`s day, you might have caught a glimpse of a machinist named Ransom Eli Olds running his three wheeled steam car on the city streets. Olds, fearing embarrassment, always tested his early steamers at night when he hoped no one would be watching to see them break down. In 1890 he built one with four wheels and sold it to a customer in India, but the car was lost at sea and therefore never delivered. An issue of Scientific American from the same year carried an article about another new invention: an electric car built by William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa that could carry up to seven people. The publicity from the article generated over 16,000 inquiries. It was an early indicator of the size of the potential market for a practical car in America, but Morrison wasn't interested in exploiting it - as late as 1907 he declared, "I wouldn`t give ten cents for an automobile for my own use. John W. Lamber of Ohio constructed and ran a three wheeled gasoline powered vehicle in 1891. The inventor offered to build them for sale to anyone who wanted one, but he found no buyers. A year later Gottfried Schloemer from Milwaukee built another gasoline engine and installed it in a buggy; today, the car resides in a Milwaukee museum and is still in working order. But since neither of these prototypes was entirely successful, oficial credit for building Americas first gasoline powered internal combustion automobile is usually given to one of two parties: either Elwood Haynes with his partners, the Apperson brothers, or the team of Charles and Frank Duryea, brothers from Springfield, Massachusetts. Both sets of inventors built their cars in 1894, but the Duryeas took things a step further in the next year, setting up a company to build automobiles for sale. The vehicles were still more curiosities than anything else, however a year after the brothers founded their company, the Barnum & Bailey Circus put a Duryea Motor Wagon on display as part of their Freak Show, where it drew large crowds. The Duryea Motor Company, although the first automaker to be even a limited success, lasted only three years and built a total of thirteen cars. Three years after the founding of the company, the brothers quarreled, and then closed down their joint business. The rift between the Duryea brothers never closed, and they carried their grudges against each other to their graves. The First American Auto Races H. H. Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago Times-Herald, was looking for a publicity stunt. Inspired by the Paris-Rouen and Paris-Brest races held in France, he decided to sponsor America`s first automobile race in his home city in the year 1895. He hoped to give positive exposure to the new horseless carriage and, not incidentally, to his paper. Kohlsaat staged the race on Thanksgiving day, with several inches of slushy snow on the ground, over a course of 54 miles, and offered a prize of $5,000. Six cars were entered: the Duryea brothers buggy. powered by a one cylinder gasoline engine; an Electrobat electric car; William Morrisons electric carriage; and three cars based on the German Benz. The only entrants who finished were the Duryea and one of the Benz cars. Although large crowds turned out to watch the start of the race, it required eleven hours for the winning Duryea to complete the distance - by which time nearly everyone had gone home. The second auto race in the States took place six months later, in May 1896, and was also sponsored by a publication - this time, the New York magazine Cosmopolitan. The course traveled from New York City to Irvington, and of the six starters, only the Duryea finished. The American public was less than impressed with the automobile - the bicyclists who left at the same time as the cars arrived ahead of them. Detroits First Automobile Although the general public was not exactly enthusiastic about the "horseless carriage" in 1896 the men who were building them kept right on doing so. In the same year as the disastrous New York - Irvinton race, an inventor named Charles Brady King drove his gasoline-powered buggy on the streets of the midwestern city of Detroit, Michigan. Following behind him on a bicycle was a young electrical engineer formerly employed by the Edison company. His name was Henry Ford, and twenty years later his name would be synonymous with the popular car. Ford was already hard at work building an automobile of his own, and three months later he felt ready for a test drive. He then discovered that he had made a small oversight when he assembled the machine - it was too large to fit through the door of his basement workshop. With the hard headed practicality and directness that were to become his trademarks, Ford grabbed a pickaxe and attacked the door frame. After removing a dozen bricks or so (and reassuring his anxious landlord), Ford pushed his Quadricycle out onto the street and took it for a successful spin around the block. The Quadricycle had a top speed of 20 mph, four times that of Kings car. Ford sold the vehicle for $200 and used the money to finance the building of his second car. Many years later, nostalgic, he tracked down the old Quadricycle and bought it back. The Steamer Forges Ahead Although Ford, King and Winton all built successful gasoline powered automobiles in the late 1890s, it seemed for a time that the steamer would be the car of choice for the new century. Apart from Alexander Winton, no one was producing gasoline cars for sale between 1898 and 1900. The Duryea automobile company, never prolific, folded in 1899, clearing the field for a different pair of brothers: identical twins Freelan and Francis Stanley. The Stanley twins were both brilliant inventors, and already wealthy from the sale of their dryplate photographic process to the Kodak film company. In 1888 they witnessed a steam powered car in action, and were so impressed they tried to build one themselves. Their first attempt was a failure, and they abandoned the project for eight years until they saw another steamer in 1896. This time they succeeded in reproducing the invention, completing their first car in 1897. It gave a winning performance in a Boston hill climbing contest, and prospective buyers swamped the brothers with over 200 orders for the vehicle - a volume they could not possibly fill. As with Morrisons electric car seven years earlier, the enthusiastic response indicated that a market for a reliable automobile did exist, if only someone could produce the right car to tap it. The Stanley brothers gamely set about trying to acquire enough parts to build the first hundred of their cars. Before they had gotten seriously underway, a man named John Walker approached them with a proposal. Walker, the publisher of Cosmopolitan and the sponsor of the unsuccessful New York-Irvington race, offered to buy out the Stanleys, business. The brothers were not eager to sell and so, to discourage Walker, they requested the ridiculous price of $250,000. To their astonishment, Walker accepted, and the delighted twins closed the deal. Walker and his partner, asphalt millionaire Amzi Barber, formed the Locomobile Company of America in 1899, and began producing Stanley-designed steamers under the brand name Locomobile. Later that year, William McKinley became the first president to ride in an automobile, and that automobile was a Locomobile Steamer. By 1901, half of the 8,000 cars registered in the U.S. were Locomobiles. Five years after selling out to Walker, the Stanley brothers decided to return to the steamer business themselves and bought back their original factory from Locomobile to produce their new car. Since Locomobile was in the process of switching over to gasoline engines, they were able to buy back for just $20,000 everything they had sold five years before for over ten times that amount. After redesigning their original car just enough to avoid charges of patent infringement, they introduced the Stanley Steamer, perhaps the best car of its time for the price. Francis Stanley was once driving an experimental model on a straight road near Boston when a policeman stopped him for speeding. When he came before the judge, Stanley pleaded "not guilty" to the charge of going nearly 60 mph. The judge, incredulous, asked how he could say that in the face of the evidence, to which Stanley replied, "I plead not guilty to going 60mph. When I passed the officer my speedometer showed was going 87 mph". The court fined him $5 and the story made all the papers, generating excellent publicity. The Stanley Streamer racer that won the Dewar Cup in 1906 was clocked at an astonishing 127 mph Unfortunately for the Stanleys and their excellent car, the time of the steamer was nearly over. Although the Stanley Steamer and another popular brand, the White Steamer, still had a number of good years ahead of them, they were on their way out. The White Steamers moment of glory came in 1906 when Teddy Roosevelt became the first American president to drive a car, and chose a White, and they were also the first official White House cars, purchased during William Howard Tafts term in office. But, unlike its presidents at the time, the American public was quickly learning that it preferred gasoline Steam, Electric, or Gasoline? The biggest question for carmakers before 1900 in America was: which power source was best? Although the gasoline engine would eventually defeat all others, at the start it was not at all clear that such would be the case. Both the steam powered and the electric-driven car did very well in America at the beginning, and car manufacturers produced excellent makes of both types of automobile around the turn of the century. Locomobile, maker of steamers, was the largest automobile producer in the country as of 1902, but just a year later the company dropped its steam engines in favour of gasoline. There were several reasons for the ascension of gasoline over steam and electricity. The first was the discovery of America`s first oil "gusher" in Spindletop, Texas in 1901, which guaranteed that gasoline would be cheap and plentiful for many years to come. The second was that both steam and electricity had problems as power sources which gasoline did not. The electric automobiles shortcomimgs were the same then as they are today: limited range and speed, plus the great weight of the large batteries needed to provide sufficient power Electricity did well in the early years of motoring, from about 1906 to 1916, because its problems were not so apparent as they later became. Early cars were used only in the city, where the limited range they could travel between recharges was not a significant problem, since the distances to be crossed were small. The most successful producer of electric cars, Colonel Albert Popes Colombia Motor Company, delivered a vehicle that could go fifty miles between recharges and had a speed of 35 mph. The low top speed was no great limitation when no production model auto powered by gasoline or steam could do any better. The electric motor was silent, vilbrationless, safe, odorless, and started instantly: no other automobile power source could say the same. Electricity also had the advantage of being very popular with the public, as the electric light was an invention of recent times, and new uses were being found for electric power every year. But even Thomas A Edison himself said, "The future of the automobile will be the the gasoline engine. The inventor of the electric light was well aware of electricities limitations. The electric car prospered until the later years of the first decade of the twentieth century and then, in response to improvements in roads that made longer distance driving feasible, and the advance of the gasoline car, it quietly faded away. The steamers limitations were less obvious, and might have been overcome eventually had not the gasoline engine gotten there first. Steam engines used kerosene to heat water for steam pressure, and kerosene was more expensive than gasoline at the time. Early steamers required a long wait before the engines built up enough steam pressure to move the car - on a cold day it could take up to forty five minutes to get one going. This problem was later solved by the invention of the flash boiler, but by the time it became standard the gasoline powered car had developed an insurmountable lead. The steam engine was also inherently less efficient than the gasoline engine - although since it was an external combustion device, it burned more cleanly than its counterpart and produced less in the way of harmful exhaust gases. Consumers did not recognize this benefit as the asset it was, unfortunately, for air quality would not become a concern for several decades yet. The steamer lasted about as long as the electric car, although a high quality streamer, the Doble, was being produced as late as 1924. About 100 different makes of steamer existed during its heyday, and 80% of them were built in the New England states. Even by 1910, however, it was clear that the future belonged to the gasoline engine The First Popular Car In 1897, Ransom E Olds set up a car company called the Olds Motor Works in Lansing, Michigan. His new cars would be gasoline powered, Olds having given up on steam engines. In 1899 he moved the company to nearby Detroit, since he considered Lansing too small to support his business while Detroit was already a large city and growing fast. Although he later moved back to Lansing, Olds remains the first automaker to set up shop in what was to become the automobile capital of the world. A disastrous fire at the Olds auto plant in 1901 nearly wiped out the fledgling automaker, but the event was something of a blessing in disguise. Of the several prototypes in the factory, only one was saved, forcing Olds to concentrate his production and advertising efforts on that one car. The automobile, the Curved Dash Olds, made its debut later that year and was a smashing success. It sold for $600, advertised as "a dollar a pound" as compared to the Locomobile which cost around $1000. The Curved Dash Olds was the first quantity built car in America with over 16,000 being made between 1901 and 1907. In 1905 it became the subject of a popular song still sung by barbershop quartets today, "In My Merrie Oldsmobile". The car and the company both became known by the name "Oldsmobile" although it was never the official name of the car and did not become the name of the company until much later. Oldsmobile overtook Locomobile as America`s leading car manufacturer in 1903. Three years after that, though, the company`s sales dropped dramatically when it stopped making the Curved Dash Olds and turned to making more expensive cars. Ransom Olds objected to the change in direction, realizing, as Henry Ford did, that the biggest market lay in the car for the average man. But by that time he had left the company and had no say over it. He would later start up another car company, Reo, back in his hometown of Lansing. The Century Turns in America By 1900 the automobile was well established in Europe, at least among the upper classes. It still had a way to go in the United States, though he first automobile show in America was held in New York city in this year, and the press called it a triumph "almost equal" to that of the yearly horse show. Electrics and Locomobiles were making the rounds of most major cities on a regular basis. Yet, on the farms that made up most of the country, almost no one had even seen an automobile. When they did see one, they generally hated it on sight or if not on sight, shortly thereafter, the first time it spooked their horses or killed one of their farm animals. Farmers often went out of their way to sabotage early motorists, spreading tacks and broken glass on the roads (sure to cause at least one puncture of those fragile early pneumatic tires)" or running rope or even barbed wire across them. Automobiles and their drivers were sometimes stoned, by adults as well as mischievous children, or even attacked with horsewhips. To be fair, much of the farmers, anger at the automobile was legitimate, and fueled by the cavalier attitude taken by the early motorist toward the farmer and his property. Drivers killed farm dogs and chickens with their cars and kept right on driving, and they sometimes deliberately attempted to spook horses pulling carriages and carts (an easy thing to do, and most amusing - except for the people in the buggy or wagon). The vast majority of early drivers were rich city people and their disdain for their rustic countrymen did not lead them to polite behaviour while in their cars or out of them. In a distinctly unusual attempt to pacify horses and horse owners alike, one imaginative entrepreneur, Uriah Smith of Battle Creek, Michigan, proposed to build a type of car called the "Horsy Horseless Carriage." This vehicle sported a life-sized horse`s head and neck on the front of the car, designed to fool credulous equines into thinking that the automobile was a standard buggy. As an additional plus, the head could be made hollow and put into service as a fuel tank. Unfortunately the head did nothing to disguise the smell or the sound of the automobile, and its doubtful that Smith succeeded in tricking even a single horse with his invention. He and his car rapidly vanished from the motoring scene. In the city, on the other hand, the car was accepted quickly because the horse had made itself less than welcome through the accumulation of massive piles of dung that had to be carted away (and often weren`t), leading to serious sanitation and disease problems. One often overlooked benefit of the automobile to cities was the elimination of this threat, and the concurrent sharp reduction in the occurrence of diseases such as tetanus (lockjaw), which thrived in the horses by-products. An additional health hazard resulted when the horses, often starved, ill treated, or simply worked to death, dropped dead in the streets. Owners often abandoned the carcasses, leaving them to rot in public for days at a time. This caused serious disease potential as well as an unbelievable stench. Even the sharp odor of car fumes could not begin to compare. AMERICAN MOTORING GAINS SPEED Early commercial production in the United States did not really get underway until around 1900, but after that point it increased dramatically. At first, American cars compared poorly to European vehicles for quality, but as more companies entered the field and the competition for sales grew more fierce, U.S. carmakers rapidly upgraded their wares until they approached a European level of reliability. The first commercial American cars were "assembled", built from parts produced by many different companies, while in Europe most carmakers produced the majority of their own parts in their own companies, resulting in better workmanship in the completed car. Once American carmakers started to amass the knowledge and capital to be able to the same, the European lead in quality narrowed swiftly. Propelled by the sales of such popular vehicles as the Locomobile, the Columbia electric car, the Curved Dash Olds and the Stanley and White Steamer, and aided by literally hundreds of small carmakers, U.S. automobile production hit 33,200 passenger vehicles in 1906, enough to unseat France from its position as leading car manufacturer. The American lead was no flash in the pan, either, but grew larger with every year that passed. It would take over seventy years and a drastic change in the motoring scene for any other country's carmakers to equal the American car industries power. Evidence that the International motoring community was taking American cars seriously arrived in 1908 with the New York to Paris automobile race. Jointly sponsored by the New York City Times and Paris Le Matin newspapers, the course covered a total of 13,341 miles. Six cars left New York on February 12 and crossed the continent to San Francisco. From there, they were shipped to Alaska and thence to Japan and the Russian port of Vladivostok. The last leg of the race was on land from Vladivostok to Paris. The winner was George Schuster driving a Thomas Flyer, who covered the distance in 169 days. All the contestants agreed that the roads of Eastern Europe, and even Siberia, were less of a problem than those of upstate New York. In the year 1903, a man named Horatio Nelson Jackson first crossed the American continent in a car. In the same year, an automobile succeeded io crossing the social rift between the city and farming country. The "high wheeler" car, basically a motor-powered horse buggy" had wheels tall enough to cope with badly rutted country roads and deep mud pits. Several makes of highwheeler achieved limited success, and gave farmers the first taste of what an automobile could do for them. Sears Roebuck offered one make of high wheeler through its catalog from 1908 to 1912, and a pleased farmer wrote in, "Iy beats a horse bad as it don`t eat when I ain`t working it, and it stands without hitching, and best of all it don`t get scared at automobiles". The tall cars lasted about six years, but fell victim to rising expectations. Their top speed was around 25 mph, they offered little preotection from the weather, and they faced stiff competition from a new arrival on the car market that was the first true automobile to deal fairly well with country roads: the Model T Ford. Why Detroit? Why, precisely, did the city of Detroit become the one and only true home of the American automobile? Part of the reason had to do with simple luck in having several of the most prominent figures in the history of the automobile industry living nearby, but there were more logical reasons as well. Although one of the earliest working automobiles, that of Charles Brady King, ran on the streets of Detroit, it must be remembered that prototype cars were chugging along on the streets of many a Midwestern and New England city at that time. Detroit was nothing special in that regard. More influential was the establishment of the Olds Motor Works in 1899 for, as the city where the first truly popular car was manufactured, Detroit naturally became associated with automobiles in the public mind. Still, as of 1899 several other carmakers had begun successful car companies in other locations Why didn`t their cities become "Motortown"? The reason was that they were making the wrong types of cars. The New England carmakers were producing steamers and electrics for the big Eastern cities, and did well with them for a while. But when the popularity of the steamer and the electric declined, so did the image of New England as the carmaker`s home. The Midwest was, by comparison, a rough and ready place, requiring something less dainty than an electric and hardier than a finicky steamer. Settlements were further apart than in the developed East, calling for a vehicle that could promise an extended range. The Midwest needed the gasoline automobile, and Detroit was one of only two places that were making them in quantity. Detroit`s only challenger was Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Winton. Both Cleveland and Detroit had several advantages in common. Both were, vigorous cities located on what was still essentially a frontier, altlhough settlers were rapidly taming it. Their location midway between the settled East and the boisterous West made them a natural way station for adventurous people, some of who decided to make their homes in the Mdwest rather than continue on. Both cities had abundant access to water and rail transportation, and a large amount of skilled labor for the workshops, much of which came from the influx of Irish German, and Dutch inmmigrants that streamed into the United States between 1880 and 1920. Both Cleveland and Detroit had fostered one very successful gasoline-powered automobile company. Thus proving their suitability as a home for the industry. However, there were three things - or, rather, three people - that Detroit had which Cleveland lacked. These three men, and the two companies they founded, cemented Detroits position as the Car City. First was Henry Ford, with his Ford Motor Company; second there was David Dunbar Buick, who formed the Buick Motor Company; and third, there was William C. Durant, who built upon the keystone of Buick to create General Motors Third Times the Charm for Ford... Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, on his family`s farm in Dearborn, Michigan. Young Henry was not cut out for farm work, as he disliked the rural life and had a natural mechanical aptitude At age 15 he ran of to Detroit to train as a machinist, and later advanced to the position of chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company. By the time he followed Charles King`s automobile through the streets of the city on a bicycle, he had for the past six years been tinkering with the idea of building one of his own. Three months after Kings jaunt, he succeeded. His Quadricycle was the sixth American built gasoline car to run. Ford tries to found a company to build his cars for the first time in 1899, but the Detroit Automobile Company folded just over a year later. In what was a familiar pattern, Ford and his business partners could not manage to agree on what the aim of the company should be. The backers wanted to build cars to sell, while Ford was not yet satisfied with his designs and wished to keep tinkering. Ford, always stiff-necked and headstrong, refused to compromise and his backers pulled out. Undaunted, Ford tried again later that year, forming the Henry Ford Company with William Murphy as a partner. Once again, the company went under, brought low by personality differences between Ford and the man with the money. Ford wanted to build race cars, feeling that his designs werent ready for wholesale production yet. Murphy disagreed, and brought in Harry Leland as a production consultant. Ford, furious, walked out, taking his name with him. Leland and Murphy put to use the parts and equipment Ford had bought to build an improved Oldsmobile engine of Leland`s design. Since Detroit was celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of its founding by Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Leland named his new car the Cadillac. Exasperated by having to deal with men who thought they had a right to tell him what he should do with their money, Henry Ford gave up on business briefly. He turned instead to racing as a means to obtain money and publicity, and to improve his engine designs. He did quite well at it setting a number of records. The famous racer Barney Oldfield joined the Ford team in 1902, and in the following year became the first nman to travel a mile a minute, driving Ford`s most famous racer, the "999". In 1904, shortly before Ford gave up on racing entirely, he took the flying mile record in the same car, traveling 91.37 mph. Buoyed by his racing successes and his new popularity with the public, in 1903 Ford took another stab at starting a business. His partner this time was Alexander Malcomson, a coal dealer. The name was originally to be the Ford & Malcomson Company, but shortly after its founding it was changed to the Ford Motor Company. The reason for the change is not recorded, but it was most likely done to pacify the temperamental Henry Ford. The new company began with $100,000 capital funds, $28,000 of that in cash. Malcomson, a canny businessman, assigned his talented and trusted bookkeeper, James Couzens, to the Ford Company to keep an eye on Malcomsons money. Couzens, ability to do so, and to get along with Henry Ford, was largely responsible for the survival and eventual success of the fledgling automobile maker. In later years, James Couzens would turn his administrative talents to use for the public good, serving with distinction in the U.S. Senate. The Ford Motor Company baptized its first car the "Model A" a name that it would later reuse for an entirely different car. A true "horseless carriage" the Model A strongly resembled a horse buggy with a steering wheel and no horse. The first one was sold a month after the companys founding, to a dentist in Chicago. By 1904, the Ford Motor Company had produced 1,708 automobiles, a remarkable number for a new carmaker in its first year. Two additional models, the Model B and the very expensive Model C priced at $2000, had joined the Model A. Alexander Malcomson wanted the company to build more expensive cars, believing in the prevailing wisdom that the market for automobiles lay with the rich, whose tastes should be catered to if one wanted to make a profit. Ford disagreed, believing instead that a larger market lay with the average man, if only a car could be made cheaply enough for him to afford it. In this case Ford`s instincts were correct, and fortunately for the Ford Motor Company, his wishes prevailed. Henry stated his idea of production thus: "The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile like another automobile - to make them all alike "He would later turn this philosophy into a novel and wildly successful manufacturing method called the assembly line. ...And also for Buick In the year that Henry Ford was taking his second shot at becoming a carmaker, a Scottish born engineer named David Dunbar Buick was taking his first. Buick had already made a major contribution to modern life by inventing a process to apply enamel to cast iron bathroom fixtures thus making them easy to clean and sanitize and making the indoor bathroom a possibility. Like many brilliant inventors, however, he bored easily, and by the turn of the century he had abandoned plumbing and instead seized on the motorcar as an interesting device with which to experiment. His first automobile business endeavor went by the rather ponderous name of the Buick Auto Vim and Power Company of Detroit. Buick, although a much more pleasant personality than Henry Ford, was if anything a poorer businessman, and his first effort rapidly went broke. He tried again a year later, founding the Buick Manufacturing Company with the engineer Walter Marr, and this time he actually managed to get some cars on the road before the company foundered. In 1903 one month before the Ford Motor Company came into being, Buick`s business was reorganized as the Buick Motor Company. It, too, seemed destined to fail within a few years - until fate, in the person of William C. Durant, stepped in. Billy Durant was one of the partners of the successful Dort & Durant Carriage Company in Flint, Michigan when in 1904, he saw a Buick automobile passing by on the street and became intrigued by it. Expansive, charming, and personable. Durant was a salesman and businessman, not an engineer or inventor. Unlike Buick and Ford, he enjoyed playing the money game perhaps a bit too much. Durant bought a controlling interest in the faltering Buick Motor Company, and set about making the business profitable. Durant reorganized Buick Motors in the same way he had run his carriage business. His first move was to go out and buy up all the companies that provided components for the Buick cars to ensure a cheap and continuous supply of parts for the automobiles. During a brief but intense financial panic in 1907 (deliberately caused by financier, Pierpont Morgan as a cynical demonstration of his power). Durant kept the Buick factories running at full speed while all other manufacturers slowed down in response to the crisis. When the panic ended suddenly, Buick was the only carmaker with cars on hand to sell: and its future was assured. It was during these years that Durant first began to envision building a "holding company" a corporation uniting all automakers and their suppliers in one organization. In the next year, his dream would start to take shape. THE START OF SOMETHING BIG If any single year can be said to have determined the shape of the American Automobile industry, it would be 1908. This year saw the premier of the Model T Ford, the car that would put a nation on wheels, and the formation of the company that would one day be the world`s largest, General Motors. It was in this year that William Durant hired a French race car driver named Louis Chevrolet to race Buicks for him. And, as fate would have it, it was also the year that a man named Walter Chrysler bought his first automobile (a Locomobile steamer) and took it apart in his garage to see what made it work The Model T The Ford Motor Company produced two new car designs in 1905, the Model K and the Model N. The Modrel K was an experimental six cylinder car that did not stay in production long. Priced at $2,800, it was anything but the "average man`s car". that Ford envisioned - in fact, it was more expensive than the highest priced Cadillac of the same period. Ford was also less than happy with the six cylinder engine, which had problems with persistent vibrations that he could never eliminate, and in his disgust with the engine refused to allow his company to manufacture any more six cylinders for over thirty years. The Model K was marketed as a cutting edge vehicle and advertisements warned buyers, "Don`t Be a Year Behind-er." This was one of the first times the idea of a "yearly model" appeared in America. Ironically enough, in later years Henry Ford was to scorn the idea of turning out a new model every year to catch the fancy of the fickle public. The Model N car was more successful. A four cylinder vehicle selling for less than $500, it was a direct precursor to the Model T, and it sold well enough to move Ford from fourth place to first by 1906. At about the same time, Ford decided that buying all Ford automobile parts from other companies was an unreasonable expense, and formed the Ford Manufacturing Company in order to be able to build his own components. He deliberately set up the company without including Alex Malcomson, as he felt (perhaps rightly) that Malcomson`s ideas would eventually lead to the ruin of the company if unchecked. Malcomson, furious at Ford`s underhanded maneuvering, left to start his own business making automobiles, the Aerocar Company. He kept his Ford stock, however. Henry Ford felt that it was unjust for Malcomson to use profits made from Ford`s cars to manufacture a competing make and took Malcomson to court over it. The judge agreed with Ford, and forced Malcomson to divest himself of his Ford stock. Despite the breach between Ford and Malcomson, James Couzens and another Malcomson employee, a brilliant young engineer named Childe Harold Wills, decided to stay with Henry Ford. Ford brought out the Model R and S cars in 1907, which kept his company as the top manufacturer. His nearest competitor was Buick, which was producing about two thirds the number of cars Ford was. In the fall of 1908, Ford introduced the car that was to make his name a household word, the Model T. It was popular right from the start, but it would not become omnipresent on American roadways until five years after its introduction. Few other cars generated the level of affection - and exasperation in their owners as did the "Flivver" also known as the "Tin Lizzie" The Model T was designed by Ford, Wills, and Joseph Galamb. In 1906, Wills had discovered a process for machining vanadium steel into automobile components. Vanadium steel components required less metal, and so were lighter but at the same time stronger than contemporary parts. The strength of vanadium steel was in a great part responsible for one of the Model Ts greatest selling points, its durability. Its sole other virtue was its economy of operation. It did not possess the advantages of either beauty or style, but it was not hampered much by its lack of looks. The people for whom it was intended and who bought it were looking for dependable, affordable transportation, not a status symbol, and that was precisely what Ford gave them. The car was a simple design, borrowing elements from the Model R and S and adding a few innovations of its own, including the vanadium steel crankshaft and an engine designed to be easily serviceable. It had a four cylinder, 20 horsepower gasoline engine and a simple planetary transmission operated by pedals on the floor. It also had a steering wheel set on the left to make driving on the right easier. Although driving on the right had been the American standard for some time, carmakers had not yet gotten around to standardizing the position of the steering wheel and in numerous models of the time it was still placed on the right. The popularity of the Model T with its left set wheel, helped determine what the standard would become in the years that followed. The Model T was offered in five body styles, at prices ranging from $825 to $ 1,000 at its introduction. The price dropped rapidly as Ford found ways to economize on production. The transmission and steering were very cheap (which is why the car could be made inexpensively) and somewhat outmoded even in the year he car was introduced. Nevertheless, the same transmission and steering remained on the car until it ended production after nearly twenty years. All components were Ford made except for the tires, made by Harvey Firestone, and the bodies, provided by a variety of suppliers. Production began fairly slowly, but by the summer of 1909 the Ford Motor Company was building cars at the rate of one hundred a day. Back in 1906, Henry Ford had predicted that he would one day reach that figure, and been universally mocked for his statement. He must have felt enormous satisfaction on the day he first proved the mockers wrong. In its first year on the market nearly six thousand Model Ts were sold. END OF PART ONE -=-=-=-=-=-=-=- DETROIT - THE OPEN ROAD - Part 2 =======================--------- The Founding of General Motors Billy Durant was a man with large dreams. Once he had Buick Motors up and running, he wasted little time in pursuing bigger fish. His grand plan was to unite as many car companies and their suppliers as possible under one name. This would guarantee financial security for all of them in a bad year, and enable the resulting conglomerate to be able to offer a wide range of automobiles priced to suit any pocketbook. In 1908 he set out to convince America`s other carmakers to join him in his new venture, a company called General Motors. He first approached Ford with his idea, but Ford, realizing that the company would be Durant`s and not his, was not at all willing to relinquish control of Ford and refused. Most other carmakers Durant approached at first felt similarly, distrusting the smoothtalking Durant, and therefore declined his inivitation. As a result, GM was formed in deep secrecy on September 16, 1908, with only $2,000 in capital funds. With that small base to work from, Durant bought his considerable talents as a salesman to bear and within two weeks had parlayed his tiny starting sum into $12.5 million. His first move was to "buy" Buick Motors. A month later, he added Oldsmobile to his group - Olds, company had been faultering since the departure of its founder in 1904 and the ensuing mishandling of the company by its primary stockholders, the Smith family. In the following year, Durant added Oakland (which would become Pontiac) and Harry Leland`s Cadillac cars to his line. By the end of 1910, he had bought seventeen car companies and a large number of component makers as well, and set the foundations for a commercial empire. One sad casualty of Durant`s empire building was David Buick. Buick was never very interested in the business end of his company, preferring tinkering with his engines to engaging in the wheeling-dealing financial enterprises of which Durant was so fond. After Buick and Durant quarreled over the question of whether Buick was going to sell his engines to other firms - Buick said yes, Durant said no. David Buick bowed out of the company he had founded leaving it in Durant`s hands. Durant saw to it that Buick left with a handsome parting gift of $100,000 of Durant`s own money and a large chunk of Buick stock, but unfortunatly it did David Buick little good. He invested unwisely in a number of shaky businesses and lost everything, ending his life in poverty and obscurity as cars bearing his name rolled by in the streets outside. Durant meanwhile proved to be over eager in the pursuit of his dream. He spent a great deal of money in a very short time (his purchase of Cadillac for $5.75 million was the largest single financial transaction ever at the time it was made), and much of it went for companys of dubious quality. Durant bought many businesses on the off chance that the patents they held might come in useful someday, and most of them didn`t. Only two years after its founding it appeared that General Motors was about to go under before it had really gotten off the ground. Durant and the other heads of GM appealed to a banker`s consortium to bail out the company. The bankers agreed to do so, but as a condition they required that Billy Durant step down as president of Buick and vice president of GM. Durant bowed to the inevitable and resigned his posts, although he kept his seat on the Board of Directors of General Motors. His place at Buick was taken by Charles Nash, who would go on in future years to found a car company of his own. But General Motors had not heard the last from Billy Durant. The Selden Patent Back in 1895, a lawyer named George Selden had obtained a patent for a primitive automobile. Four years later he sold the patent to a group of electric carmakers, the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALAM), headed by Colonel Pope of Colombia Electric. The electric automobile manufacturers had little use for the patent, which was for a gasoline engine, but they may have been hoping to discourage the development of gasoline cars until they could work out the problems with the electric, or perhaps they were just hedging their bets, as no one then could tell which type of car would eventually dominate the market. Most gasoline engine automobile makers of the period paid royalties to ALAM thanks to the Selden patent, or got around it by joining ALAM itself. Winton, Knox, Locomobile, Oldsmobile, Packard, amnd the Pierce Arrow had all become members rather than pay royalties. As of 1903, Selden had not built a single car in that year, to defend his patent from a challenge, he built two of them, but neither of them ran more than a few yards. The judge did not consider the failure of the vehicles to be an issue, though, and upheld the patent. The verdict caused a stampede as thirty more automakers rushed to join up with ALAM. In the same year, Henry Ford made inquiries about obtaining membership, but was brushed off by F.L.Smith of Oldsmobile because he was "only an assembler." Ford, his combative nature aroused by the insult wore that ALAM could take its patent and go to Hell, for they would never get a cent of royalties out of him. During the first year of full scale Model T production, in 1909, ALAM brought suit against Henry Ford to force him to pay up. Ford challenged the patent on the grounds that Selden`s car ran on a two cycle engine while his ran on a four. He also founded his own group, the Motor Car Manufacturers Association, as support for the fight. Ford`s organization included himself Marmon, Reo, Maxwell-Briscoe, Mitchell, and the truck manufacturer Mack. After two years of court battles Ford won the case on appeal. The effect of his struggle with ALAM and his victory over them on the public was enormous. Ford came to be viewed as the representative of the Common Man contending with the over whelming forces of Big Business and succeeding against high odds. This view was not entirely justified; the Ford Motor Company was already well established as a Big Business in its own right, and in fact Ford had more money than any of the car manufacturers that comprised ALAM. Nevertheless, the court case made Ford a folk hero of sorts, and he came to be viewed as the champion of the underdog Midwest against the establishments of the East. In any case, there is no question that all the furor helped his car sales tremendously. Durant Finds a New Partner In 1911, Billy Durant found himself in the frustrating position of being on the Board of Directors of GM, but being essentially powerless. This did not sit well with him at all, and he set out, in his own inimitable style, to do something about it. Durant realized, as Olds and Ford had before him, that a tremendous market existed for a cheap car of reasonable quality. He also realized that General Motors had no plans to build any car fitting that description. Never one to miss an opportunity (good or bad), Durant approached Louis Chevrolet, a well known race driver who had worked for Durant at Buick. Durant resoned that a race car driver must have some idea what makes a good car, and when he proposed to Chevrolet that Chevrolet should design the kind of car Durant had in mind and Durant would provide the financing, Chevrolet was agreeable. At the end of the year, the company was formed. Chevrolet designed the car, and Durant set up the company and did the marketing. Nothing but the design and the name were Chevrolets. The company belonged to Durant, and Chevrolet was not even on the board of directors. The earliest cars Chevrolet designed were less than successful, but in 1914 he produced the H series 490. It became a significant success, and the new company`s fortunes began to rise. Durant, with a sucessful company to work with, began to scheme to achieve greater things once again, but the Directors of General Motors failed to catch the scent of trouble on the wind. THE CLASSIC YEARS Woodrow Wilson while still president of Princeton, condemned the automobile as a spreader of social envey amoungst the lower classes, since it was a luxury only the idle rich could afford. Little did he know that within a very few years, the automobile would become available to nearly everyone. The man who made that possible was Henry Ford, and he did it by inventing a manufacturing process that would revolutionize the automobile industry and many other industries as well. Up until 1906, the U.S. lagged behind Europe in auto development, but by 1915 that situation had completely turned around, thanks almost solely to Ford. AN AUTOMOBILE FOR THE AVERAGE MAN: 1913-1919 Henry Ford had a dream: he wanted to build an automobile that the common man could afford. With current production methods, however, it was impossible to produce a car cheaply enough so that it could be sold to someone of modest means and still make a profit for the manufacturer. The cost for parts, and more importantly for labor, were just too high. The only way to get around these problems was to create a new method of manufacturing. Flivvers for Everyone The concepts that led to the inspiration of the assembly line had been around for a while before Henry Ford put them to work. In Delaware in 1784, Oliver Evans set up a system of conveyor belts and chutes that allowed him to grind flour in a continuous process, and keep his mill running day and night. The basic technique was adopted by the rest of the milling community, and came to be used in the textile, iron, canning, hardware, and meat-packing industries. It may have been the last that inspired Ford; one story holds that inspiration struck when he saw carcasses being moved through a meat packing plant on a chain conveyor belt, each worker taking off the appropriate cut as it passed his station. Automobiles were not carcasses, though - they had to be put together, not taken apart. In order to make Fords idea really work, another element was required; interchangeable, standardized parts. The first standardized parts were made in 1800 by Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, who devised a system for precision machining of parts in order to make large numbers of rifles for the U.S. Militia. It was Ford`s particular genius to see that the two ideas - a belt that carried parts past workers instead of the workers carting parts to a central location, and standardized parts that eliminated the need for individual hand fitting and adjustment of assembled components - could be combined to produce complex manufactured goods in an efficient manner. Ford first instituted his new process in the manufacture of magnetos for ignition systems. The trial was a huge success. What used to take one man eighteen minutes to accomplish could be done in only five - less than one-third the time. Encouraged, Ford soon expanded the system to the manufacture of entire automobiles. It worked as well there as it had for the magnetos, reducing the time needed to assemble a chassis from twelve and a half hours to only one and a half. One disadvantage to the new technique was that only black paint would dry fast enough to make the faster assembly practical, so from 1914 on a customer could have his Model T In any color, as long as it`s black. The main effect of the assembly line, from Ford`s point of view, was that he could now afford to make the "car for the average man" that he`d dreamed of since his company was founded. He put his new assemblers to work producing Model T Fords in numbers previously undreamed of. In 1914, Ford alone produced 202,667 cars, more than the rest of the worlds manufacturers combined, and by 1923 the manufacturing rate was such that 1,817,891 Fords were built in a single year, more than four times the number of Ford`s closest rival at the time, Chevrolet. The price of the Model T Ford plummeted in response to the new economical manufaturing method. By 1916 it was down to $360, and by 1924 one could be had for $260. With prices like that, the customers didn`t care that the Flivver was fairly ugly and not exactly the most modern car on the road. They bought in droves. By 1920 two thirds of all vehicles on the American road and one half of those in the world were Fords. For the next fifteen years, Henry Ford was the undisputed automobile king. Ford, born of farm stock, was particularly pleased when Model T became the first true automobile to be a hit with farmers, replacing the vanishing high wheeler in their hearts. Like the high-wheeler and unlike its contemporaries, it was not bothered by the rough back-country roads. IT was a plain and simple car for a plain and simple people. Henry Ford Objects to Dodge For many years Ford had been having its engines and a few other parts made by the Dodge brothers in their family`s machine shop. They had begun building engines for Olds in 1901, but in 1903 Ford offered them $5,000 a month and 50 shares of Ford stock each to work for him instead. The stock alone was more than enough to make them millionaires when the Model T took off. By 1910 the Dodge brothers, who had some good ideas for automobile innovations, were growing frustrated with Henry Ford`s single minded concentration on his Model T and his refusal to make any improvements on the car. Without telling Ford, they began to design a car of their own, planning for it to be of better quality than the Model T but priced in the same moderate range, and in 1914 they incorporated the Dodge Brothers Company. Their premier car, the Dodge Four came out the following year with the first all steel body, as well as many other lesser innovations, and a price tag of $785. Though derided by some as a "tin can" the car, supported by the Dodge Brothers, sterling reputation as engine makers, was an instant success. Some 22,OOO firms applied for Dodge dealerships before the car was even officially launched. In its first year, the firm went from non existence to third place behind Ford and Willys Overland. Henry Ford found the Dodge Brothers, instant success a difficult pill to swallow. He felt that the Dodge engine had risen to fame on the back of the Model T, not the other way around, and for the Dodge Brothers now go into business using that reputation to make a competing car was base treachery. To add insult to injury, they owned 10% of his company and supported their business with profits from his cars! The Auto King vowed to rectify the situation. In 1916 he announced that instead of paying dividends to his stockholders, he planned to plow the companys entire profits into expansion and development of the Ford facilities. The stockholders naturally objected, and when Ford refused to yield, they filed suit to force him to pay. Three years later a judge decided in favor of the stockholders, much to Ford`s annoyance. These events convinced Henry Ford that letting other people have any say whatsoever in the doings of his company was insupportable. Therefore, he set about immediately buying up all the shares of Ford that he did not personally own. The stock, which had sold at $100 a share when first offered cost Ford $12,500 a share to buy back. The total cost of the purchase was an astounding $100 million, but Henry could afford it. It was almost forty years before anyone other than a member of the Ford family would hold even a single share of Ford stock again. Today, the family still holds 40% of all shares The Prodigal Returns Billy Durant and Louis Chevrolet were having trouble agreeing on company policy for Chevrolet, or even what type of cars they were going to build. Chevrolet wanted to build big, expensive cars but Durant controlled the business and directed him toward lighter, cheaper automobiles instead. Their differences of opinion reached a critical level in 1913 when Durant suggested to Chevrolet that he adopt a more polished image appropriate to his new status as a successful manufacturer - for example, Billy said, Chevrolet should abandon his beloved lower class cigarettes for the more prestigious cigar. Chevrolet, pushed too far, blew up and walked out, leaving Durant sole control of Chevrolet. Chevrolet continued to prosper under Durant`s adept management, garnering a nice slice of the economy car market. In 1915 Durant decided it was time to implement the strategy he`d been working on all along: the takeover of his beloved GM, stolen from him five years before. Durant used his profits from Chevrolet and bank loans against the company to buy up some GM stock. Then, by arranging a stock swap between Chevrolet and GM shares favorable to the GM stockholders, he expanded his total past the critical 50%. At the next meeting of the Board of Directors of GM Durant sauntered in and announced that he was back in charge. His Time of triumph was destined to last only a few years, however. It was Billy Durants personal tragedy that, for all his skill at running a single company, he did not seem able to get the hang of how to successfully manage a large, diversified corporation. Failing to learn from his earlier experiences, Durant returned to his old policy of spend, spend, spend. This time he went for a so called "vertical" expansion, buying up parts suppliers such as Fisher Body, Frigidaire, and Hyatt Roller Bearing. With Hyatt Roller Bearing came a talented young manager named Alfred P. Sloan who would one day become Durant`s successor. But it would take some time for the effects of Durant`s spending binges to become apparent, so for the moment, Billy Durant was riding high. In 1917 with World War I raging in Europe and America`s involvement becoming more and more likely with each passing day, Harry Leland of Cadillac, a staunch patriot, asked Durant if he could use Cadillac facilities to manufacture Liberty airplane engines. Durant, a pacifist, refused. To his surprise, Leland`s determination to add to the war effort was so strong that the founder of Cadillac resigned in order to start a new company devoted to building the Liberty. When the war ended two years later, Leland`s new company, Lincoln, went over to doing what Leland did best, and within a short time Lincoln cars were competing with Lelands old company, Cadillac. FROM DEPRESSION TO DEPRESSION : 1920-1929 It was during the Roaring Twenties that America`s "love affair with the automobile" became passionate. Between the years of 1920 and 1929 annual car production in the U.S. jumped from two million to four million, and total car registrations went from eight million to twenty three million. By 1930 there was one car for every 13 households. Twenty years before, the figure had been one per forty four. Owning a car became a symbol that the buyer could afford "the good life" and everyone wanted one. All other purchases were set aside in favor of the automobile - sometimes even basic necessities. We`d rather do without clothes than give up the car, said one mother of nine in 1923, while a 1925 survey in Muncie, Indiana showed that twenty-one out of twenty six car owning households had no bathtubs with running water. When asked why they chose a car over a bathtub one farmers wife replied simply, "You can`t ride to town in a bathtub" Many improvements were made in the automobile during this period. Among the features that became commonplace were balloon tires, enclosed hydraulic brakes, standardized gearshift, noclash shifting, windshield wipers, taillights, hydraulic shock absorbers, and the mechanical fuel pump. Automobile designs started to conform to a few standard looks, and much variety disappeared as carmakers grew unwilling to seem "unconventional". After 1929 obvious ostentation went out of vougue with a desire not to flaunt wealth, if you were fortunate enough to still have it. One clear trend that developed through the 1920s was the ascendance of the businessman over the inventor in the American auto industry. Early automobile producers were in general engineers and machinists not salespeople or administrators. They brought their ingenrity and technical know how to their companies, while other men brought the money and the business savvy The few inventors who managed to start their own companies without the help of a businessman such as the Stanleys and David Buick, did so by selling off their previous assets for capital. But eventually they were forced to turn to others to handle the problems of managing the new industry. By the mid 1920s nearly all of the original auto pioneers were no longer associated with their companies, the notable exception being iron willed Henry Ford. Ransom Olds had been forced to leave his company in 1904 when the Smith family, his backers, refused to let him build the kind of car he wanted, David Buick had abandoned his to Billy Durant, as did Louis Chevrolet, and the Dodge Brothers had passed away. The End of Billy Durant The American economy nose dived in 1920, slumping into a temporary depression. It was a foreshadowing of events to come, and it spelled trouble for Billy Durant`s overextended General Motor Corporation. Durant took heavy losses in the stock market, in both his personal fortunes and those of GM. Many of Durant`s friends who had purchased stocks on his advice experienced severe financial difficulty, and Durant`s sense of personal honor led him to bail each and every one of them out at disastrous cost to himself. By the end of the year, his personal debts totaled over $800,000, and the only asset he held was his GM stock. The bankers backing GM, long unhappy with Durants free handed money policies stepped in again as they had in 1910, offering to write off Durant`s debt in exchange for shares in General Motors. Durant had little choice but to accept, and he once again lost control of the company that had been his brainchild. This time his departure was to be permanent for the bankers, having been fooled once, demanded that Durant relinquish his seat on the Board of Directors as part of the settlement. Durant re entered the automotive field almost immediately, founding Durant Motors in 1921 with a new set of backers. He had not lost his touch, and Durant Motors did quite well for a number of years. At long last, cars bearing Billy Durant`s name were rolling through the streets. Unfortunately, like so many other carmakers, Durant Motors did not have the wherewithal to survive the Great Depression, and it folded in 1933. Like David Buick, Durant ended his life in poverty and obscurity, working in a small restaurant. An unpleasant auto dealer in the area enjoyed bringing in customers so that he could impress them by ordering a hamburger from the man who founded General Motors. Durant died a broken man, but the company he founded thrived. Even today, although its fortunes are no longer at their height, it remains the largest single company in the entire world. From Dirt Roads to Concrete Highways In addition to opening up the European automobile market, the ending of WWI brought another benefit to the American automobile industry in the form of better roads. Until the advent of the automobile, macadam roads made of layers of pressed stones had been the standard. But automobile traffic was hard on macadam, as the high speed of the automobile loosened the stones and raised huge clouds of dust. This problem was solved by the addition of asphalt to the base matrix, resulting in a serviceable (if not terribly durable) road surface. In 1909, the first concrete road was laid - in Detroit, naturally. But the road network was slow to spread, especially outside of the cities. The coming of the popular car led to a public outcry against the state of the nations roads. People who had vehicles to travel with now wanted something decent to drive them on. The governnment responded by passing the Federal Road Act in 1916 to authorize and provide funding for the establishment of a nationwide system of interstate highways. The Federal Highway Act of 1921 expanded on this earlier legislation, and the ingenious Kahn-Wadsworth Bill killed two birds with one law by offering the government`s large supply of surplus trucks (left over from the war effort) at rock bottom prices to states and cities that provided for the building of new roads and the improvement of the ones that already existed. Under this impetus, Americas road network rapidly expanded. The improved roads had an immediate effect on the public. In addition to allowing city folk to travel to the Great Outdoors and making intercity business easier to conduct, it had more subtle effects on the car industry itself. For one thing, the open road made a great testing area for automobiles and the word quickly spread of which vehicles were durable enough to cope with the increased wear and which ones weren`t. Numerous small carmakers went out of business because their automobiles failed to operate to an acceptable standard on longer drives. Since gas stations had not been invented yet, gasoline was purchased at the general store and carried in cans in the back of the car for long trips. People also started wanting faster and faster cars to enable them to cross the distance between their starting point and their destination in the least amount of time, so lower performance cars tended to suffer. One such car was the venerable Model T; with a top speed of 40-45 mph, which dropped to 35 mph if the extra weight of a weather resistant top was added, it steadily lost ground to the swifter more modern vehicles. And as if that weren`t more than enough to cause difficulties for small manufacturers, another side effect of the expanding road network was an increased access to formerly isolated areas by the big car companies. Several makes which were successful on a local basis folded when Ford and GM came to town. If you drove a well known type of car on a long trip, you improved your chances of finding a mechanic in a distant location who knew how to repair it, and a source for repair parts was likely to be closer. The carmakers that had reached a certain critical size in the 1920s flourished, while those that were not large enough to support the required expansion withered and eventually died. The "Big Three" Are Complete The year saw the arrival of the last of what were to become the ruling trio of the American auto industry - Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Compared to the other two members of the "Big Three" Chrysler was a relative latecomer. Ford began in 1903 and GM in 1908, but Chrysler was not officially formed until 1928. It had its foundations much earlier, however The Maxwell-Briscoe company was a venerable organization which had been around since the early days of the automobile. It was reasonably successful until one of its founders, Benjamin Briscoe, made a major error in judgment. Briscoe had been approached by Billy Durant in 1908 and asked General Motors. Briscoe, deciding that he liked the idea but didn't like Durant, declined, and in 1910 set up a rival group called the United States Motor Corporation. It included Maxwell Briscoe, Brush, Columbia, Courier, and Stoddard Dayton. The USMC experienced financial difficulties very similar to those GM had in its early years, and by 1912 it was in bankruptcy. Durant managed to convince a finance group to save General Motors, although it cost him his control of the company, but Briscoe, lacking Durant`s connections (and perhaps Durants renowned charm) could not pull off a similar trick, and United States Motors collapsed and vanished. The failure of the corporation nearly dragged Maxwell Briscoe down with it, until the company was bought by a man named Walter Flanders, who united with Chalmers after WWI to form Maxwell-Chalmers. The company never really recovered completely, though, and in 1921 the experienced automobile executive Walter P Chrysler, the former head of Buick who had recently given his walking papers to Billy Durant, was brought in to reorganize it. Chrysler had some ideas, which he quickly put Maxwell`s engineers to work on. The result in 1923 was the Chrysler Six, a car with a six-cylinder high performance engine that could give a top speed of 75 mph. It was an instant hit. In 1926, deciding that he was tired of producing cars with other mens' names on them, Walter Chrysler renamed the entire company after himself. Two years later he bought Dodge, which had gone into decline after the unfortunate and untimely deaths of both Dodge brothers in 1920 Chrysler continued to make design improvements on his cars and also released a new line in 1929, which he called Plymouth (after a popular brand of twine used by farmers, whom Chrysler hoped would purchase the Plymouth car by association) Now, with three different makes of automobile, all successful, Chrysler was well on its way to becoming a major force in the auto industry. A Crackerbox Rainbow Automobiles of early years were "Touring cars" open models that provided no protection from the wind or inclement weather. It was not long before the soft top cars arrived, copied from horse buggies, with snap on windows to use in case of rain. The extra protection of the hardtop was not available at all until the late 1910s, and then only to the wealthy. The 1920s saw a major style change arrive in the form of the first affordable hardtop, or "crackerbox" so-called because of its boxy shape. The first enclosed hardtop car priced for the average consumer was the Essex, produced by the Hudson Motor Company in 1919. It sold for only about $100 more than the open touring car, and many buyers were more than happy to pay extra to be safe from the weather. The Essex sparked a swift rollover in the type of car on the road. As of 1920, only 10% of American cars were hardtops, while by 1925 the Essex had brought that percentage up to 50%, and in 1929 the changeover was complete, with 90% of cars being "crackerboxes". The other major technological innovation that would drastically change the look of the American car arrived in the 1920s as well. As Henry Ford had found out when he began producing his Model Ts on the assenmbly line, the slowest part of the process was the painting of the cars. The paint had to be brushed on hy hand, dried, sanded to remove brush marks, painted again and the whole process repeated three or four times for primer, paint, and varnish. The cars also had to be stored inside while this went on, to keep grit and dust from sticking to the drying paint, and that wasted a great deal of space. Ford dealt with this by sticking with the one color that dried fast enough to suit him, namely black, while other carmakers, although they didn`t go as far as Henry did, also found themselves restricted to using a limited range of colors if they wanted to stay profitable. This all changed in 1920, when a chemist working at DuPont invented a quick drying lacquer, and soon realized that it could revolutionize the car-painting process. He took his idea to Charles Kettering, founder of the Dayton Electronics Laboratory (DELCO) and head of research at GM. Kettering an inventive genius in his own right who designed the first modern automobile ignition system, easily saw the value in the new paint, and agreed to have GM start using it if a paint producer could be found to manufacture it in quantity. The plan hit a snag when the big paint companies balked, protesting that the new lacquer would force them to retrain all their workmen and junk their current varnishing equipment. Kettering decided that extreme measures were called for. He invited a big paint company executive for a grand tour of GM, and when the man first arrived, spoke to him about the range of colors possible with the new paint, called Duco (from "DUpont COmpany"). Presenting the representative with samples of the various hues, he asked the man which color he would most like to see on his car if he had the option. The executive played along and selected one. Kettering then commenced the tour, making sure to take his guest through every part of the factory and explain its workings to him in detail, and also treating the visitor to a lengthy gourmet lunch. It was 4:3O pm in the afternoon before Kettering wrapped up the tour, and when the executive got back to his car he realized instantly that something had changed. Kettering had had it completely repainted in his guests color of choice while the tour was underway. The executive left convinced, and Kettering got his new paint. The first car to be mass produced in a rainbow of colors was the 1924 Oakland, but within two years virtually every other car manufacturer had adopted the new process. Henry Ford, ever distrustful of change, was one of the last to do so, waiting until the end of 1926 before making the Flivver available in color again. GMs New Management While Durant can scarcely have been happy about being ousted from his own company, he at least left it in good hands. Alfred P. Sloan, who became GM`s president in 1923, was a genius of management who took a debt-burdened corporation swiftly back to prosperity and then on to an industry lead that lasted nearly sixty years. Sloan realized that GM`s biggest advantage over Ford lay in the wide variety of models and styles it produced, enough to satisfy nearly every taste and pocketbook. To shore up his company`s relatively weak economy car line, he premiered the affordable Pontiac in the early 1920s. He also instituted the idea of making new models yearly and using advertising to sow discontent with the older ones, introducing the concept of planned obsolescence to ensure a market that would always be hungry for new cars. Henry Ford disdained this idea, claiming that, "The man who buys one of our products should never have to buy another. It was a rather naive statement from a man producing 1.8 million new cars each year, but perhaps understandable given his long success with a singlew car model. But Sloan`s strategy would prove to be more viable than Ford`s within a very few years, as rapidly declining sales of the Model T in favor of GM cars attested. By 1927 GM had overtaken Ford as the industry leader. Although a good thing for the automobile industry, this new attitude towards cars which viewed them as a disposable commodity was perhaps not so beneficial to the American consumer in the long run. By the time the decade ended, emphasis in the car companies had shifted away from long-cherished values of durability and economy to the newer ones of style and short term salability. In terms of mechanical endurance, the cars prodced in 1929 were often inferior to ones produced fifteen years earlier, but the public didn`t mind. When credit buying allowed the average family to get a new car every year if they wanted it, who cared if the car would be worn out in five? In the immediate future, the new attitudes of the car manufacturers would contribute to the Stock Market Crash in 1929. In much later years, the emphasis on style over quality and practicality would give Japan the opening it needed to bring down the American Auto King. Ford Takes Over Lincoln The depression of 1920 was as hard on Ford as it had been on GM, forcing Henry Ford to resort to drastic measures. He started by slashing prices on the Model T until they were being built at a loss and making up the difference on spares, but even that didn`t keep him from having to shut down factories. He then devised a policy of requiring his dealers to pay for each load of cars in cash, up front, which was a tremendous hardship on tbe dealers. Any that dared to complain were threatened with the loss of their dealership if they did not do as ordered, and most found a way to stick it out until things improved. Harry Lelands Lincoln Motors was not so fortunate. Although his luxury automobile was a good car, it was not particularly innovative, and 1920 was a terrible year to try to launch a new automobile make. By 1921 the company was struggling to stay afloat, and the final blow came in the form of a botched tax assessment requiring his company to pay $4,500,000, a full nine times the correct amount. Before the error was rectified, Lincoln Motors sank into receivership. Henry Fords wife was a dear friend of Harry Leland`s wife, and she resolved not to let the Lelands go under. She brought tremendous pressure to bear on her husband in an effort to convince him to bail out Lincoln. Ford eventually did as she asked, but he waited until Lincoln went into receivership so that he could buy the company outright. Earlier, Leland had approached Ford for a loan which could have saved the company from receivership, but Ford refused, knowing full well that a loan would not give him full control over the business the way that buying it would. Late in 1921 the deal was closed and Lincoln became a Ford property. At the time the Deal was made, Henry Ford promised that he would keep Harry Leland and his son Wilfred in charge of their company, but nothing was put down in writing and Henry reneged on his promise in a shameful manner. He refused to allow either of the Lelands a voice in Lincoln, instead ignoring them completely. The Lelands, deeply regretting their decision to sell, tried to buy the company back from Ford for the purchase price plus interest only a few months after Ford bought it, but Ford wasn`t in the least interested in selling. When a messemger came from Henry Ford`s office in 1922 saying that Wilfred Leland`s services were no longer required at Ford, Harry Leland walked out the same day, as Ford no doubt expected. Ford had absolute and uncontested control over Lincoln. Henry Ford`s motivation for his treatment of the Lelands can only he guessed at. It may have been that he was growing more power obsessed as he aged, or perhaps it was some long delayed revenge on Harry Leland for working with William Murphy to build Cadillac from the remains of Henry Ford`s second company back in 1901. Fore whatever reason, it was the end of the Lelands, who were deserving of a better fate. Farewell to the Flivver For the first fifteen years after it appeared, the Model T Ford ruled the American road. But fifteen years is a very long time in an industry advancing as quickly as the American auto industry was doing, and it was inevitable that the Flivver would eventually fall. If Henry Ford had possessed more foresight, he would have been better prepared when the American public began to reject his car; but out of what seemed to be willful blindness on his part, the Automobile King stubbornly refused to admit that times were changing. He continued to produce the Model T long past the time when any other manufacturer would have seen that its popularity was waning. The Model T, unchanged in all but the smallest details, was produced for almost twenty years, The last car, number 15,007,003, officially rolled off the line at the Highland Park factory on May 27, 1927 (although in fact production continued until June), and it was possible to buy brand new Model T engines from Ford as late as 1941! Back in 1909, Henry Ford had lost a minor parent suit to one Frederick W Ball, who invented a small part that Ford used in his Model T transmissions. To settle the suit, Ford agreed to pay $1 to Mr Ball for each Model T built, neither Ford nor Ball could ever have predicted that over 15 million of the cars would be built, and that Ball would thus be made a millionaire many times over. One factor not already mentioned that contributed to the decline of the Model T was the emergence of the used car market. By the early 1920s, a buyer could get a secondhand vehicle of better quality and style for the same price as a brand new Flivver. Other companies fought back against this problem by introducing the yearly model, but Ford disdained this strategy and refused to employ it, to his company`s detriment. More Chevrolets were produced than Fords for the first time in 1925. Ford`s refusal to make an enclosed car or update it in other ways (such as using the new color paints) gave GM an opening that it pursued eagerly, learning and profiting from Ford`s mistakes. When Henry Ford finally gave in and admitted that the day of the Flivver was past, he did so with poor grace and a marked lack of good sense. In what might best be described as a fit of pique, he held off on launching his new car, the Model A, until six months after his factories had shut down Model T production. His actions caused 23 assembly plants across the nation to close, throwing an estimated 60,000 men out of work, and forcing his dealers to survive by selling nothing but spare parts! The unnecessary discontinuity in production cost the Ford Motor Company an estimated $250 million and its claim to the mantle of industry leadership which General Motors gladly assumed. By the time the Model A emerged in December of 1927, people were so eager to see the first new Ford since the Model T that huge crowds gathered around the showrooms for a glimpse. Although the Model A was not terribly innovative by the standards of the day, it was a vast improvement on the Model T, and its status as the Flivver`s successor practically guaranteed that it would be bought in large numbers. It was sufficiently popular that when the new U.S. currency was designed in 1928, the picture of the Treasury Building that was created for the back of the ten dollar bill was engraved complete with a Model A Ford parked in front. FROM DEPRESSION TO WAR : 1930 - 1941 Much of the potential car market in America was still unsaturated by the end of the 1920s. The average man had managed to get a taste of the freedom of the open road, but he still often had to contend with poor roads, undependable vehicles, lack of mechanics to repair them, and a scarcity of replacement parts. The top speed of an average automobile was around 35 mph. Clearly there was room for improvement but advances would have to wait, as there were bigger problems ahead for the auto industry, and the rest of the United States as well. The Great Depression Strikes In October of 1929 the United States finally paid the price for the wild overindulgence of the American public in credit buying and the uninhibited rise of stock market speculation. On Black Tuesday the New York Stock Exchange crashed and the Great Depression was underway. In the year of the crash Detroit produced five million new automobiles, and one out of every five people in the United States owned his or her own car. A year later production had sunk to three million, and by the depths of the Great Depression in 1932 it was down to just over one million, the lowest it had been in ten years. Many car companies that managed to survive the twenties found the rug pulled out from under them. Although the ruined economy caused new car production to plummet, the number of cars actually in use stayed remarkably constant throughout the worst years of the Depression. For many families the car was the last possession to be sold, as it could be used to travel long distances in search of work. In a pinch, it could even be lived in. Once the worst was over recovery for the auto industry came slowly but steadily. By 1937 production had risen to four million and in 1941, the year before America entered World War II, it was almost back up to pre-crash levels. 1941 saw several production milestones passed, such as the production of the four millionth Plymouth, the five millionth Dodge, and the twenty nine millionth Ford. Chrysler somehow managed to maintain a strong research and development department throughout the Depression and pioneered several innovations such as overdrive and a novel type of engine suspension. In 1933 Chrysler`s sales surpassed Ford`s. Perhaps as a response to the harshness and lack of amenities in the Depression, the biggest changes on the automobiles of this time came in the area of driver and passenger comfort and conveinience. Heaters, air-conditioning, powered windshield washers and wipers, and defrosters all debuted during the thirties. Car radios were first offered by the Philadelphia Storage Battery Corporation in 1927 and by 1935 it was estimated that there were more than one million radio equipped cars in the United States. Several early versions of the automatic transmission became available to car buyers, although the prototypes were prone to breakdowns. The technology was greatly improved during World War II, and by the 1940s the first modern style automatic transmission, virtually trouble free, had appeared. Changing Styles Right in the middle of the decade as the nation was starting to climb, however painfully, out of the Depression, two cars appeared on the market that would greatly influence modern styles and forever change the way that car bodies were designed. As has been the case with automobiles almost since their inception, being ahead of their time resulted in both cars becoming commercial failures. In the early 1930s a Chrysler engineer and designer named Carl Breer pioneered the idea of wind Tunnel testing. His earliest trials with typical cars of the day revealed that they were more aerodynamic going backwards than forwards, and Breer resolved to change this by designing a "back to front" car. The result, in 1934, was the Chrysler Airflow, the first automobile to employ streamlining. The Airflow had, in addition to its dynamic styling, all-steel construction and the first automatic overdrive ever featured on an American car. Unfortunately for Chrysler, the car was late to arrive in the showrooms, giving its competitors time to spread disparaging rumors about it and, as luck would have it, the first deveral thousand Airflows to be produced did in fact have some serious construction problems. Although the manufacturing errors were quickly eliminated, the car developed a reputation for unreliability that, when combined with its drastically different look, was enough to assure poor sales. The car never earned a cent for Chrysler. The other revolutionary car of the period was the Cord 810 produced in 1935. Designed by the maker of the Duesenberg, it was intended as a cheap version of the famous luxury car. The style was radically different from anything seen before. It included a "coffin nose" hood, horizontal louvers, headlights that disappeared into the fenders, no running boards, and a fastback sedan body. It was voted the best looking car at the New York Auto show in the yeat it premiered, and in 1951 the New York Museum of Modern Art recognized the design as one of the finest examples of industrial styling of all time. One other style of car which arrived in the 1930s was the station wagon, often called a "woody" because its body was made of wood. The station wagon did not become a passenger car until the 1940s, being considered at first a utility vehicle like a truck or van. It gained popularity first with farmers, explorers, film studios, and hotels, until by the late 1940s ordinary consumers had adopted it as the perfect family car. Fords New Engine In 1932 the presidency of the Ford Motor Company was taken over by Henry Ford`s son, Edsel. The transfer of power was in name only; in most respects, Henry Ford still ran the company as he always had. Edsel struggled against his father`s control during all his years as president, but only rarely succeeded in bucking the wishes of iron willed Henry. In the same year Ford introduced the first V8 engine available in an economy car. V8 engines had first been introduced in 1914 by Cadillac, but had remained an option only for the wealthy until Ford began to build them. The reasoning Henry used to arrive at this decision was typical of him: "We`re going from a four to an eight because Chevrolet is going to a six." Henry's business strategy could often be summed up as one of not doing what anyone else was doing. He avoided such worthwhile innovations as hydraulic braking and longitudinal springs solely because the competition all had them. The Ford V8 gave excellent performance for the price range, and the other manufacturers took a while to catch up. In spite of Ford`s image and performance advantages, however, sales continued to slip - Chevrolet sales topped Ford`s in every year of the decade except 1935, and from 1936 on Ford ranked third behind GM and Chrysler in overall sales. The main reason for this was that Ford only produced two makes, as compared to six for GM and four for Chrysler. The cheap Ford and the expensive Lincoln left a huge gap in the middle of the market, and the other companies prospered by filling it. In the hopes of regaining pre eminence in the field, Ford introduced a third make in 1938 to bridge its price gap, and called it Mercury. Part of Fords difficulty in profiting from the V8 lay in the fact that the cars were valued for their performance by high schoolers and college kids, but as consumers these groups could rarely afford to buy new. Another customer base that appreciated the V8 for its performance, but which Ford could not depend on for income, was the criminal underclass - Bonnie and Clyde drove a V8 Ford, as did John Dillinger. After becoming Public Enemy Number One, Dillinger wrote to Ford, saying. "Hello Old Pal, you have a wonderful car. It`s a treat to drive one." Of course, Ford had its better class customers as well; the President drove a Ford V8, as did famous aviator Charles Lindenburg. There were a few other factors that may have contributed to the decline of Ford in the thirties. For one thing, Henry Ford`s public image became tarnished by his vicious anti-union actions, and also his outspoken anti Semitism. For another, in spite of their excellent engines, his cars were in other ways behind the times technologically, with outmoded suspension and brake systems. Ford`s other notable product in this period was a new model for its luxury line, Lincoln. In 1939 Edsel Ford took a standard Lincoln Zephyr automobile and instructed a friend of his to redesign it according to some ideas Edsel had in mind. The car was originally intended to be for Edsel`s personal use only, but a number of his friends saw it and were delighted with the new styling. Over two hundred orders were placed for the car before anyone even had any idea that it would ever be produced! Responding to the enthusiasm for the car, Ford instituted a limited production run and the Lincoln Continental was born. The car sold on styling and image alone, since otherwise it was identical to the Zephyr. WORLD WAR II AND AFTER : 1941 - 1950 By 1939, the "Big Three" had consolidated their hold on the American auto industry had accounted for 90% of auto sales. Five smaller makes fought over the remaining 10% of the market And then for three and a half years, all American car manufacturers abandoned their rivalry and joined together in a huge effort to supply their country`s needs for war. Detroit Goes to War On December 7, 1941 the United States entered World War II. Two months later all automobile production except for military vehicles ended as Detroit shifted over to war production. The impact of the American automobile industry on the United States war effort was enormous. Over $29 billion worth of military materials, including planes, jeeps, tanks, ammunition, and parts and supplies of all types were produced in Detroit - one-fifth the total American output for the entire war. By the time passenger car production was again sanctioned, on July 1, 1945, the pent up demand for new automobiles was tremendous. But before the carmakers could start supplying automobiles to answer that demand they had a few hurdles to cross. For one thing raw materials, especially sheet steel, were hard to come by. For another, the forces of labor had started to become organized and were readying themselves for a big battle with the auto industry. Ford started its produclion lines again only two days after the restrictions were lifted. GM waited until October 1945, but in November the company was hit with a nationwide strike called by the United Auto Workers, who had organized ten years previous but were still struggling unsuccessfully to gain official recognition. Chrysler, out of fear of similar strikes, put off restarting its lines for even longer. Throughout 1946 strikes at auto plants and parts manufacturers made production highly undependable. By the time the year was up, however, the guaranteed minimum wage and forty hour work week had been agreed upon and the worst of the labor strife was over. The final thing the carmakers had to contend with was the postwar Truman administration. Thanks to the shortage of such vital materials as sheet steel, car production costs were sky high in 1945. The Office of Price Administration however, handed down a decree stating that new car prices should be based on 1942 costs "It costs us $1,O41 to make a car", complained Henry Ford II, new president of Ford Motors, "but we are restricted to selling it at a maximum of $780." In 1947 the price controls were lifted and the auto industry could at last get back to serious business. END OF PART TWO -=-=-=-=-=-=-=- DETROIT - THE OPEN ROAD - Part 3 =======================--------- Postwar Boom and Bust The demand for new automobiles was so high in postwar America that practically anything on wheels could and did sell. Numerous new carmakers appeared on the market flourished briefly, then sank when the boom eased off a few years later. The bust following the boom also killed off several venerable luxury carmakers such as Packard and Studebaker, as their customers deserted for Cadillacs and the Lincoln Continental. The first cars produced immediately after the war were built from prewar designs. Truly new car models did not appear until the years of 1946 to 1948. Several of the new features of the postwar designs became trademarks: the portholes just ahead of the front door on the Buicks were standards of the make from 1948 to the 1970s, and Cadillac acquired its famous fins. Chrysler lost ground to Ford steadily in this period, dropping to third in 1950 as Ford surged up to second. The lost sales can be attributed to a combination of Chrysler`s failure to bring out a new model until 1953 and the revitalization of Ford that occurred during this period with the advent of Henry Ford II as the company`s new President. Edsel Ford passed away prematurely at the age of 50 in 1945. His son, Henry Ford II, then a 28 year old ensign in the U.S. Navy, was released from his duties to assume the presidency of Ford in his fathers place. Henry II, unlike his father, had been allowed to attend college and had graduated from Yale before joining up. When he arrived at Ford he found the companys management moribund and extremely inefficient, and at once set about cleaning house. Unlike Edsel, Henry II had little to fear from his grandfather who was by that time old and growing infirm. One of the first things Henry II did was fire Harry Bennet, the first Henry`s much feared and disliked security chief. Then in 1946 he brought in a group of ten young outsiders, known collectively as "The Wizz Kids" to revamp the company from the ground up. The group included prominent academics from Princeton and Harvard, as well as future U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The whiz Kids, led by Henry II, made a sweeping reorganization, adopteD GM`s decentralized management svstem, improved labor relations, ad stabilized the company`s shaky finances. In 1949 Ford sold over a million cars, the first time that mark had been passed since 1930. The following year, Ford recaptured second place from Chrysler, although the Whiz Kids never did quite succeed in their aim of beating GM. THE COMING OF THE CAR CULTURE : 1951 - 1958 An average 1949 car in the U.S. cost $1,800, had an eight cylinder engine, a heater, and a radio. Many had automatic transmissions. Around 1950 the first of what we would now consider "economy cars" small in size, durable, and fuel efficient started to appear in Europe. In America by contrast, cars were approaching their peak in size, were often covered with two tone paint schemes and gleaming chrome on every surface, and were generally notorious gas guzzlers. Americas roads received another boost from the government in 1956 with the passing of the Interstate Highway Act, which provided federal money for a nationwide system of four lane superhighways. The nation`s road network at the time topped out at approximately three million miles. The American consumer wanted big, powerful cars, to travel long distances in speed and confort. Conspicous consumption, particularly with respect to one`s automobile, was the rage. Gadgets of all sorts proliferated, power and prestige became emphasized over utility and real performance, engines got larger, and body styling became more than a little outrageous. The idea of the "dream car" or "concept car" made its first appearance in these years. These were vehicles never intended to go into mass production. Some of them were even missing such details as a working engine. The purpose in building such a car was to test a new engine concept or sample the public`s reaction to a new body styling, or sometimes just to suit the fanciful whim of a chief executive Americas First Compact Until 1950 all American cars came in basically a single size, and that size was "Big". The wide variety in body size that can be found today was completely unknown. The first relatively small American car to find a market was the Nash Rambler, launched in 1950. George Mason, president of Nash car company (one of the few independents to survive past the end of the postwar boom)" knew that small cars had never been successful on the American market He reasoned that his failure was due to the marketing of such cars as cheap vehicles, which thereforevmarked the buyer as someone of limited means. The key to selling small cars, Mason thought was to build a small car that people would buy because they liked it, not because it was inexpensive - and thus was the Nash Rambler born. The Rambler wasn`t an expensive car but it did cost more than the bottom line Fords and Chevrolets and so did not appear "cheap". It sold very well for Nash in 1950 and 1951, but by then the other independents had learned from Nash's success and brought out compacts of their own, cutting into Nash`s market. In 1955 the Rambler was discontinued, just after Nash merged with Hudson to form American Motors. Three years later the Rambler was reintroduced and did even better in its second outing than it had in its first, selling briskly from 1959 - 1961. Its success, coupled with the success of a diminutive German invader called the Volkswagen Beetle, prompted the Big Three to launch their own compacts in 1959. The Sports Car and the Youth Movement The heart of the Car Culture in the United States was the growing independence and freedom of movement that American youth found with the wheels of their choice. The car and its care and feeding became the centerpiece of an entire way of life for millions of Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. High-schoolers and college age kids found happiness in one of two types of cars: either the big boat like vehicle into which six to eight people could be packed along with supplies for a trip to the beach or to the movies, or the speedy two-passenger sports cars which appeared late in the decade. The Ford Galaxie was a good example of the first type of car, while the two sports cars of choice were the Chevrolet Corvette and the Ford Thunderbird, both of which premiered in 1954. The Corvette was designed by GM style chief Harley Earl, who was hoping to design a low priced sports car suitable for his college aged son and his friends. His initial design was exhibited as a concept car in 1952 and was such a hit that Chevrolet went into production the next year. To save weight and cost, the Corvette had the first all fiberglass body. The new car was priced at $3,440, a disappointment to Harvey Earl who had hoped for some thing closer to $1,000. The early "Vettes" though prized by collectors, were not considered very good cars by the people who made them. But the 1956 Corvette had a V8 engine gave the magic advertising figure of one horsepower per cubic inch, and sales took off. The 1957 model featured more improvements including better suspension, fuel injection, and a four speed transmission. It could go from zero to sixty miles per hour in 5.7 seconds, a respectable figure even by today`s standards. In 1962 the Corvette engine was placed in an all new body and released as the Sting Ray, which became the single word Stingray by 1969. The Stingray stayed in production, almost unchanged, until 1983. The Thunderbird, which debuted in the same year as the Corvette, had a regular steel body but a bigger and better performance engine than the original "Vette. It also cost about $500 less, a significant difference to a young person with a limited income. The Thunderbird only stayed a sports car for the first three years of its life, and then it became a four passenger convertable. The Car Culture even had its own sacred hymns, sung by the likes of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean: "Little Deuce Coupe", "Shutdown" "Fun Fun Fun" "409" "Dead Mans Curve", and "Little GTO". The latter was a tribute to a Pontiac car that owed its name to a stroke of advertising genius by then Pontiac General Manager John Z DeLorean. The initials "GTO" were originally used by the Italian carmaker Ferrari. The acronym stood for "Gran Turismo Omologato" or homologated Grand Touring, and was a designation used on Ferrari racing cars that made it into general production. The car was DeLoreans special baby and he snuck the design through when his superiors weren`t looking. By the time they learned of it, it was already in production and much too late to stop. Sports car enthusiasts raised an enormous row about Pontiacs usurpation of their beloved letters, but as "Car & Driver" magazine pointed out, the Pontiac GTO could beat a Ferrari on a straightaway and the Ferrari cost five times as much. The letter stayed Fords Infamous Edsel The Ford Motor Company was doing much better in 1954 than it had been in a long time, thanks to Henry Ford II and his Whiz Kids. But it still had not caught up with GM. It was decided that ford needed a second middle priced car to accompany the Mercury, as GM had three cars in that range (Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick). Great effort was expended in selecting a fitting name for a brand-new Ford marque. Ford`s advertising agency supplied a list of 6,000 to choose from, including several names that were eventually used elsewhere, such as Citation, Pacer, and Ranger. Market research manager David Wallace contacted poet Marianne Moore to ask for suggestions and received back of list of possible names including "Intelligent Whale", "Resilient Bullet", "Mongoose Civique", "Taper Racer", and finally in a burst of inspiration, "Utopian Turtletop". Miss Moore had declined any fee for her help, saying it would inhibit her creativity. Although none of her suggestions were even remotely usable, there seemed to be no hard feelings either way for at Christmastime the poet received a large bouquet of red roses with a card attached saying "Merry Christmas to our favorite Turtletopper". Eventually, despite objections from the Ford family, the name Edsel was chosen in honor of Henry II`s father. Unfortunatly Ford did not put nearly as much effort into the actual car as it did into the name. To economize, bodies and engines were mostly from other Ford and Mercury cars. The distinctive horse collar grille was intended to be the car`s mark of distinction, but it was not a particular good choice. Edsel production was mostly done hastily at the end of the day and as a result often suffered from poor quality workmanship. It quickly acquired a reputation for unreliability. The car was widely hyped, but it was not really an innovative car in any true sense of the word, being made as it was from parts of other ordinary cars. Ford`s timing was nothing short of terrible - the Edsel was a big car, and the day of the compact was just around the corner. At the time the Edsel was being developed, the midsize car accounted for 40% of the market; by the time it debuted, that had dropped to 25%. The Edsel did not sell and stayed in production only until 1960. The failure of the new marque may have cost Ford as much as $250 million. THE MODERN AGE The demise of the outmoded Edsel in 1958 heralded the beginning of the new age for the automobile. American cars had become nearly too big to drive, too clumsy to operate, and too expensive to maintain. Consumers began to look for something different. It was during this period that European cars reappeared on the American automobile scene, in small numbers at first, and then in waves of increasing size. At the beginning the American auto companies seemed to be up to the challenge presented by the new preference for compact cars, but their early triumph was not destined to last. This decade was the time when the confidence of the US automakers began a dangerous downward slide into complacency. The emphasis on year-end profits and the tyranny of cost accounting management led to a distinct short-sightedness. Capital investment was discouraged, no new machine tools were designed or purchased, and research and development departments went begging for funds. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the Big Three were long overdue for an unpleasant wake up call. THINKING SMALL : 1959 - 1964 The Compact Revolution in the U.S. auto industry came ahout as a response to the success of the Nash Rambler, combined with the disturbing appearance of small European economy cars on the American market in increasing numbers. Until WWII the only imports sold in the U.S. were large luxury cars such as Mercedes, Minerva, Renault, and Rolls Royce. After the war the import market focused on sporty cars such as the MG Midget and the Jaguar XK120. The first imported economy car to make an impact on the American market was the tiny Volkswagen Beetle - and that impact, small at first, soon mushroomed to enormous proportions. The Little Car That Could The Volkswagen car got its start in 1930s Germany, when Adolf Hitler commissioned Dr. Federnand Porsche to develop a cheap "people`s car" (the literal translation of Volkswagen) in order to keep automobile money inside Germany. The cars were first built in 1938, but only about 100,000 VWs were made before WWII arrived, halting production. After the German defeat the Volkswagen plant was offered up as part of payments for war damages, but the American and British experts scorned the offer, declaring the little car to be worthless. Shortly thereafter, in 1945, a handful of people who had been employed by VW before the war requested permission to go back to producing cars, and were granted it. The VW factory had been bombed during the fighting, so when the workers returned they found the plant barely usable with blown out windows and a damaged, leaky roof. Nevertheless, they set to work. Due to the severe materials shortages, their first handful of cars were built entirely from salvage parts. This lack of supplies forced them to concentrate on a single model, and they chose the one that had been the most popular before the war, the little VW 1200 Beetle. By the end of 1946 they had somehow managed to raise production to 10,000 cars. The next year the Allied Government stepped in and put Heinrich Nordhoff, former head of GM`s German line, Opel in charge. Nordhoff opened markets throughout Europe to bring in foreign money to stabilize Volkswagen and the company never looked back. The Volkswagen was the first car built to create a market, not to fill a need. Like the Model T before it, the Beetle was simple in design, plain to look at, and economical to operate. It was introduced in America in 1949 and its sales were slow for several years thereafter. Volkswagen persevered however and in 1960 half a million Beetles were sold in the United States. The "Bug" became a huge favorite on college campuses, and by the time the decade wore out five million of the funny little cars had been purchased by American consumers. Then in 1972 the Beetle did the unthinkable, stealing the title of most popular car ever by exceeding the Model T`s record of fifteen million cars sold. By the time the series was discontinued in 1978, 19,200,000 Beetles had been produced The "Big Three" Respond The success of the Nash Rambler and the VW Beetle combined with the encroachment of other European compact cars on the American auto industries territory convinced General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler that some sort of response was called for. It came in 1959 as all three companies, acting almost in unison, each introduced a new compact car for the 1960 season GM produced the Chevrolet Corvair; Ford, the Ford Falcon; and Chrysler, the Chrysler Valiant. The Valient was a standard Chrysler car engine and chassis with new styling and construction. The Chevrolet Corvair was more unorthodox, with a new body and a novel rear mounted flat six air cooled engine. The Ford Falcon was the most conventional in design, but even with that it was a full two feet shorter than the Ford Fairlane. The Falcon was the dullest, but sold the best of the three; in its first year it represented nearly half of Ford sales. In later years, new Ford vicepresident Lee Laccoca spruced up the Falcon`s look to make it more exciting and sales went up still further. All Three cars were an unqualified success, proving that the time of the compact had arrived. The European competitors quickly faded from the scene, with the singular exception of the hardy little Beetle which actually increased its market share during this period. The success of the compact cars, which later evolved into the so called intermediates, led to an expansion in available automobile types. In the early 1950s, a car generally had one body shell which could be made in four door sedan, two door coupe, topless convertable, and station wagon, all fitted on top of one engine and chassis. When a range of engines became available at the start of the Sixties, two new classes of cars appeared, categorized more by engine type than body type. The "pony car" was a powerful engine fitted into an intermediate coupe or compact body shell, while a "muscle car" was a powerful engine fitted into a sedan body. The first "pony car", was, of course, the Ford Mustang, from which the class derived its name. Some historians have called the Mustang the most significant American car of the 1960s, for it did what the designers of the Edsel had tried (and miserably failed) to do: it captured the spirit of the times. The Mustang was the baby of vice-president Lee Lacocca. Laccoca started as a Ford salesman in Allentown Pennsylvania, and made a vow to himself that he would be a Ford vice president by his thirty fifth birthday. He missed the mark, but not by much - his promotion to VP can through just eighteen days late. Lacocca, young himself, was devoted to the concept of "thinking young" and realized the the Baby Boomer children born in the post war years were nearing driving age and would want something different from their parents. At the same time women were becoming professionals in larger numbers than ever before and acquiring buying power and they too would be looking for a car of their own. Lacocca reasoned that a small, individually styled car without the family sedan image of existing compacts might fit the bill for these consumers. The original Mustang design was tested by racing drivers, who loved it. But Lacocca reasoned that a car beloved by racing drivers might not be quite right for the average American, so the Mustang went back into design, re emerging in 1964 to instant runaway success. It was available in an enormous variety of options, so that each car could be customized to the buyer's personal tastes and requirements. Five engines were offered, plus six transmissions, three suspension packages, three brake systems, three wheel sizes, and many other comfort and performance option. The simplest unenhanced Mustang sold for $2,368, while a souped up version could cost as much as $3,850. More than 100,000 Mustangs were sold in the first four months of production, and more than a million in the first year. Chrysler and GM rushed to jump on the bandwagon, launching the Chrysler Camaro and the Pontiac Firebird as competitors. WASHINGTON STEPS IN : 1965 - 1970 By the early 1960s, cars had been in common use in America long enough for some of the difficulties associated with their operation to become apparent. Traffic congestion became a problem, causing road surfaces to degrade and eroding the automobile's great advantage door to door transportation. For example, according to New York City`s Department of Transportation, the average speed of horse and buggy in downtown Manhattan in 1907 was 11.5 mph. Today, the average speed by car in Manhattan`s overcrowded streets is 9.8 mph, while the average for horses remains the same. And elsewhere in the country, Southern California discovered to its dismay that its reliance on the automobile combined with its local air patterns was rapidly depriving the people who lived there of the opportunity to breathe. Automakers, concerned as always with sales and little else, steadfastly ignored any problems associated with their cars or the use thereof, considering it the consumer`s business to look out for himself "Caveat emptor" were the watchwords for the Big Three and the smaller manufacturers as well. But the 1960s were a time of great social activity in the United States, and it was inevitable that eventually the eye of the activist would fall upon the American auto industry. When it did, it did not like what it saw. Before the decade was out, the Big Three would discover themselves wrestling with new legislation designed to force them to pay more attention to issues they had rarely considered in the past, such as automobile safety for both passengers and pedestrians, and engine exhaust emissions. The new legislation caused significant changes in the way new cars would be designed in the future. Until the mid 60s, car design was dictated by consumers and accountants, with engineers and stylists balancing between what the public wanted and what the carmakers could afford to produce for them. With the advent of the new laws, car manufacturers were suddenly presented with a third factor to figure into their designs. By setting mandatory standards for safety and pollution, Washington spurred new developments in the fields of engine design, body design, and safety devices such as seat belts and air bags. Without this impetus, such advances might have arrived decades later or not at all. Nader the Raider For many years, the prevailing wisdom in Detroit was "safety doesn`t sell cars". As far back as the 1930s the Airflow had touted its all steel body as a safety feature and by 1952 Nash and Muntz had installed passive seat belts in their automobiles, but neither advance helped the cars sell. Things would change radically in the midsixties, starting in 1965 when a crusading young lawyer named Ralph Nader researched the automobile industry`s history on safety and wrote a book, Unsafe at Any Speed, detailing his findings. Nader concluded that although the big companies had the technology, money, and personnel available to make their cars significantly safer, they had refused to do so even when their designs were close to negligently hazardous. Specific targets of Nader`s book included Buicks undependable power braking system, the famous Cadillac fins which impaled bicyclists and pedestrians, and the rear swing axle on the Chevrolet Corvair. This last problem was one of Nader`s paRticular demons, as the design flaw had been pointed out to Chevrolet by one of its own engineers before The car went intO production and the big carmaker had ignored the warning. The rear swing axle had been used successfully in cars before, but the Corvair had rear mounted engine and a body design that put most of the car`s weight at the back of the vehicle; on a turn, the extra weight caused the inside wheel to lean at a sharp enough angle that it could fold completely and cause a deadly rollover. Nader`s attack, combined with the Corvair`s higher production costs, drove the car off the market within a few years After publishing his book, Nader testified before the U.S. Congress on automobile safety and was influential in getting the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act passed later in the year. This law gave the federal government the right to regulate the design of automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles so as to protect the public safety. Since its passage more than fifty safety standards have been imposed regulating safety windshields, seat belts, head restraints, brakes, tires, lighting, door strength, and roof strength. Sadly, the new safety legislation wasn`t enough to prevent the tragedies associated with the Ford Pinto. The Pinto, Ford`s entry into the new subcompact field, made its debut in 1970. To save weight on the design, Ford`s engineers had eliminated a number of rear subframe members from the car`s body. This left the gas tank more vulnerable to compression and rupture in a collision than it was on heavier cars. The gas tank also had a filler neck that could easily tear loose in a crash and fill the passenger compartment with highly flammable gasoline fumes. In the case of a rear end collision, the Pinto could - and sometimes did - go up in an explosive fireball. One victim of a Pinto explosion sued Ford for negligence and won an award totalling $128.5 million. On appeal the amount was reduced, but it still cost Ford $6.5 million and an enormous amount of bad publicity. The bad press got worse once Henry Ford II`s contemptuous views on automobile safety became public knowledge, and The Ford company was a long time recovering Fumes and Furor Safety considerations were not the only automobile issue to capture the interest of the American public in the late 1960s. Driven by tales of Southern California cities such as Los Angeles, where old people and children could not walk outside on some days during the summer due to the poisonous air, the federal government passed the Clean Air Act in 1970 establishing acceptable levels of exhaust emissions such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons. The Clean Air Act also set restrictions on leaded gasoline, the use of which originated in 1933 when Charles Kettering of GM discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline cured engine knock. Burning leaded gasoline, however, spreads airborne lead into the atmosphere where it can be taken up and absorbed into the body through the lungs. High levels of lead are toxic, especially to small children, and lead from leaded gasoline was a major contributor to the number of cases of lead poisoning in urban children in America during the 1960s and 1970s. The two easiest ways to lower levels of unacceptable auto emissions are by lowering engine temperatures and by use of a device called a catalytic converter, now standard equipment on American cars, which converts exhaust fumes to water and carbon dioxide. The use of the catalytic converter provided the other nmajor impetus for the abandonment of leaded gasoline, as the lead in the fuel coats the active catalyst in the converter and destroys the devices function. In spite of two decades of air pollution legislation and the subsequent improvement of air quality in many cities in the United States, the problem is far from solved. Several Southern California cities, unable to find another solution, are considering completely banning gasoline burning vehicles from the city limits by the year 2010, which may lead to a revival in the use of the electric car. Increased use of mass transport and alternative, cleaner burning fuels may be other answers, as may be the development of engines other than the standard internal combustion type which run more cleanly, such as the Diesel and the external-combustion Stirling engine. To complicate matters even further, studies have shown that current methods of emissions control may be drastically insufficient to solve the problem. Catalytic Converters, though very beneficial, have a limited life span and if not replaced, become useless and allow exhaust to pass through unchanged. There is also concern that one of the by products of ctalytic converters, carbon dioxide, may lead to global warming if production is unchecked. Furthur research has indicated that problems may exist with exhaust gases previously thought to be harmless: ozone for example, damages crops and lowers air quality while, paradoxically, chlorofluourcarbons emitted by automobile air-conditioners may be contributing to the depletion of the planets natural high-altitude ozone layer. Even with air pollution controls in place, automobile exhaust still accounts for 90% of the air pollution in modern cities. DETROIT'S CRISIS YEARS : 1971 - 1979 Although the United States would cling to her top seat in the world automobile industry for nearly a decade yet, by 1970 it was already clear that her grip on the position was slipping. America`s cars were still examples of style over substance, built to break rather than last, bearing gasoline thirsty engines, and suffering from bad publicitv due to the public`s perceived indifference of the Big Three to concerns such as safety and pollution control. The advent of the Japanese import in conjunction with two serious fuel crises within five years would prove a one two punch that would bring down the Auto King after nearly seventy years of domination. American Motors Tries Something New The struggling American Motors was having a hard time competing with the Big Three in 1970. The company`s executives decided to introduce a new car into the market to compete with the VW Beetle instead, hoping that since the Big Three appeared not to be interested in that part of the market it would have a clear field. Later that year the American Motors Gremlin appeared: It was an odd-looking little car with styling charitable described as "controversial" which was a nicer word than "ugly". The car's stylist defended its looks, claiming that only an unconventional design would have garnered the car enough attention to bring in the customers. That may or may not have been true, but for whatever reason, the little car sold well enough to prompt two of the Big Three to respond with designs of there own later in the year. GMs offering was the Chevrolet Vega: while Ford brought another of Lee Lacocca`s designs, the ill stared Pinto. Chrysler ignored the trend toward smaller cars and unwisely offered no subcompact for several years to come. Either because the new subcompacts were pushed through production in a hurry or because the companies did not feel that the subcompacts were worthy of heavy investments, neither car was very good. The Pinto's disastrous safety flaws lead to multimillion dollar lawsuits and bad publicity for Ford, while the Vega's problems included body rust, oil leaks, rough engines and cylinder head warping. Long Lines at the Pumps It was unfortunate for the Big Three that they had not put more effort into designing well made subcompact cars, because the first major oil crisis was just around the corner. It would usher in the age of fuel conservation and engine economy, and with the Big Three woefully unprepared for bthe change, the door was opened for the Japanese carmakers. When gasoline engines were first made in quantity, America`s domestic oil supply was more than sufficient to provide for the country's needs. Originally, the only use for petroleum was to make kerosene lamps, and with the advent of the electric light even that use was declining. The arrival of the gasoline engine gave the Petroleum industry a whole new reason to exist. Today, gasoline comprises nearly a third of the total oil consumption of the world. As the car became more and more common in America, use of gasoline naturally increased past the point where domestic oil reserves could provide enough fuel for everyone. This point was reached and passed in the 1950s, but hardly anyone noticed because the discovery of new large oil fields in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and other middle Eastern countries ensured that fuel would continue to be plentiful. American consumers failed to realize, however, that when oil became a precious commodity, it became a source of power - power which had now passed out of American hands. The hard lesson was driven home in 1973 with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and her Arabic neighbors. Oil stopped flowing to the United States and to most of Europe as well not because the wells had gone dry but because the Arab nations had decided not to sell it to the countries that were supporting their enemy, Israel. Gasoline prices tripled over a few months and people stood in line for hours to get fuel for their cars. Some European nations, with no domestic oil supply, resorted to banning driving entirely on Sundays. It was a rude awakening for American gasoline consumers, abruptly forced to become aware of how drastic their fuel needs had become and how great their dependence was on foreign powers to supply it. Large car sales went into an immediate downturn with the worst hit being the Large sized, medium priced cars such as Ford`s Mercury. An economical car suddenly seemed a much better choice than a powerful one. Unfortunately, the American auto industry wasn`t building any dependable fuel-efficient cars, nor was it prepared to do so in the near future. In response to the crisis, the Big Three to start making plans to downsize their product, but it would be several years before the changes would be reflected in the creation of new, smaller cars. The second oil crisis hit just five years later in 1978, brought on by the struggle to overthrow the American supported Shah of Iran. Prices, which never came down after the first crisis, tripled yet again. Then in 1980 Iran and Iraq, both major oil producers, went to war with each other, stopping oil production from both countries and guaranteeing that the high gasoline prices would continue for the immediate future. For the American auto industry, there would be no turning back. The day of the gas guzzling car was well and truly over. The Rise of Japan The entry of Japan into the auto industry started early, but stumbled badly several times before finally achieving success. Japan`s first car was built in 1902, an experimental model only that used an American engine. Five years later a car was built for production but only twelve were made before the company collapsed. By the early 1920s there were many tiny car manufacturers in Japan, none of them supccessful. The first automobile company in Japan to actually turn a profit was founded in 1926, its product being an experimental car built by Kwaishinsha Motor Works. The initials of the founders were combined to created the company`s original name, DAT. Five years later DAT bought out a car named "Datson", meaning, literally "son of DAT" and in the year after the name was changed again to Datsun to honor the rising sun emblem of the country's flag. In 1934 DAT joined with the new Nissan company to form today's Nissan Datsun corporation. The only other pre WWII car manufacturer in Japan was Toyota which started, improbably enough, as a textile manufacturer. Its first offering was brought out in 1935. The car looked like a cross between a Ford and a Chrysler Airflow and by the standards of the West was a poor vehicle It was not until the second World War that Japan's auto industry really took off. The vast industrial and technological expansion that Japan undertook in order to fight WWII formed the basis of its post war industry. Production was very slow at first; only 215 Toyotas were built between 1947 and 1952. But during the 1950s Japanese engineers traveled to the U.S. and began to study American production methods, and in 1953 Toyota production had jumped to 16,500. Financing for Japan`s industrial capitalization, expansion and modernization were provided by its government and by low cost loans from the World Bank. Once they had learned the basics of modern mass production methods, the Japanese engineers went on to do what America's companies had failed to do: improve on them as an example, Toyotas production manager, Taiichi Ohno, developed stamping machines that could be easily changed to make several different parts from a single machine. This saved on capital, since fewer machines were needed and eliminated wasteful and inefficient stockpiling. Conversion of one of Ohnos machines could be done in a few minutes instead of the three hours or more it could take to convert a standard Detroit model. Early Japanese marketing efforts were restricted to home, for only one person in ten in Japan had a car in the 1960s, compared to one in two in the U.S., one in five in West Germany, and one in six in Britian. Even as late as 1967 only 11% of Japan`s car production was exported During the 1960s the Japanese car industry expanded and developed as new companies were founded and older companies merged. Nissan took over Prince Motors of Tokyo, Toyota absorbed Daihatsu, and the huge Mitsubishi company joined forces with Isuzu Motors. Honda, ruler of the motorcycle market, began making cars in 1962. In 1968 Toyo Kogyo, which began as a cork manufacturer began producing the Mazda marque, some with Wankel rotary engines. The Japanese automobile got off to a shaky start in the United States. The first Toyotas reached California in 1957 against the wishes of the car`s designer who felt (rightly) that the vehicle was not ready to challenge the U.S market. By American standards of the day, the early Toyotas were poorly made , with engines so underpowered that they could not accelerate fast enough to get on a freeway safely. Toyota dealerships were considered only by the most desperate car dealers. The turning point came in 1973, when Honda brought its subcompact Civic to the United States. It was the right car at the right time, and sales soared. Other Japanese automakers soon followed. American consumers discovered that Japanese imports cost the same (or less than) American made subcompacts, but were more durable, ran better, and were much more fuel efficient Compared to the Vega and the Pinto, they seemed like wonder cars. Word spread quickly among buyers and within a very few years the Big Three realized they had a serious problem on their hands as sales of American cars went into a steady decline. By 1980 Japan had passed the United States in overall production and in 1987 imports accounted for 31.3% of all automobiles sold in America. THE POPULAR CAR TODAY : 1980 - PRESENT Since the end of World War II the car industry has taken on an increasingly global character. Cars are imported and exported from every major industrialized country, and multinational ventures are becoming more common every year. Foreign automakers have established links with U.S. firms and all major Japanese manufacturers have opened plants on U.S. soil. A car today may be owned by a company in one country, be designed by a company in a second, be assembled in a third, and contain parts originating in five or ten more. The heaviest concentrations of car owners are found in North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, all of which have ratios of one car for every 2 - 4 people. China, by contrast, has one per 2,000 people. Countries with automotive industries include Japan, the United States, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Sweden, and regions of the former U.S.S.R. America has the Big Three of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Japan has six major firms Toyota, Nissan/Datsun, Honda, Mazda, Isuzu and Suzuki. In Germany, Volkswagen leads by a large margin, followed by Opel (GMs German branch), Ford, Daimler-Benz (with Mercedes), and the Bayernische Motoren Werks (BMW). France has Renault, Citroen/Peugeot, and Simca, while Italy's only major popular car manufacturer is Fiat. Volvo and Saab are made in Sweden, and South Korea, a very recent entry into the field, is doing well with Hyundai. The United Slates produced two thirds of all the world`s cars in 1950. By 1990 that fraction had dropped to one-fifth, although the total number of cars built was about equal to that of 1950. For most of the early years of the auto industry, Britain held the second place spot behind the U.S. This lasted until Germany, building on the strength of the Volkswagen, seized the position in the 1960s. In the 1970s Japan surged past Germany and shortly thereafter the U.S. itself to take the lead. Tough Times for Detroit One quarter of the cars sold in the United States were made in Japan by 1980, an astonishing turnaround from just ten years before. The success of the Japanese import can be attributed to two simple factors: first, they had the right car at the right time to take advantage of a lamentable lack of foresight on the part of American automakers, and second, they were able to refine the mass production process in order to combine high output with high quality control. The U.S. government, alarmed by this threat to a major national industry, in 1981 convinced Japan to impose restrictions on its automakers to give American car companys time to retool and modernize their factories. In the following year the United Auto Workers revealed the growing desperation in the industry when they made major concessions to manufacturers, hoping to help get the American auto industry back on its feet. Between 1978 and 1984 the Big Three spent a total of about $69 billion throughout the world in an attempt to become competative, putting the money into product redesign and plant modernization. Since 1984 sales of American cars have been slowly rising, although it will take them quite a while to regain lost ground, if indeed they ever do. American carmakers recovered from earlier difficulties such as the Great Depression, given time, but in those cases the slump was a world wide phenomenon affecting carmakers everywhere in roughly the same way. Even in the depths of the Depression, the American auto industry still turned out more than twice as many cars as its nearest rival. This latest decline is specific to the United States, a loss in global market share rather than a general depression of sales, and as such it will be harder to recover from. No one in the American car industry is giving up, however Lee Lacocca said in 1988, "Americans are fat and happy" but that doesn`t mean America is finished. When it gets tough, they will straighten out". His confidence may or may not be justified. The matter is further clouded by the growing international nature of the industry. In recent years, cooperative marketing deals and production mergers between American companies and carmakers from other nations have blurred the line between import and domestic vehicles to the point where it is difficult to say where a car actually comes from. All three major U.S. carmakers have international plants and have sub-assemblies and parts manufactured by foreign affiliates. Japan and South Korea have been the major partners, although Europe and South America are in the process of joining them. As of 1970 an American make of car was truly American made, designed and built by Americans with all parts manufactured in the United States. In contrast, in 1990 a Ford Festiva was a Korean built Mazda design, a Chevrolet Turbo Sprint was a Japanese built Suzuki, and a Pontiac Le Mans was a German designed Opel Kadett built in Korea! One of the main reasons why foreign built cars are being sold as American is that the enormous cost of retooling a factory can be avoided if an already-developed foreign design is used. In 1990, cars of the Ford-Lincoln Mercury group came from Korea, Mexico, Canada, Austria, and German as well as the U.S.. As of 1970 there were no foreign companies building cars on American soil, while in 1989 and 1990 the best selling American built car was the Honda Accord. In 1991 a Dodge Stealth was selected as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500 auto race, until it was discovered that most of the car was built outside of the United States. A public outcry prompted a change to a Dodge V10 Viper. The decline of the American auto industry has brought about a similar decline in Detroit; once the fourth largest city in America, it dropped to seventh as job prospects, dwindled in the 1980s. Unless American carmakers can accomplish the difficult task of regaining consumer confidence in their cars. Detroit`s decline seems likely to continue. In America, imports used to be purchased by people who either fancied "exotic" cars or who wanted one as a status symbol. Today, it is Henry Ford`s "average man" who buys a Japanese import - ordinary people in lean economic times trying to save money on repair and running costs and maintain trade in values. There has been a surge in new car designs and ideas emerging from Detroit in recent years as the city strives to return to producing not only the most cars, but also the best cars. Only time will tell if they will succeed. If they do not, the next Detroit will be a city in Japan or Germany. Regardless, the popular car will undoubtedly continue to be the transportation of choice in modern nations for decades to come. -------------------------------END-----------------------------------------