Ford Model T Production

In October 1908, the Ford Motor Company introduced the Model T, a simple, sturdy car built to be affordable for ordinary working families. Over the next two decades it became the most influential automobile ever made, turning the car from a luxury for the wealthy into an everyday tool and reshaping how Americans lived, worked and traveled.

Henry Ford had founded his company in Detroit in 1903, at a time when hundreds of small firms were building expensive, hand-assembled cars. Ford believed the real market lay with farmers, clerks and factory workers. He wanted one standard model that was light, easy to repair and tough enough for the rutted dirt roads that covered most of rural America.

The Model T delivered on that idea. It used vanadium steel for strength, had a high body that cleared rough ground, and was simple enough for owners to fix with basic tools. It first sold for around 850 dollars. Demand quickly outran the company's ability to build it, which pushed Ford to rethink how cars were made.

In 1913, at its Highland Park plant, Ford introduced the moving assembly line, bringing the work to the worker instead of the other way around. The time needed to assemble a car fell from more than twelve hours to about an hour and a half. As output soared, prices dropped, eventually to under 300 dollars. In 1914 Ford also announced a five-dollar daily wage, roughly double the going rate, which reduced worker turnover and helped employees afford the cars they built.

By the time production ended in 1927, more than 15 million Model Ts had been sold. At its peak, about half the cars on American roads were Model Ts. The car's popularity fueled demand for paved highways, gas stations, roadside businesses and suburbs, and it gave rural families easy access to towns, markets and services for the first time.

The Model T's legacy reaches well beyond the automobile. The mass-production methods Ford refined spread to industries around the world and became known as Fordism, linking high-volume manufacturing with higher wages and mass consumption. Its success also showed the limits of a single unchanging product, as rivals like General Motors won customers in the 1920s by offering yearly styling changes and more choice.