Model T Abundance
From 1909 to 1922 the time price fell by 88 percent, from 5,000 hours to 591 hours.
According to the Detroit Historical Society, Henry Ford introduced the Model T—his “everyman’s car”—on October 1, 1908. Initially built by hand at the Piquette Avenue plant, production was slow, with only 11 cars assembled in the first month. Demand quickly outpaced the plant’s capacity, leading Ford to open a new, larger factory in Highland Park on January 1, 1910.
Ford’s new Highland Park assembly plant revolutionized automotive production with unprecedented efficiency. When operations began, assembling a Model T chassis took 12 hours and 8 minutes. By 1914, that time had dropped to just 93 minutes—a remarkable 87.2 percent reduction. In the time it once took to build a single Model T, Ford could now produce nearly eight.
In 1909 the Model T cost $850. Blue-collar hourly compensation was 17 cents an hour, putting the time price at 5,000 hours. By 1922 the price had dropped to only $260 but hourly wages had increased to 44 cents an hour, so the time price when down to 591 hours. The time price dropped by 88.2 percent, saving customers 4,409 hours. Put differently, for the time it took to earn the money to buy a single car in 1909, a worker in 1922 could afford 8.46 cars—reflecting a 746 percent increase in abundance.
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In May 1927, the Ford Motor Company ended production of the Model T after building more than 15 million units. In recognition of its profound impact on industry and society, the Model T was named the “Car of the Century” in 1999.
Henry Ford recounted his vision of the Model T in his 1922 book My Life and Work: "I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.”
Learn more about our infinitely bountiful planet at superabundance.com. We explain and give hundreds of examples why more people with freedom means much more resource abundances for everyone in our book, Superabundance, available at Amazon.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a board member at Human Progress.