In the 18th century, experiments began with putting engines at the back of carriages instead of horses in front of them. The car was the answer to the dream of the ‘self-propelled carriage’. Today, the car is both taken for granted and questioned. It has brought us increased mobility as well as exhaust fumes, and has come to symbolize freedom and confidence as well as environmental threats.
Early engines were inefficient and emissions were high. Today, car manufacturers are investing in better engines, cleaner fuels and alternative designs.
Mass Production in the 20th Century
Mass production in the 20th century allowed cars to become the property of the middle class. “The ‘bubble’, actually called the Volkswagen Type 1, is the world’s most produced car, with 22,000,000 units produced.
The Early History of the Car
The history of the automobile begins with steam power. In 1769-1770, Frenchman Joseph Cugnot (1725-1804) built a steam-powered carriage for the French army. The carriage’s steering mechanism did not work well and in 1771 it crashed into a wall and was destroyed in the world’s first car accident.
Over the next fifty years, a number of different types of steam cars were constructed. However, they never became more than a technological parenthesis before the advent and expansion of railways.
The internal combustion engine, which is considerably lighter than the steam engine, opened up new possibilities for self-propelled wagons. The German Karl Benz (1844-1929) designed a motorized three-wheeled carriage in 1885. Bertha Benz, the inventor’s wife and business partner, became the first person to drive a car over a long distance in 1888, 106 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back the next day. With this drive, she demonstrated the potential of the car as a means of long-distance transportation.
Did you know that…
Ford employees visiting Chicago slaughterhouses in the 1920s were inspired by the ‘conveyor belt’ principle widely used in slaughterhouses, where animals’ bodies were moved while staff stood at their stations. The principle was then also used in car manufacturing and is still the best and most efficient way to build cars today.
The basic idea of the “assembly line” in car manufacturing, which usually concerns the last stage of the production chain, namely the final assembly of the car, is that the car is continuously moved slowly forward on an assembly line without stopping and is gradually assembled by specialized work groups with well-defined work steps.
The Competitions
The first international car race took place in 1894 in France. Today we would call it an endurance race, but back then it was mostly a durability test for the cars and a way to draw attention to the new, exciting machine. The race was organized by the newspaper Le Petit Journal, with 21 cars taking part and driving the 126-kilometre route between Paris and Rouen. The following year, the fastest car was driven between Paris and Bordeaux.
Sweden’s first car race took place in 1904, on the Stockholm-Uppsala-Stockholm route. However, the cars taking part were not allowed to drive faster than 30 kilometers per hour! Many of the early races took place on lakes and racetracks.
Mass Production
The American Henry Ford (1863-1947) is known as the man who ‘put the world on wheels’. He built his first car in 1898, and 10 years later the first T-Ford arrived. It went into production on an assembly line in 1913. More than 15 million T-Fords were produced between 1908 and 1927. This mass production was made possible by the so-called ‘fit bits’, a precision measure by the Swede C E Johansson, which meant that all parts of the T-Ford could be standardized and exchanged for an exact copy. Thanks to this mass production, it was no longer only wealthy people who could afford cars.
The Car Society
The post-war period was one of optimism. New technologies were developed and many innovations were born. Several innovations were introduced in the luxury models of car companies, and then became standard in cars for ordinary people. For example, air-conditioning was already available in 1939, and electrically operated seats and automatic window lifts arrived in the late 1940s.
During the 1950s, the number of cars on the road increased rapidly. While this development had led to faster cars, roads and traffic solutions had not developed at the same pace. Now the road network began to evolve to better suit mass motoring and minimize accident risks. With the expansion of the road network and the steady increase in the number of cars, social planners began to shift from adapting car use to the old society to building a car society along the lines of the United States. The car was now part of a gigantic technological system that included highways and car-friendly shopping malls with huge parking lots. To achieve the car society, Sweden’s cities also began to transform – city blocks were demolished, roads were widened, parking garages were built and the cities’ suburbs expanded further and further from the city centers. The result was a cultural and economic dependence on cars.