MASS PRODUCTION

The first car manufacturers built each car individually: each one was different. In 1894 Karl Benz’s company started building the first standardized model called the Benz Velo. The company built these for five years, producing more than 380 of them. Although the cars were all built to a standard design, they were still hand-built. Building cars by hand is slow and expensive, which meant that cars were luxury items that only the rich could afford.
That changed when the American industrialist Henry Ford introduced an improved assembly line. This allowed his workers to build a car chassis in just 93 minutes. The first mass-produced car that Ford produced was called the Model T, nicknamed the Tin Lizzie, because of the thin steel that its panels were made from. From 1908 to 1927 Ford built more than 15 million Model T cars. At the height of its production, the Ford factory produced a Model T every 24 seconds. Because they were built so efficiently, Ford could sell the cars for much lower prices. From then on cars were no longer just for rich people. Other car manufacturers copied Ford’s idea, first in the United States and Europe and then later in other parts of the world. Japan became the biggest manufacturer of cars in 1980. The number of people who could afford to buy a car increased massively, especially during the 1950s and 1960s.