“The modern car—a practical, marketable automobile for everyday use—was invented in 1886, when the German inventor Carl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Commercial cars became widely available during the 20th century. The 1901 Oldsmobile Curved Dash and the 1908 Ford Model T, both American cars, are widely considered the first mass-produced and mass-affordable cars, respectively.”
(First gasoline car at all was 1808 though)
So this was at most around 21 years after the Model T. For anyone much older than that, cars would have been rare at best when they were young.
Cars were really only for the ultra rich until Ford started making them in an assembly line. The world wide numbers are in the tens of thousands until the late twenties and early thirties when Ford got up into hundreds of thousands of cars per year.
Generally the first real car is credited to the machine Benz’s wife drove into town at one point. That had a differential on an axle and it was this addition that really made it into a complete machine that one could use. Still, Benz did not make many cars at all per year. It was in the thousands, but at this scale, these were only for the ultra rich.
Racy!
But seriously, seeing the older people made me realize that those guys wouldn’t have even had cars all over when they were growing up.
From Wikipedia:
“The modern car—a practical, marketable automobile for everyday use—was invented in 1886, when the German inventor Carl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Commercial cars became widely available during the 20th century. The 1901 Oldsmobile Curved Dash and the 1908 Ford Model T, both American cars, are widely considered the first mass-produced and mass-affordable cars, respectively.”
(First gasoline car at all was 1808 though)
So this was at most around 21 years after the Model T. For anyone much older than that, cars would have been rare at best when they were young.
Cars were really only for the ultra rich until Ford started making them in an assembly line. The world wide numbers are in the tens of thousands until the late twenties and early thirties when Ford got up into hundreds of thousands of cars per year.
Generally the first real car is credited to the machine Benz’s wife drove into town at one point. That had a differential on an axle and it was this addition that really made it into a complete machine that one could use. Still, Benz did not make many cars at all per year. It was in the thousands, but at this scale, these were only for the ultra rich.