Detroit

Detroit appears as the setting for a pivotal early chapter in American automobile manufacturing: in 1899, Ransom E. Olds opened the Olds Motor Works there, and the company’s experiments ultimately produced a low-cost car that reached a mass market. The city’s significance in the account lies in this convergence of entrepreneurial risk, technical variety, and an emerging market for automobiles.

The Olds Motor Works

Olds had been building cars since the mid-1880s, beginning with a three-wheeled steam-powered vehicle. After turning to gasoline-powered cars, he started a company in the early 1890s, but it failed and left him nearly destitute. He was able to establish the Olds Motor Works in Detroit only after persuading financier Samuel Smith to provide nearly all of its funding. The arrangement gave Olds a company, but also a superior whose expectations differed from his own: Smith favored large, expensive cars for wealthy buyers, while Olds was drawn to the possibility of a car affordable to the middle class.

That disagreement mattered because the American market was still tiny. In 1900, fewer than 15,000 cars were on the road. Olds nevertheless believed that the automobile might find a broad audience if it could be made cheaply enough. Rather than settle immediately on one design, he built eleven prototypes during the company’s first year, testing electric, steam, and internal-combustion power.

Fire and the surviving prototype

In March 1901, a fire destroyed the factory and nearly all of Olds’s prototypes. One vehicle escaped: it stood near the door and was light enough for the only man present to push to safety. By chance, it was the inexpensive model Olds had imagined selling to a much larger market. The fire abruptly ended the company’s experimentation and turned that surviving prototype into the basis for production.

The resulting car became known as the curved-dash Olds, named for its floor, which curved upward to form the dashboard. It was an ungainly horseless carriage, started with a crank beside the seat and steered by a tiller. It had two forward gears, one reverse, and a small single-cylinder engine. Its price, $600, was more important to its prospects than its style: the car was within reach of many Americans.

From Detroit to a national market

Olds paired engineering with publicity. He arranged for a young driver to travel eight hundred miles cross-country in an Olds on the way to the Manhattan Auto Show, drawing press and dealer attention while demonstrating to a skeptical public that an automobile could be more than a gimmick. He also drove a souped-up Olds in the first race at Daytona Beach.

The company sold 4,000 vehicles in 1903, more than any other American manufacturer, and 6,500 two years later. Olds’s achievement came amid fierce competition: hundreds of companies were trying to make cars, and there was no settled agreement about what a car should look like or which engine should power it. Electric vehicles had a substantial presence, and steam cars remained a serious contender; in 1905, the Stanley Steamer reached 127 miles per hour. The eventual dominance of gasoline power was not predetermined. The Olds story instead shows how a varied field of experiments, an accidental survival, and a car priced for ordinary buyers helped shape the market. The company founded in Detroit had produced what the account identifies as the first mass-produced automobile in American history.