Ford Model T

Ford Model T at a glance

Launch in 1908 and the first orders

The first production Model T was completed on 12 August 1908 at the Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit and left the works on 27 September 1908. Sales officially opened on 1 October. Ford had promised a strong, simple car at a low price, and buyers believed it: 15,000 orders arrived within two days of the release.

Demand soon outgrew Piquette Avenue. In 1910 production moved to the new Highland Park complex, and from 1911 the car was also assembled at Walkerville in Canada and at Trafford Park, Manchester. That made the Model T the first car built in several countries at the same time. After the First World War, assembly lines followed in Germany, Argentina, France, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Japan. German Wikipedia records that Ford's Berlin operation began assembling imported parts on 1 April 1926 with about 30 workers.

Engine and chassis

Under the five-sided early bonnet sat a four-cylinder side-valve engine of 2.9 litres, with a bore of 95.25 mm and a stroke of 101.6 mm. It produced 15 kW (20 hp) at only 1,800 rpm. Compression started at 4.5:1 and was later lowered to 4:1, so the engine ran on poor fuel; it would also burn kerosene or ethanol. After the first 2,447 cars, Ford dropped the water pump and cooled the engine by thermosiphon.

Ignition came from a magneto built into the flywheel, feeding trembler coils, so no starting battery was needed. Electric headlamps arrived in 1915, and an electric starter became available in 1919. Parts of the car used vanadium steel, and the front axle was drop-forged in one piece; for demonstrations Ford twisted such axles through 2,880 degrees without breaking them.

Suspension relied on transverse semi-elliptic leaf springs at both ends. The car had no brakes on the front wheels at all: a band in the transmission did the stopping, helped by a parking brake on the rear wheels. Wooden artillery wheels were used until steel-spoke wheels arrived for 1926–27. If you want to compare 15 kW with a modern engine, our power converter does the arithmetic in any unit.

How the Model T is driven

The Model T does not use a clutch pedal and gear lever in the modern way. Three floor pedals and a hand lever control everything. The left pedal selects low gear when pressed and high gear when released, with the hand lever holding neutral; the middle pedal engages reverse; the right pedal works the transmission brake.

Contemporary language called this a "three-speed" gearbox, counting reverse; in today's terms it has two forward speeds. Owners who needed more could buy a Ruckstell two-speed rear axle or one of more than 30 aftermarket auxiliary gearboxes. The videos below show how much practice the system takes for a driver used to modern cars.

The moving assembly line

The Model T is remembered above all for the way it was built. On 7 October 1913, Ford started a moving assembly line at Highland Park. Work was broken down into 84 separate tasks, and the time to assemble one chassis fell from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes. By 1914 a finished car rolled off the line every three minutes, and Ford built more cars that year than all other makers combined.

Output kept growing. In 1925 the factories built 9,000 to 10,000 cars a day, about two million a year. By 1918, half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts. When the ten-millionth car was built, half of all cars in the world were Fords.

Paint: "any colour so long as it is black"

Early cars were not all black. From 1908 to 1913 Ford offered grey, green and blue, with red reserved for the touring car, and in 1912 all cars were painted midnight blue with black wings. From 1914 to 1925 only black was available, matching Henry Ford's famous remark from 1909. The usual explanation is that black paint dried faster, but English Wikipedia notes there is no evidence for it; cheap carbon black and asphalt-based gilsonite paints, which only came in dark shades, are the more likely reasons. Ford used more than 30 different black paints during the run.

Prices year by year

The falling price was the point of the whole project. The table shows the runabout, the cheapest open model, in US dollars of each year.

These are list prices of the period, not today's money.

Body styles, Model TT and conversions

The same chassis carried a long list of bodies:

• Touring car: two-door at first, then three-door from 1912 and four-door for 1926–27.
• Roadster (runabout): from no doors in 1909 to two doors in 1926–27, with a pickup version from 1925.
• Closed cars: coupé (1909–1912 and 1917–1927), the coupelet (1915–1917), a two-door sedan with centre doors (1915–1923), the Tudor two-door sedan (1924–27) and the Fordor four-door sedan (1923–27).
• Others: a town car (1909–1918), a C-cab delivery wagon (1912), and a bare chassis for coachbuilders in every year.

Bonnet shapes help date a car: a five-sided bonnet and acetylene lamps to 1914, a louvred bonnet with electric lamps for 1915–16, the tapered "low hood" from 1917 and the "high hood" for 1926–27. The Model TT was a heavier truck version with a worm-gear rear axle, lower gearing and a stronger frame. Farmers also turned cars into tractors with conversion kits, and the American LaFrance company rebuilt more than 900 Model Ts as fire engines.

Racing and recognition

A heavily modified Model T, the "Montier Special" of Charles Montier, finished 14th in the first 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1923. In the 1999 Car of the Century vote, the Model T was ranked the most influential car of the 20th century, ahead of the Mini, the Citroën DS and the Volkswagen Beetle.

The end of production in 1927

On 26 May 1927, Henry Ford and his son Edsel drove the 15-millionth car off the Highland Park line, and Ford moved on to the Model A, which entered production that October. The last Model T was assembled in Cork, Ireland, in December 1927.

Ford's figure of 15 million is a milestone, not an audited sum: the per-year production table in English Wikipedia adds up to 14,689,525. About 170,000 replacement engines were built after car production stopped, and engine production finally ended on 4 August 1941. The company background is covered in our history of the Ford Motor Company.

Photo gallery