December 2
MODEL A DAY
Sales of Henry Ford’s fabulously successful Model T had slipped noticeably in 1926. Those who lived during the prosperous 1920s had had their fill of pure utility and were ready for a larger measure of comfort and beauty.
The Ford car simply had not kept up with America’s rising standard of living. And so, production of the Model T ceased at the end of May, 1927, a few days after the 15-millionth car had come off the assembly line. A new car would take its place.
The most extraordinary aspect of Henry Ford’s plunge into the future was that his old car expired before his new car had been born. No matter what vehicle he might come up with, no one knew how it would be powered because no plan for a new engine existed. Nevertheless, movement in the direction of a totally new car forged ahead. Ford’s basic concept was for a car that would deliver the speed, power and comfort suited to the improved roads and the quickened pace of life in that day. The body would be lower than the T, longer, wider, more pleasing in its proportions, available in a variety of models and an assortment of colors (the Model T had been available in black only). And it would be named after the first car made by Ford Motor Company back in 1903: the Model A.
To produce the new car, retooling on an unprecedented scale would be required. According to one historian, a changeover of this scope and urgency was, at the time, “unknown in American industrial history.”
During the months between the discontinuance of Model T and delivery of the first Model A, 400,000 orders had piled up for a car that not a single customer had seen.
The first Model A was unveiled on this day in 1927 in New York City’s Waldorf Hotel and in 35 other cities around the U.S., Canada and Europe. The car was priced affordably: the Phaeton sold for $395.00 and the Tudor Sedan for $495.00. The lag between cars available and orders on hand had mounted to 800,000 by the spring of 1928. Ford made almost two million Model A cars in 1929 alone. But Black Thursday came on October 24th of that year, ushering in the Great Depression, and from that time on it was downhill all the way. In 1931, sales dropped to 620,000 units. Production of Model A was shut down in August, and early the following year, the ‘new order’ took over in the form of the radically different Ford V-8.
By that time, a total of well over 20 million Fords had been manufactured, and almost 5 million of these had been the brilliant little Model As.
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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