Thursday Trivia

Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars! This week’s question: What automotive record was set in 1916 that has never since been eclipsed? If you think you know the answer, eclipse the jump and see if you are correct. The best selling car in the U.S. last year was the Toyota Camry, which says a lot about America’s love affair with the automobile having long since passed. Globally, the fire is still glowing as the world’s top car in 2013 was Ford’s Focus, a model that even in lower-tier form remains a reasonably engaging driver. Both of these brands can crow about their sales leadership, an accolade that questionably contributes to selling even more cars, but still a nice feather in each’s cap. One sales record that Ford once achieved, and that neither it nor Toyota is ever likely to attain again, occurred back in 1916. From the Discovery Velocity Blog

In 1916, 55% of all cars were Ford Model T’s – not surprising since, with the help of the assembly line, it only took 93 minutes to finish a complete Model T.  The only paint color that would dry fast enough to keep up with the production speed of this model was black Japan enamel, hence Henry Ford’s famous declaration “the public can have any color it wants, so long as it’s black!

It’s perhaps hard to imagine now, what with cars and trucks ubiquitous across the globe and in an unfathomable diverse mix of makes and models, but at the time Ford’s Model T was not just popular, due to its innovative manufacturing techniques it was the only vehicle positioned to provide such volume production. Of course success breeds competition, just ask Apple Inc, and the T’s dominance over all other makes and models was short lived. Image source: Wikipedia