Industry-wide engine failures: the whys, at least some of them...

[mk11]

Yeah, faster horses, younger women, older whi-  oops, wrong quote 😜

[WillyBilly]

Regulations, and mandates kill everything. People who know nothing about a subject making decisions on said subject. Stupid people.

Edited 10 hours ago by WillyBilly

[maxwell48098]

 

A quote widely attributed (perhaps misattributed but still entirely on-point) to Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." 

 

And Henry decided in 1913 that his customers could have their vehicles in any color that they wanted, as long as it was black.  By 1926, Henry went back to offering a few other colors as customers took their business to brands that offered colors, in addition to black.

 

I had a finance professor when I was getting my MBA that worked at Ford in the late '50's.  Until then, Ford didn't have a corporate wide accounting system and let each business operate as its own little company.  Henry personally believed that as long as you had the money to pay the bills and taxes, everything was doing fine. When Ford put in a corporate level accounting system to oversee the financial activity of each unit, it was determined that the company would have gone bankrupt 4 times with the losses that some unit had which were covered by income from the other units.  As my mom would say," Sometimes it's just better not to know."

[Rodent]

2 hours ago, maxwell48098 said:

And Henry decided in 1913 that his customers could have their vehicles in any color that they wanted, as long as it was black. 

Maybe true, maybe not true, but I have always heard that the black paint they used dried faster than the other colors and Henry decided to make them black to move them along the line faster.

[Ace-Garageguy]

2 hours ago, Rodent said:

Maybe true, maybe not true, but I have always heard that the black paint they used dried faster than the other colors and Henry decided to make them black to move them along the line faster.

My understanding is that you're correct.

IIRC, from 1908 to 1913, Ford model Ts could be had in colors including red, green, and blue.

As demand and production increased, the paint technology of the time made black the quickest to get out the door.

As paint technology advanced, around 1926, colors that could also be put through quickly became available.