Iconic Ford Model T marks centennial as automaker struggles to survive

VANCOUVER — It’s hard not to find some wistful irony in Ford Motor Co. wrapping up a year of celebration marking the centennial of its iconic Model T while the company fights for its life.
While its financial situation is not thought to be as dire as that of General Motors, Ford likely will undergo radical restructuring and downsizing over the next year.

“Henry Ford pioneered the automobile; he mass-produced it. He put America on wheels. And here we are now the big manufacturers, particularly Ford and GM, fighting for their lives.”
That’s George Hoffman of Surrey, B.C., speaking inside the phone-booth-sized cabin of his Canadian-built, 1923 Model T closed coupe.
“I bought this 53 years ago,” says Hoffman, who joined a couple of other Model T collectors recently to show off their babies alongside Ford’s self-consciously hip 2009 Flex crossover wagon.
Ford built its fortune on the Model T and changed the world in the process.
Now it’s staking its future on the boxy Flex family hauler, along with sedans like the Fusion, the upcoming European-designed Fiesta subcompact and a new F-150 pickup truck still crucial to its profitability.
The Model T had an impact on society comparable to the advent of affordable personal computers in the 1980s. It changed everything.
Henry Ford, a self-taught engineer, had already produced a couple of low-volume cars when he conceived the Model T.
Before, cars mostly were expensive, high-maintenance toys for the rich. Ford created one that was relatively cheap and simple to build using a moving assembly line system he adapted from big Chicago slaughterhouses.
It was also easier for owners in largely rural North America to maintain and repair.
The first one went on sale Oct. 1, 1908, with the first Canadian-built model coming the following year from the Walkerville Wagon Works near Windsor, Ont., owned by Ford’s Canadian partner Gordon McGregor.
By the time production ended in May 1927, Ford had produced 15 million Model Ts, 475,000 of them in Canada. The total wasn’t eclipsed until 1972 by the Volkswagen Beetle, which in turn was bettered by the Toyota Corolla.
Hoffman says it’s estimated about 500,000 Model Ts still exist.
In an era when cars could cost $3,000 or more, the Model T initially sold for about $850 in Canada. Production improvements drove the price down to about $300. It made an automobile attainable to millions of people, including Ford’s own employees who were paid the unheard of wage of $5 a day.
That was for a stripped-down version. Ford helped spawn the automotive accessory sector by providing the bare minimum necessary for locomotion.
Hoffman’s Windsor-built coupe has about three dozen accessories, including the factory optional electric starter that wasn’t offered until 1919, coil springs, a vacuum-powered windshield wiper, lockable anti-theft steering wheel and a dash light for the car’s single gauge, an electric ammeter.
There’s no speedometer, though Hoffman has added an odometer mounted on the front wheel hub, and no fuel gauge. A dipstick is used to check how much gas is in the tank.
Turning over the Model T without the fancy starter follows a precise script: Set the hand throttle and spark advance levers mounted on the steering column, make sure the handbrake is on, then walk to the front of the car.
If it’s cold, pull the choke wire next to the radiator. Grab the hand-crank, taking care not to wrap your thumb around the handle.
“If you have your thumb around it and it backfires, it breaks your thumb,” says Hoffman. “It’ll come back around this way with an awful crack.”
Hoffman, who broke an elbow at 16 while cranking a Model T, adds you should keep your head up too, “because sometimes it’ll come around and crack you in the chin.”
There are plenty of stories of Model Ts with maladjusted handbrakes and sticky clutches flattening their owners as they cranked-started them, he says, or pinning them against the garage door.
“We had a case in the States a while ago where the fellow’s Model T ran away. We couldn’t find it. It actually was gone down the street.”
Assuming you survive, you clamber onto the Ford’s running board and into the driver’s seat. Open cars only had a door on the passenger side but Hoffman’s coupe has two doors. The driver must thread his feet past the upright handbrake on the left and wedge behind the huge wooden steering wheel.
There he’s confronted by three foot pedals: a clutch that counterintuitively you push in to go, a foot brake where the gas pedal is on a modern car and a pedal for reverse where the brake should be.
The clutch operates the Model T’s primitive two-speed automatic transmission, with speed controlled with the hand throttle and spark levers.
There were no brakes on the car’s big rubber-tired wooden wheels, just a band tightening on the transmission, which made its 70-kilometre-an-hour top speed a blessing. Hills were approached carefully.
“Going down a steep hill you would retard (the spark) and throttle back and it’ll hold back going down a hill quite nicely,” says Hoffman.