Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Chevrolet, like Durant, could never keep still. In 1905 he was hired by Fiat as a racing driver, and a year later was approached by a wide range of car makers who were keen to prove their new products on the racetrack. Among them was Billy Durant, and Chevrolet was soon racing for Buick. At the same time, Chevrolet started designing his own engine. Highly impressed by his industry, Durant backed him to found the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in 1911, employing a stylized version of the Swiss cross as its corporate logo. The firm’s big, luxurious Classic 6 was a great success, and even Louis Chevrolet himself was pressed into helping market the model, inviting journalists to place a pencil tip against the car’s bonnet while he revved the engine – the stationary pencil demonstrating the smoothness of the new engine.

  Chevrolet and Durant were completely dissimilar characters, both physically and temperamentally, and it was no surprise to most observers when they fell out. Durant used the runaway success of Chevrolet’s cars to buy up GM stock and, ultimately, to buy his way back to overall control of General Motors in 1915 – buying out shareholders who were disgruntled with their stock’s lacklustre performance in the hands of the conservative, steady-as-she-goes bankers who had run GM since 1910. But he did this without Louis Chevrolet. Chevrolet returned to France in the summer of 1913 and in his absence Durant moved the production of Chevrolet cars from Detroit to Flint. When Chevrolet returned he was furious. Relations deteriorated even further when Durant suggested that the chain-smoking Chevrolet replace his beloved Gauloises with cigars, the image of which was so much more stereotypically American. The two also quarrelled over the design and marketing of Chevrolet’s automobiles: the self-educated, rough-hewn Chevrolet wanted his name to be used for a big, meaty car with a powerful engine, while the smooth, fast-talking Durant merely wanted to build cars cheaply and quickly. By the end of 1913 Chevrolet had resigned from the company that bore his name; and by 1915, the year in which Durant returned in triumph to the summit of the conglomerate, he had sold Durant all his shares in GM – stock that, had he held on to it, would have been worth many millions of dollars by the time of his death in 1941. In 1917 Durant quietly folded the business into General Motors, making Chevrolet the largest division of the corporation, producing the kind of affordable, everyday cars that Louis Chevrolet, ever the romantic racing driver, loathed.

  Chevrolet himself, meanwhile, had reverted to his first automotive love and started building racing cars. In 1916 he and his younger brother, Gaston, started the Frontenac Motor Corporation, whose products frequently competed in the Indianapolis 500 race, with modest success. Sadly, though, success in business always eluded the impatient racer. Gaston died in a racetrack accident in 1921, and the brothers’ company was declared bankrupt in 1924. After this failure, Louis ventured into boat and aircraft building, again with little success. By the early 1930s he was penniless and he and his wife were eking out a living in a small Florida apartment. Embarrassed by his plight – and aware of the public relations disaster that would ensue if the media were to rediscover the man who had lent his name to GM’s most profitable division – General Motors agreed to provide Chevrolet with a small pension in 1934. Seven years later, he died after a botched leg operation. Louis Chevrolet was buried not in his native Switzerland, nor in France, nor even in Detroit, but in Indianapolis, where his happiest moments had been spent at the wheel of a racing car.

  Ransom Eli Olds was yet another pioneer American car maker who, like Benz, Daimler and Chevrolet, found himself sidelined in the industry’s rapid dash for growth. In 1892 Olds was selling gasoline engines to customers in America and Britain, and a year later tested a buggy powered by one of these engines on the streets of his native Lansing, Michigan. Olds so impressed local lumber and copper magnate Samuel L. Smith that the latter eagerly invested in his new Olds Motor Vehicle Company.1 Initially, Olds met with little success, and all seemed lost when his Detroit factory burned to the ground in 1901. However, the single car that Olds had managed to save from the flames – a little 4 hp vehicle with a curved dashboard – was put into production in 1902 and proved an immediate hit. Orders topped one thousand when test-driver Roy Chapin drove the car across Canada to Detroit and then on to New York.2 Olds, however, soon found himself almost as temperamentally unsuited for the world of big business as Louis Chevrolet. Disagreements with Smith and his son culminated in Olds’s sacking in 1904. Ironically, the following year the company finally adopted the colloquial name for the Olds cars and began officially calling them Oldsmobiles – a brand that, with the help of Smiths’ financial backing, became one of the constituents of Durant’s General Motors in 1908. The Oldsmobile name survived for almost a century before being axed by its parent company in 2004.

  Alone once more, Olds had founded his own automobile manufacturer, named REO after his own initials, in 1905. REO’s stylish and innovative cars won many admirers, but Olds found himself elbowed out yet again; removed as general manager in 1923, he remained only as nominal president of his eponymous firm. Unlike Chevrolet, Olds at least ensured that his enforced retirement was not a penurious one. He turned to architectural patronage, financing the Olds Tower in Lansing, the tallest building in Michigan’s state capital;1 and adding to his mansion on Lansing’s South Washington Avenue, where one of his many domestic innovations was to design a garage turntable that allowed him to drive his car in at night and leave again the next morning without having to engage reverse gear. Four years after his death in 1950, the struggling REO company was declared bankrupt; and in 1972, with a flagrant disregard for America’s architectural and industrial heritage that was so typical of the times, Olds’s fine Lansing mansion was demolished to make way for Interstate 496 – a highway which, in a hideous irony, was named after Ransom Olds himself.

  Durant, meanwhile, continued his rollercoaster ride. On 16 September 1915, having engineered Chevrolet’s reverse takeover of the much larger GM, he returned to the top job at General Motors, jubilantly informing a shaken James Storrow: ‘I’m in control of General Motors today.’ Storrow and Nash were soon persuaded to resign. (Charles Nash went on to found the Nash Motor Company, which by the 1920s had become a successful niche car maker.2) Over the next few years Durant installed Ford-style assembly lines at GM’s plants and saw the combine produce its millionth car (an Oldsmobile). Meanwhile he continued buying companies, among them Delco electronics; the Guardian Frigerator Company, whose electric icebox Durant memorably christened the Frigidaire; Fisher car bodies; and the ball-bearing manufacturer Hyatt, whose president, Alfred P. Sloan, now found himself on the GM board. In June 1919 work was begun on a new GM corporate headquarters in Detroit, designed by the car makers’ Palladio, Albert Kahn. However, Durant was soon to be faced with an obstacle far more implacable than Storrow or Nash, and was about to get his final comeuppance.

  Across the Atlantic, in Britain, the success of Ford and Durant in the years before the First World War encouraged other automotive enthusiasts to try their hand at car making. Not all of them, however, proved as successful as the lions of Detroit.

  Of the early British auto pioneers, London-born Frederick Lanchester initially seemed to be the man most likely to succeed. The son of an architect, Lanchester began work as a humble draughtsman’s assistant in Birmingham in 1887. Soon he had risen to become assistant manager of the local gas works. However, while on a visit to Paris in 1889 he caught the automotive bug. From 1895 he began experimenting with his own car designs, introducing pneumatic tyres, water-cooling, overhead valves and, in 1903, disc brakes.

  Lanchester’s cars were a cut above those of his competitors: they rode smoothly, were well built, and as a result were far more reliable than most vehicles currently on the roads. They were also unusually spacious; Lanchester (like Alec Issigonis forty years later) sought to concentrate the engine as far forward as possible in order to create as much internal space as he could for the car’s occupants. But Lanchester, like Chevrolet, was no businessman. His first car company went bankrupt
in 1905, just as he was introducing his superb 20 hp model. Lanchester, however, a good-humoured man with a fine singing voice and an excellent reputation as a public speaker, never seemed to let such setbacks affect him. He first became a consultant for Daimler and then restarted the Lanchester business. Sadly, in 1913 he was forced to resign – just as Benz, Daimler and Olds had been – by his impatient fellow directors. After 1913 he turned his attention to producing aircraft engines during the First World War and to developing radio, and he acted as a consultant to Coventry’s car makers.

  Where the impeccably middle-class Lanchester failed with his luxury models, farmer’s son Herbert Austin succeeded with his everyday runabouts. Working as an engineer in Australia in his twenties, Austin met the Dublin emigrant turned sheep-shearer Frederick Wolseley, who had patented new sheep-shearing machinery in Victoria in 1876, and in 1889 had brought his Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine Company (WSSMC) back to Birmingham. Wolseley invited Austin to manage the WSSMC works, which he did very successfully, centralizing production and replacing antiquated machines. Indeed, Austin so impressed the WSSMC directors that, after he had seen his first cars in Paris in 1893, they agreed to his proposal to invest in this new mode of transport. Two years later Austin’s first car was born: a three-wheeled, 2 hp Wolseley model, which was one of the first British-designed automobiles to run on British roads. A year later WSSMC, in collaboration with the Daimler syndicate, invested in a new car plant; and in 1900 the third Wolseley car, the Voiturette, won the first public motor trial – a gruelling 100 mile ride along bumpy roads and tracks, organized by the Auto Club of Great Britain. Nevertheless, Wolseley’s directors saw the car as merely a bit of fun and soon refused to invest any more of their money in Austin’s ‘hobby’. Austin, however, quickly found another, more visionary backer: the armaments tycoon Sir Hiram Maxim funded Austin’s break from WSSMC and, in 1905 (together with the Midland Bank and, curiously, the German steel giant Krupp), financed an Austin factory seven miles south of Birmingham, on the site of a derelict print works at Longbridge.

  Austin was criticized for his new factory’s remote location, but he argued that at Longbridge there was lots of room for expansion, unlike at the cramped car shops of Birmingham and Coventry, and that the absence of urban air pollution would assist in the application of paint and varnish. The space Austin enjoyed at Longbridge also, crucially, enabled him to add an on-site body shop, whereas the majority of his rivals had their car bodies made elsewhere. And here Sir Herbert (he was knighted for his services to the war effort in 1917) was the absolute ruler, sincerely believing that his interests would always be the same as those of his workforce – who would, he assumed, value engineering more than equality.

  While Austin was making a name for himself as the builder of small family cars in Birmingham, fifty miles away, on the other side of the Midlands, the unlikely partnership of Rolls and Royce was succeeding, where Frederick Lanchester had stumbled, in establishing a British luxury car business to rival those of Benz and Cadillac.

  F. H. Royce was a miller’s son from Cambridgeshire who had only had three years’ schooling when, on the death of his father in a London poorhouse, he was forced to seek work – which he found first as a newspaper boy for W. H. Smith and then (aged only twelve) as a telegram delivery boy for the Post Office. A kindly aunt financed an apprenticeship at the Great Northern Railway (GNR) works at Peterborough, but Royce had to leave the GNR when his aunt’s money ran out. Instead he joined a machine-tool firm in London and attended evening classes at Finsbury Polytechnic. Moving to Liverpool to work on theatrical lighting, his newly invented electric dynamo came to the attention of the automotive world, including a would-be aristocratic entrepreneur, the Hon. C. S. Rolls.

  Charles Rolls’s background was as far removed from Royce’s as could be imagined. He was the third son of Lord Llangattock, a wealthy Welsh landowner whose family seat was near Monmouth, while his mother was the daughter of a rich Scottish baronet. Rolls was a tall, confident man – he stood at 6 foot 5 inches – who was always impeccably dressed and was a natural salesman.1 From Eton – a school he detested, and where his developing interest in engineering earned him the nickname ‘Dirty Rolls’ – he scraped into Trinity College, Cambridge, via a crammer school. At Cambridge he was more interested in cars and bicycles than in his degree course in Mechanical and Applied Science, and won a half-blue in cycling. In 1896, at the age of eighteen, Rolls brought a Peugeot Phaeton back to Cambridge, the first car the ancient city had ever seen. He joined the Self-Propelled Traffic Association, became a founder member of the Automobile Club, and built an engineering workshop in his parents’ garden. On his graduation, Rolls shocked his family by getting a job at the London and North Western Railway workshops at Crewe, albeit in a rather more elevated position than Royce had been able to find with the GNR at Peterborough. In 1903, with the help of £6,600 provided by his father, he started one of Britain’s first car dealerships, at Fulham, in west London, where he sold imported Peugeots from France and Minervas from Belgium.

  Rolls and Royce’s historic meeting, at the splendid Midland Hotel in Manchester on 4 May 1904, was facilitated by a mutual friend at the Automobile Club. Rolls could see the potential in Royce’s new two-cylinder car and agreed to sell all the cars Royce could make. The two were like chalk and cheese: Rolls urbane, unruffled and sociable; Royce coarse, reticent and obsessed with engineering. (Royce would no doubt have been pleased that his statue in Derby is merely inscribed ‘Henry Royce, mechanic’.) But the partnership worked.

  The first Rolls-Royce car, the 10 hp, was unveiled in Paris in December 1904; and in 1906 Rolls and Royce formalized their partnership by creating Rolls-Royce Ltd, with Rolls providing the financial backing and salesmanship to complement Royce’s engineering expertise. Their first cars were built on the principles of lightness, speed and quality. Royce, like Lanchester, was shocked by how poorly built most contemporary automobiles were, and was determined that his vehicles would be made to last. Rolls, meanwhile, put much effort into publicizing the quietness and smoothness of Royce’s superb cars, and at the end of 1906 he travelled to the US to promote the new automobiles, unlocking a market that was to sustain the firm ever after. By 1907 the company was winning numerous awards for the quality and reliability of its cars, and in 1908 it was able to afford to begin production at its new factory in Derby, bought after Derby City Council, seeking to lure embryonic car makers away from Coventry, offered the partners all the cheap electricity they needed.

  By 1909 Rolls’s personal interest in the car business was waning, having been superseded by his fascination with the new fad of flying. On 2 June 1910 he became the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel by air in his Wright flyer, for which achievement he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Aero Club and memorialized with imposing statues in both Monmouth and Dover. But it was flying that was to cut Rolls’s glittering career tragically short. On 12 July 1910, at the age of just thirty-two, he was killed in an air crash at Bournemouth when the tail of his Wright biplane broke off.

  After Rolls’s death, Royce, a workaholic who made himself ill with overwork, became increasingly unwell and was advised to spend most of his time at West Wittering in Sussex, on the warm south coast of England, or in southern France. As a result, Rolls-Royce was effectively run by its canny business director, Claude Johnson, a publicity-conscious enthusiast and former museum curator who, as secretary, essentially ran Britain’s Automobile Club. By 1914 Johnson was nicknamed (behind his back) ‘the hyphen in Rolls-Royce’.

  After the Model T, perhaps the most famous car in the world in the years in the years before the First World War was the Rolls-Royce 40/50, first introduced in 1906 and later named the Silver Ghost. This legendary car, as motor historian Jonathan Wood has noted, ‘more than justified the firm’s claim that it was “the Best Six Cylinder Car in the World”’. The Silver Ghost was emphatically Claude Johnson’s creation. Royce tended to lose intere
st once he had created a car design and always wanted to move on to the next challenge. It was Johnson who produced and marketed the Silver Ghost; in Johnson’s hands it was – in sharp contrast to Ford’s products – promoted as an unambiguously premium product, retailing at prices up to £2,500 at a time when Ford’s new Model N was available for £125. Reassuringly, customers considered the high price quite justified, and the success of the Silver Ghost help to make Rolls-Royce a byword for build, resilience and longevity.

  Rolls-Royce’s reputation for fine luxury cars was cemented by the First World War. As early as 20 August 1914, only sixteen days after Britain had declared war on Germany and Austria, Claude Johnson arranged for twenty-five Silver Ghost owners to cross by ferry with their cars to Le Havre and drive to Picardy, where they were soon chauffeuring the generals of Sir John French’s British Expeditionary Force. Silver Ghosts were also provided with basic armour plating to protect key airfields for the Royal Naval Air Service. As a result, when the first Royal Naval Armoured Car Division was formed in September 1914, it used adapted Silver Ghosts fitted with armour and a turret, the car’s resilient chassis happily taking the extra weight. Quiet, reliable and well built, and capable of up to 63 mph, the Silver Ghost served as the ultimate British staff car and was selected to carry King’s Messengers around the Western Front. Most famously, T. E. Lawrence immortalized the Silver Ghost during his ‘Revolt in the Desert’ of 1917–8. Writing about the campaign after the event in his classic account The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence of Arabia’s tales of driving militarily adapted Silver Ghosts through the desert at over 60 mph did wonders for Rolls-Royce’s international image. The cars were ‘more valuable than rubies’, Lawrence enthused; ‘we knew it was nearly impossible to break a Rolls-Royce’. When, after the publication of the Seven Pillars, Lawrence was asked by a journalist what in life he most valued, he replied: ‘I should like my own Rolls-Royce car with enough tyres and petrol to last me all my life.’ You couldn’t buy that sort of publicity. And Lawrence’s encomiums helped to ensure that the Silver Ghost survived the vicissitudes of the postwar years as one of the world’s most prestigious cars. The last Silver Ghost rolled out of the Derby works in 1925, two years before Henry Ford ceased production of the Model T. Together these two, vastly different, vehicles helped ensure that the motor car was definitely no passing fad.