Pothole Prairie by Tim Engstrom

What is the most successful car of all time?

It all depends on the criteria we use to determine “most successful.”

If it is based on sales, the Toyota Corolla is the winner. In July 2013, it reached the 40 million mark. The car was launched in 1966 and surpassed the Volkswagen Beetle in the late 1990s.

The Beetle was made from 1938 to 2003, and there were 21.5 million units sold. And if we count the redesigned Beetle, the number is more like 23.5 million. The Ford Model T, manufactured from 1908 to 1927, sold 16.5 million.

Let’s not forget the Ford F-Series line of pickups. Made since 1948, Ford has sold an estimated 35 million of them.

What’s more, if the Volkswagen Golf is counted with its prior name of Rabbit, that car has sold somewhere like 27.5 million.

Ford sold about 20 million Escorts from 1968 to 2000.

The Chevrolet Impala has sold about 14 million units since being introduced as the Bel Air Impala in 1958.

The Volkswagen Passat debuted in 1973 and has sold 15.5 million. Honda introduced the Accord in 1976 and has sold 17.5 million of them. It came out with the Civic in 1973 and has moved 18.5 million of them since.

By the way, my numbers come from various automotive media sources on the Internet and for the most part are not including 2014 sales figures.

Sales are definitely a factor. Affordability is a factor, too, but that often leads to high sales. And context of its times matters, too.

Let’s look at the Corolla, for starters. It was an affordable Japanese import that invaded the United States in the 1970s and sold well when gas prices went up in that decade. People didn’t want to pay for gas hogs. It, along with the Honda and Datsun models, caught Detroit off guard. But today’s Corolla is not the model of the 1960s and 1970s. It just has the same name.

In fact, when looking at all these cars, the only two actual cars that stayed the same year to year and sold year after year were the Ford Model T and the Volkswagen Beetle. Sure, there were minor changes in those cars between the start year and the finish year, but most specifications remained alike. All the other cars morphed greatly. The 2013 Ford F-150 is far and away different than the 1948 Ford F-1.

I’d probably have to award the title of most successful car of all time to the Model T. It once dominated more than half the American car market alone and 57 percent of the worldwide market. Priced to sell at less than half of what a typical automobile cost, it introduced motoring to the middle class and democratized the mobility of Americans. It became easy to get from the farm to town or from one town to the next. Historians note that the Roaring 1920s culture stems, in part, from a society with greater mobility. Sure, if Henry Ford hadn’t built a car for the common people, someone else probably would have done it eventually. Still, no other single car in automotive history can claim to have altered the culture of a country to the extent the Ford Model T did.

It also was the first automobile mass produced on an assembly line, changing manufacturing early in the 20th century. The Model T is the manufactured good around which the eight-hour workday was established, as well as the livable wage that helped build America’s middle class.

The Tin Lizzie established the left-side steering wheel. Americans had been taking the right side of the road with wagons since the 1700s and the practice became common in every state by 1860. However, early cars had the wheel either on the left, center or right. After the Model T came out, the left-side wheel became standard. Fortunately the Model T’s clutch, brake and reverse pedals and its throttle on the column didn’t become standard.

The Model T was remarkably durable, and because everyone seemed to have one, it was easy to find parts, to customize, to share tools and to repair.

Of course, no hot rod captures the imagination of a boy more than a T-bucket. These are the hot rods with open engines and open wheels with a small seating area chopped from a Model T or a replica body with a shiny Model T radiator up front.

 

Tim Engstrom is the editor of the Albert Lea Tribune.