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| THE ASSEMBLING LINE IS COMPARED TO "A MODERN DANCE" |
| It's not when the works run at top speed that these men grumble, but when they shut down. |
"And you feel now," I asked, "that you have embodied in this car the very best that the whole world now knows about motor-car construction?"
"The whole world knows a lot" was his answer.
It was characteristic. For many weeks the new model had seemingly been completed; but in spite of performances which made his associates impatient to begin production, Mr. Ford himself held back.
It was not that any pet scheme of his had not been realized. The job he had set for himself was not to realize some pet scheme, but to make the best car that could be made; and if there was any factor which could still be improved, Henry Ford was all for waiting until the improvement could be incorporated.
Even now, altho the assembling line was in action and a number of cars were being turned out daily, I could not learn the exact date when mass production would begin. For each car built by machinery was now being tested as completely as the "experimental" cars had been; and after each test it was being taken to pieces and examined microscopically for any possible weakness that might develop anywhere.
Was Mr. Ford right in thus delaying production? Only history can tell. But when one understands his attitude toward life, the course appears clearly as the only course which Mr. Ford could take.
Workers were idle during this long delay, the automobile industry was suffering, and the buying power of the country generally was so curtailed that everybody was asking eagerly when Mr. Ford would start mass production again. And the Forbes Magazine writer continues:
To all this Mr. Ford has seemed indifferent, and I asked him to explain his apparent indifference.
"That wasn't the major question," he said. "They only thought it was. The big question was not when would we start production but what kind of production would we start. If we had started to produce something that could be produced better by others, it wouldn't have been done any good. And even if we had produced something better than our competitors, and it still wasn't the best that we could do, we would have found ourselves tumbling after a little—just as soon as they had caught up to us.
"If a car is to serve its purpose", he added, "it must be low-priced—not cheap, but low-priced. If it isn't, you can't sell a lot of them; and if you can't sell a lot of them, you can't manufacture them at lowest cost. In order to set the lowest possible price, you must have the greatest possible production; and in order to assure the the greatest possible production, you must set the lowest possible price. That's what capital is for; to enable you to set a price based not upon your actual first cost of production but upon what it will cost you to produce when you are producing all you can.
"Now, if we're going to produce cars as cheaply as we can, we've got to figure on producing them for more than one season. If we change models every few months, the public must pay for the change or else refuse to pay, which means that we must go out of business. Our job was to invent and produce a car which we could make and sell as cheaply as possible for a good many years to come. We did that with Model T, and we think we have done it again. If we haven't, it can be for only one reason—because somebody else succeeds in doing an even better job. So I can't see that the public has lost anything. The only way the public could lose would be through our not doing the best we could."
"Competition is the great teacher"—that is another of Mr. Ford's mottoes. The man who is in business merely for the dollars, he says, can't learn much from words; but if such a man comes up against a better philosophy in the shape of practical competition, he may learn something. As for Henry Ford himself, we are told, "he must do what he thinks best with his two-billion-dollar tool, not what somebody else
