His Father Lost the Dealership to a Car That Cost 269 Dollars

His father had been selling cars for twenty years. Then one morning in October 1922, his son borrowed a secondhand Ford and drove east on US 40 to find out why everything was going wrong. The answer turned out to be the cheapest car ever mass-produced in America, and the man who had decided, deliberately and systematically, to make it cheaper every single year. This is the story of Avery Coles, a young man from Terre Haute, Indiana, and the 1922 Ford Model T Touring he drove forty miles east and back trying to understand a business decision that would close his father's dealership by 1924. It is also the story of what price does to a market, what a car costs versus what a car means, and why Ford's competitors kept selling better cars at higher prices while Ford kept selling the same car for less, to people who had never owned a car before. The Model T was not the fastest car on American roads in 1922. It was not the most refined. It produced twenty horsepower from a 177-cubic-inch four-cylinder and topped out at just under forty miles an hour. What it did, it did without complaint, without failure, and without asking the driver to know anything a farmer in Indiana already knew. Ford reduced its price seventeen times between 1909 and 1922, from 850 dollars to 269 dollars. Each reduction was calculated against factory efficiency gains. Each reduction opened the market to people who had never been in it. By the time Avery parked back in the alley behind his father's house that night, he understood something the ledgers at home had been saying for eighteen months. He sat in the car and did not go inside for a long time. Subscribe to Vintage Car Stories USA for new episodes every week. Every video is built around a real car, a real road, and a life that changed somewhere on the asphalt. If you drove a car that cost so little you stopped worrying about it, or if you remember what American roads looked like in the era of the Model T, tell us in the comments. #vintagecars #americanroads #vintagecarstoriesusa #goldenageamericancars #americancarhistory #retroamericanlife