CHAPTER IV.
AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY AS AN INVESTMENT.
A dozen years ago dictionary publishers vied with one another to be the first to announce that new editions of their wordbooks contained the word “automobile.”
Today the automobile industry is the fourth in magnitude—only three others that are larger.
Is your imagination equal to the task of forming a vivid picture of the tremendous activity that has been maintained to produce such results in so short a time?
Do you know of any other industry in which money could have been at work in as great a creative capacity? We will not say in a capacity to produce immediate profits, because so far the automobile industry has been largely in the building, in the creative state.
In 1899 we produced 3,700 automobiles, in this country. In 1915 we produced 842,249 cars, and in 1916 the production reached the unexpected number of 1,617,708 cars.
The value of the production in 1899 was $4,750,000, or about $1,283 a car. In 1916 the value was $972,336,400, an average of a little over $601 a car.
In 1916, also, we produced 92,130 commercial vehicles, valued at $157,000,000.
And this is not all. A comprehensive survey of the automobile industry will include the industries that the automobile has created, as manufacturing tires and accessories, and not to forget the enlarged market for gasoline and oil. As the jokesmiths have it, “It isn’t the original cost, but the upkeep that counts.”
For illustration, in the matter of tires, C. H. Williams, of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, who is in a position to know, said that in 1916 the motorists of the United States took from their wheels and replaced some 9,000,000 tires, representing an expenditure in that year of about $300,000,000 for tires.
Any motorist can draw from his experience and compare the expense for tires with that for gasoline, and from these tire expense figures arrive at a reasonably accurate estimate of the tremendous amount of money that was used in 1916 in paying for gasoline to run automobiles.
By way of an interpolation, it may here be remarked that these tire figures show that there is one problem in the automobile industry that the engineers still have to solve, and that is to produce a wheel that will give satisfactory service without requiring a pneumatic rubber tire.