alt-hist: a world without cars

[Rocket Man]

Originally Posted by ericthered

An excellent point. Tractors don't act like cars. Cars are about comfort, speed, user-friendliness, status, and paved roads. Tractors are about power, towing weird attachments, and muddy fields. They serious lack the speed to actually get from place to place, require more maintenance and know how, and generally aren't a way of displaying wealth.

I'm with you on all of it but the last point. When farming machinery is starting to replace animal- and human-drawn devices, having a tractor is indeed a status symbol. And even afterward, if you live in a farm region, the sort of tractor you have can indeed be a signal to your neighbors as well as a useful implement, and displays of newer, better ones at a county fair or the like will draw quite a bit of attention. (Yes, I lived in Kansas for almost 10 years, does it show?)

[Koshka]

What sort of changes would be needed to keep cars from being made on an assembly line? Shoving Henry Ford in the path of stampeding circus elephants won't do it, the concept predated him. If cars continue to be made by teams of skilled mechanics, they'll stay too expensive for Joe and Jane Average to buy.

A farmer would probably still be willing to shell out for one of those new steam-engine-powered plows, because as long as he keeps up on the maintenance it will last longer than an ox or horse team. And he can fuel the boiler with anything burnable he's got around the farm, such as corn stalks or wood from his windbreak trees or woodlot. (Probably not dried manure, though, that would be more useful as fertilizer.) But that's industrial usage, or a reasonable facsimile, and could be deducted as business expense on the tax return without the IRS raising an eyebrow.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Koshka

What sort of changes would be needed to keep cars from being made on an assembly line?

Assembly lines work for producing large quantities of things because they really are just assembling parts that they have in quantity. If some part has to be hand fabricated in order to meet required tolerances and a skilled workman can't hand fabricate more than three or four a day, it doesn't matter that your assembly line can be set up to produce a thousand cars a day. You've only got the parts to make three or four a day. (Well, you could make more if you have enough skilled workmen, but it is a bottleneck).

As to what part requires hand fabricating, I can't think of anything critical but IIRC, Buick used to spend a day hand-finishing a car with a half-dozen workers involved for each vehicle. If you were to use wood for the body and needed to steam bend pieces like the fenders that might work.

[RogerBW]

I'm reminded of the story recounted at the Swedish Air Force museum. They built the 40mm Bofors gun. The Americans liked it and bought a licence to manufacture. Then they read the instructions. "What do you mean, 'bend to fit'? We don't do 'bend to fit', we do 'stamp out a thousand in an hour'." And they ended up substantially redesigning it, and accepting some drop in its performance, so that it could be turned out in truly massive numbers.

[Johan Larson]

I seem to recall that until quite recently (the 80s?) cars arriving at the dealer from the factory often required some finish-work from the dealer. It was the Japanese that finally changed that.

Apparently the same could be said of rifles back in the 50s; they often required some work by a gunsmith or armorer (definitely a skilled worker) to function really well. Factories were geared for volume and their output could be a bit raw.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Johan Larson

I seem to recall that until quite recently (the 80s?) cars arriving at the dealer from the factory often required some finish-work from the dealer. It was the Japanese that finally changed that.

Apparently the same could be said of rifles back in the 50s; they often required some work by a gunsmith or armorer (definitely a skilled worker) to function really well. Factories were geared for volume and their output could be a bit raw.

There's two factors at play here - first was "running in", where a new engine has to be used gently at first whilst small imperfections in the fittings of parts wear down. These days engines are run-in on the bench prior to installation ... back in the day, it was the end user's job and very easy to get wrong. The other is simply shoddy quality control. I don't recall the days of the 500 mile service, but it's the sort of topic that it's best not to get my father started on... basically, if you brought a car from producers with poor quality control (like, for example, most of the pre-reform British motor industry), you tended to end up taking it back after about 500 miles or so (i.e. pretty much as soon as you'd finished running it in) so that the dealer could perform a whole heap of fixes that should have been dealt with before it left the factory.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

You could vastly reduce car usage by increasing regulation and taxation and avoiding the 1950s era decision to design cities for motor vehicles.
...
A combination of localised communities and good public transport could then account for most people's transport needs, leaving motor vehicles for local freight and the elite.

Assuming the intent is for cars to be uncommon rather than nonexistent, this is the way to go. I left out the bit about the World Wars because, while avoiding those would certainly help, I feel so much other technology would be impacted that it would be much less feasible to reach a point that looks just like today but without cars. Given, any solution is going to cause some butterfly-effect style ripples, but the above is going to be far less disruptive than removing the World Wars.