The big thing was that
the cheapest car sold for $600 and the most expensive for only $750, and
right there came the complete demonstration of what price meant. We sold
8,423 cars--nearly five times as many as in our biggest previous year.
Our banner week was that of May 15, 1908, when we assembled 311 cars in
six working days. It almost swamped our facilities. The foreman had a
tallyboard on which he chalked up each car as it was finished and turned
over to the testers. The tallyboard was hardly equal to the task. On one
day in the following June we assembled an even one hundred cars.
In the next year we departed from the programme that had been so
successful and I designed a big car--fifty horsepower, six
cylinder--that would burn up the roads. We continued making our small
cars, but the 1907 panic and the diversion to the more expensive model
cut down the sales to 6,398 cars.
We had been through an experimenting period of five years. The cars were
beginning to be sold in Europe. The business, as an automobile business
then went, was considered extraordinarily prosperous.
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