The Age of GM and the Brand — America's Golden Era

Last time, we watched Henry Ford lower the price of the automobile with the moving assembly line, turning the car into something for the masses. The Model T conquered the world by building one and the same black car, relentlessly cheap and in vast numbers. Yet as people’s lives grew a little more comfortable, a new question arose. Simply being affordable was no longer enough. The kind of car you drove began to say something about how you lived. In this installment, we trace the era in which the car became a ‘symbol of prosperity,’ centering on General Motors (GM) — which tried to answer that question head-on — and Alfred Sloan, who led the company for so long, looking at both the light and the shadow.

Not Cheapness, but the Wish to Choose — Sloan’s Idea

The strength of the Model T lay in its thoroughgoing simplicity. Color and shape were narrowed down to essentially one kind, and cost was driven relentlessly lower. In return, there was almost no pleasure of choice. It was here that GM saw a different road.

GM had originally been a sprawling patchwork that William Durant had assembled by buying up several manufacturers. Alfred Sloan (1875–1966), who became president in 1923, is said to have reshaped this miscellaneous collection into a single, disciplined enterprise. Though he came from an engineering background, he was above all a manager who watched organization and numbers. He is known for giving each brand freedom and responsibility while the head office bound the whole together — a system later called the divisional structure.

The question Sloan posed was a little different from Ford’s. Not how to build cheaply, but when do people come to want a new car? Wallets, tastes, and stages of life all differ from person to person. If so, then prepare cars to match those differences. This idea led on to the distinctive GM strategy we will see next.

Climbing the Staircase — The Full Line and the Model Change

When people speak of Sloan’s GM, the idea often quoted is ‘a car for every purse and purpose.’ From low-priced to high-priced, brands like Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac were arranged like a staircase, satisfying the full range of consumer wishes — this is what is called the full-line strategy.

What was clever was that this staircase was designed to be ‘climbed continuously.’ In youth you began with an affordable Chevrolet; as income grew, a Pontiac, then a Buick, and at last, as a mark of success, a Cadillac. A car’s brand became a signpost reflecting a person’s climb through life. Within a single company, customers advanced to the higher step with each replacement. In this way GM is said to have built a mechanism that raised its customers without letting them go.

Another pillar was the annual model change. GM remade its existing cars a little each year and sent out new model-year versions. Then last year’s car began to look somehow dated. Though it still ran perfectly well, you wanted to replace it. This technique of prompting replacement not by function but by appearance and fashion was later called ‘planned obsolescence,’ and it would attract both praise and criticism. While a brilliant device for generating endless demand, it has also drawn the question of whether making people feel that still-usable things are old is not a waste of resources.

And the quiet workhorse supporting this strategy was the mechanism of money. GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation), said to have been established in 1919, let customers buy cars on credit. A car out of reach as a lump sum became reachable as monthly payments. Installment selling invited far more people into the new-car market and made the staircase of replacement easier to climb. Yet a life of borrowing to buy can also become a burden when a household’s finances tilt — both sides of which the people of today will surely recognize.

The Dream of the Tailfin — American Car Culture, and After

When the Second World War ended, America met an unprecedented prosperity. Owning a house in the suburbs and parking a big car in its garage — that became the symbol of a comfortable life. And in the 1950s, American cars took on a distinctive shape. Glittering chrome, ample bodywork, and at the rear a wing-like form rising up: the tailfin.

The tailfin was a design of the future, evoking jet planes and rockets. It had almost no practical meaning; it was simply a shape for selling dreams. Yet that is precisely what tells the story of the American car culture of the time. The car was no longer a mere tool for getting around but a product carrying the joy of ownership and the very mood of an ascendant age. Culture too — movies and music, the drive-in theater and the highway journey — grew up alongside these big cars. GM stood at the center, its revenue reported to have reached roughly 12.4 billion dollars in 1955, reigning as one of the largest manufacturers in the world.

But the summit brought questions with it. Large, heavy cars that drank fuel would soon be asked about another price. What about safety? What about exhaust? And how long would oil remain cheap to obtain? Beneath the feet of a golden era that competed in luxury, problems that would shake later ages were quietly putting out shoots. The time when they would burst forth was still a little ahead.

In any case, the mechanism GM perfected — ‘let them choose, make them replace’ — put down deep roots in carmaking around the world. Ford pressing forward on cheapness, GM answering desire: America fixed its place as an automotive superpower by setting two different ideas in competition. Yet the philosophy surrounding the car was not only this. Across the ocean, in Europe, another kind of carmaking was about to begin — from an idea utterly unlike the symbol of prosperity.