{"id":5670,"date":"2015-04-28T06:58:19","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T20:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.privatefleet.com.au\/?p=5670"},"modified":"2020-06-20T01:08:38","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T15:08:38","slug":"how-world-war-1-changed-cars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/history\/how-world-war-1-changed-cars\/","title":{"rendered":"How World War 1 Changed Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, I hope everybody took a pause to \u201cremember them\u201d over the past weekend \u2013 ANZAC weekend.\u00a0 It\u2019s been 100 years since the disastrous landings in Gallipoli, and it\u2019s this sort of anniversary that gets people in a thoughtful mood.<\/p>\n

\"Renault<\/a>

Renault taxis take French troops to Marne.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s interesting to speculate on how cars would have been different if World War 1 had never happened.\u00a0 Cars had indeed been invented prior to the outbreak of war \u2013 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was riding in an open-top car when he was assassinated, triggering the whole stupid mess. But the war stimulated development of the automobile and accelerated progress.\u00a0 Heaps of car manufacturers managed to get off the ground because of their involvement in producing cars (and tanks and motorbikes and aeroplanes) for their respective sides.\u00a0 Renault started churning out war transport units, especially after heaps of Renault <\/a>taxis were commandeered to take French troops to the battle lines after Germany invaded.\u00a0 BMW <\/a>and Citroen <\/a>got started with serious auto production, although they turned to making cars after the war was over, as they had invested heavily in R&D and in manufacturing plants.<\/p>\n

A few other ways that World War 1 changed cars around the world include the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Mass production.\u00a0 The wartime demand for lots of identically made gear churned out really quickly opened people\u2019s eyes to the efficiency of assembly lines.\u00a0 According to one historian, WWI was a \u201cwar of production\u201d where the side who could crank out the most tanks, machine guns, aeroplanes, etc. had the edge.\u00a0 Ford <\/a>had begun pioneering assembly lines and time-and-motion efficiency measures before the US was dragged into the war; however, other car manufacturers quickly cottoned onto the idea. This meant that once the war was over, the technology was there and the factory lines were there, so they were used for making cars. And they still are.\n

  2. Social change led to more demand for cars. The war took heaps of guys off the farms and out of the factories and sent them around the world, giving them glimpses of the exotic. At the same time, it became respectable for middle-class women to stop sitting around being decorative and to work (who do you think was working on the assembly line when the men were fighting?). The new outlook on life and the desire to travel led to demand for cars (helped, no doubt, by advertising by the car manufacturers). Bicycles and the train, which had been the norm prior to the war, just didn\u2019t cut it any longer. \u00a0The old class system was dead and cars weren\u2019t just a luxury for the aristocracy and the wealthy.<\/li>\n
  3. Petrol and diesel became the fuels of choice.\u00a0 Prior to WW1, fossil fuels weren\u2019t the only way to go.\u00a0 Manufacturers were playing around with things like steam and electricity. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, electric cars were actually pretty popular because they were quiet. However, the advantages of gasoline over these other fuels became apparent during the war. The fact that the Allied forces (who had the new automotive technologies) had also managed to bag large chunks of the oil-rich Middle East that had been part of the Ottoman Empire might also have had something to do with this.<\/li>\n
  4. Petrol stations.\u00a0 As cars became more affordable (thanks to mass production) and more desirable (thanks to social change), fuelling stations had to be provided. All across the world, bowsers sprang up.\u00a0 Before that, people had to carry their own gas or imitate Bertha Benz and pick up a container or so of fuel from any shop that sold it.<\/li>\n
  5. Paying in instalments. Car manufacturers wanted to sell cars.\u00a0 People wanted to buy them.\u00a0 However, not everyone had the ready cash straight away to purchase a car outright. So car dealers started allowing people to pay in instalments. This was a way for makers of medium-priced cars to compete with the really cheap players like Ford (and later Volkswagen<\/a>).<\/li>\n
  6. Sealed roads. Cars wore roads down more than bicycles and carriages did (trains, obviously, stayed off the roads). This meant that as the car grew in popularity, more roads needed to be tarsealed to keep them in good condition.\u00a0 The history of roads would probably make another good post in itself, so I\u2019ll probably have to save that for another time.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Safe and happy driving,<\/p>\n

    Megan<\/p>\n

      http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/offers-credit-card\/ren-drive-365-credit-card.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well, I hope everybody took a pause to \u201cremember them\u201d over the past weekend \u2013 ANZAC weekend.\u00a0 It\u2019s been 100 years since the disastrous landings in Gallipoli, and it\u2019s this sort of anniversary that gets people in a thoughtful mood. It\u2019s interesting to speculate on how cars would have been different if World War 1 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[296],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5670"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11746,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670\/revisions\/11746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}