Simanaitis Says
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HAPPY 100TH AUTOMOTIVE NEWS!
IT WAS IN 1925 THAT AUTOMOTIVE DAILY NEWS published its first issues—in of all places, New York City. (“I go somewhere, I take a cab….”) Of course, we know it today as Detroit-based Automotive News, a definitive record of the American auto industry.
Here are tidbit gleaned from AN’s January 6, 2025, issue including a facsimile of the inaugural front page of A.D.N., as it was known, which came out August 27, 1925.
The Summer of 1925. The banner headline read “Price-Cutting War in Gasoline Spreads,” with subhead “Over-Production Blamed for Drastic Reductions.”
Drill, baby, drill.
At that time Tide Water Oil sold its gasoline for 17¢/gal. Before some wacko blames the Deep State for today’s national average of $3.138/gal., the CPI Inflation Calculator shows 17¢ in 1925 equates to—uncannily enough—$3.12 in 2025 dollars.
Car Prices. A.D.N. had news from the Moon Motor Car Company that it “Reduces Prices on Cars $50 to $250.” Again, another bit of possible misinformation for the X influencers: Did a $300 Moon now go for $250? Uh, no. The headline’s real meaning: Moon cut its prices by a range of $50-$250.
A 1925 Moon Model 6-40 Roadster. Image by Eastfrisian via Wikipedia.
Wikipedia describes, “The company had a venerable reputation among the buying public, as it was known for fully assembled, easily affordable mid-level cars using high-quality parts…. Moon Motor’s peak production year was 1925 when the company produced 10,271 vehicles and the prices ranged from $1,195 to $2,540 (equivalent to $44,129 in 2023).”
In today’s dollar, Moon’s prices were $21,927–$46,607. CarEdge notes, “The average price for a new car is $49,740 in January 2025. New car prices have remained near record highs since 2022.”
Or is that “since 1925.” When the CPI is included in one’s figuring, matters are uncanny again.
Fords in A.D.N. “New Ford Cars Combine ‘Eye’ and Service Appeal” reads another headline, “Closed Bodies Seen in Colors for First Time.” It’s also noted, “Special from A.D.N. Detroit Bureau.”
The year 1925 was an interesting one for Ford. Its Model T was introduced in 1908 and, amazingly enough, the last was produced in 1927 when it was replaced by the Model A. In 1925, Ford’s assembly lines were cranking out Tin Lizzies at a rate of 9000-10,000 cars a day. A base Model T was priced at $260 (CPI figure day: $4743).
Ford Model T 5-Passenger Touring Car. Image by Harry Shipler, Salt Lake City, April 11, 1910; see “Ford Model T Lore.”
In 1925 it was no longer Henry Ford’s “Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”
Henry Ford, the Person. “A New Ford Angle” A.D.N. wrote: “Henry Ford has just been eulogized from a new angle. This time it’s in connection with his interest in the advancement of aviation. J. Gainer, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, in Detroit a few weeks ago, said, “Thanks to Mr. Ford’s patriotism, America will be in the front rank of preparedness in event of another war.”
Hmm…. Mr. Ford’s extreme antisemitism was not recognized back then. More recently, PSB American Experience recounts, “In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled ‘The International Jew,’ and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers.”
PBS American Experience continues, “What Henry Ford says, people stop and listen.… There are people who talked about him as a potential presidential candidate in the 1920s. And Ford is just about the most popular American, certainly one of the wealthiest; here’s the person whose money and whose influence commands tremendous attention, spewing stuff that’s no different than what Hitler is saying in his beer hall meetings in Munich at the same time.”
I pause nostalgia here and wonder if Automotive News jumped the gun on its celebration because who knows what the United States will be by August 27, 2025. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
Simanaitis Says 
E. L. Cord made his name as Chicago’s top Moon salesman, festooning the cars with accessories and extra nickle trim costing little but allowing him to boost prices $300 per car. Cord next dressed up the Auburn factory’s languishing stock of 700 dowdy cars with pinstripes, fancy wheels, and by cutting top bows for a lower roof line, which led to his becoming Auburn’s president.
One of Henry Ford’s friends during his 1919-27 ownership of the Dearborn Independent, where in Sun Myung Moon Washington Times/ Fox “News” fashion Ford bannered his anti-Semitic lunacy, Detroit’s leading rabbi, Leo Franklin, bumped into Ford, who asked “Why don’t you come over to the house to visit anymore? This underscores Ford’s myopia, as does the distrust of the Jews he and fellow farm boy Thom Edison imagined running the East Coast banks. Edison wisely kept his mouth shut. Apparently, both had already forgotten J.P. Morgan, a WASP who’d cut your throat for a nickle.
Indeed. Let’s hope we don’t see more such idiocy by August 27th, 2025.
My favorite century old (century plus) automotive news item comes from a May 27, 1914 WSJ interview with Edison. Headline: Edison Electric Motor, Future Family Carriage. Subhead: All city, trucking and carriage shopping must come to electric.
Edison: “The machine has been simplified, every non-essential part eliminated. It will be simplicity itself so that it can be run by a child. The cost of the car will probably be between $500 and $700. Mr. Ford is working steadily on the details, and he knows his business so it will not be long. I believe that ultimately the electric motor will be used for trucking in all large cities, and that the electric automobile will be the family carriage of the future. All trucking must come to electricity.”
Well said .
The only reason we’re paying so much for gasoline ($5 / Gal. in California) is because the gop deregulated it .
-Nate
Our Phase Three Reformulated gasoline is cleaner in combustion (and more costly to refine).—ds
Far as our California gas goes, Dennis is right. But contrary to creaking belief, the GOP is now clearly bad for business, inc. gasoline, we producing more oil than at any time in history during Biden, more than any other nation on earth.
Meanwhile, people forget that while Ford was a production whiz, many of the features ascribed to him were from his chief engineer Childe Harold Wills (his mother liked Lord Byron’s poetry), who even designed the famed blue Ford oval, responsible for using vanadium steel, later building his own high-quality Wills St. Claire in the ’20s.
However, one of Ford’s better ideas, if not coming to fruition, included burning coal in the ground, piping in oxygen to aid combustion, saving both on railway shipping and preventing the ugly landscapes in so much of West Virginia, etc.
Ford intended his Model T and Fordson tractor, comprising half the vehicles on the globe’s roads and fields by 1920, to run on agwaste ethanol, but John D. Rockefeller controlled 85-90% of all bulk oil so with infrastructure well in place, prices as low as 12-17 cents a gallon, Ford went along with gas. Had Ford prevailed, Maxwell, GM, Hudson, Nash, Chalmers, Reo, Auburn, Apperson; the entire industry, might’ve gone ethanol.
Today, Brazil’s ethanol is entirely from agwaste. Making it from corn, as the US does, is waste of land, a net energy consumer, as even Al Gore concedes. The fungicides, herbicides, pesticides, synthetic fertilizer run off carried in the Mississippi created a dead zone the size of Pennsylvania in the Gulf of Mexi– oops, America, and is that silly name change really going to stick?
But if our ethanol from agwaste, we’d be better off. Engineers describe a given engine running, their word, “sweeter” on alcohol than gasoline.
Henry Ford said it was “folly to burn gasoline” and that petroleum should be used as lubricant.
Meanwhile, so much rubbish written about Ford, as with Duesenberg, Packard, Ferrari, Bugatti, Auburn, Rolls-Royce, et al. For example, the bit about Ford ordering shipping crates built just so, in order to knock them down and use them as floorboards for his cars. He did re-use the wood.
Despite Ford’s hideous antisemitism, he even contributing $40,000 to the Nazis to aid reprinting anti-Jewish pamphlets, later in the ’30s, another $300,000 to Hitler, nonetheless hired more black assembly workers than the rest of Detroit combined, though they were not allowed to be promoted for foreman.
Ford’s phenolic resin made from soybeans a terrific idea. You’ve seen the famous photo of him slamming the blunt end of an ax into one of his ’40 Fords trunk lid, it merely bouncing off.
Pardon ramble. It’s too wet and cold to garden or fool around in the garage.