US bids farewell to era of Model T

By Bernard Simon in Richmond, Indiana

Peter and Sally Kable, a retired couple from Kiama, New South Wales, are taking a typical US road trip this summer. Starting in California, they have travelled halfway across the country since early June, arriving this week in the sleepy farming centre of Richmond, Indiana.

What makes the Kables unusual is that they are driving a 1915 Model T Ford, which Mr Kable has fitted with an exact replica of an outdoor camper - including two comfortable beds - made by the St Louis brewer Anheuser-Busch during Prohibition in the 1920s.

The Australian couple are in Richmond with about 900 other Model T owners to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the car that, by common consent, changed the world.

By a twist of fate, the festivities coincide with arguably the biggest upheaval in the motor industry since Henry Ford put longdistance transport within reach of the middle class.

"The Model T was the icebreaker for industrial America," says Billy McGuire, an environmental science teacher from Richmond, Virginia, who owns six of them. Now, he adds, "we're at the precipice of another change like that".

Soaring fuel prices and rising concern about climate change have swept up the automotive industry in a race to devise cheaper and cleaner alternatives to the internal combustion engine. Success could bring about the biggest changes in mass transport since the Model T.

The Tin Lizzie had an enormous impact on modern society. Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University in Houston and author of a book on Ford, says that "psychologically, the Model T turned people outwards from cities", spawning highways, suburbs and shopping malls.

Thanks to the world's first moving assembly line, Ford brought down the price of a Model T from $850 in 1908 to $260 in 1925.

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