Sears Motor Buggy (1910 ish)

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Sears Motor Buggy (1910 ish)

You can read about them here. They were made by Lincoln Car Works for Sears to sell from catalogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Motor_Car_Works

They had to compete against cars from Ford that were much faster, up to 45 mph for the Ford Model T, compared to only 25 mph for this Sears model.

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That’s about $14,000 today. Seems really fair for the limited production at that time.

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OP

Yeah that’s what I got too with an inflation calculator.

The Ford Model T started out more expensive than the Sears, at $780 in 1910, but Ford used mass production to drive the price down to $290 by the 1920’s, a mere $5500 today.

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Base inflationary calculations kind of miss the real difference in attaining X thing for Y cost in Z year though.

$395 in 1910, when the average person made around 25¢ an hour, would have taken 1,580 hours of work for the average person to buy. Or roughly 40 (40 hour) weeks of work.

Today, the median non-farm worker makes about $50,000 per year or $26 an hour. The equivalent of working the same number of hours at $26 an hour is just over $41,000.

As you can see, $41,000 is a far cry from $14,000. The number honestly makes more sense considering that the median cost of a new vehicle right now is $49,000.

Inflation calculations really fail to capture the actual power of money in relative terms, even though on a technical basis they are “correct”

For the average person to buy an average priced car today requires an additional 300 hours of work more than it took back in 1910 for someone to be able to buy the car in this post. Inflation obscures that reality by making it look like it should take 1/3rd of the time, since its only “$14,000” today. But everyone knows that is not true just based on personal experience. Its certainly not that easy to buy a new vehicle

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We should have stuck with horses.

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I remember reading about the crazy tons of horseshit that was being dumped in big cities and it changed my mind on sticking with horses.

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OP

Ditto. I’ve heard it was a huge problem for health, sanitation, and just the pure stink of it all! Example…

In late nineteenth century, New York contained somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 horses. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses, from fancy carriages pulled by the finest breeds, to cabs and horse trolleys and countless carts, drays, and wains…

Each horse produced up to 30 pounds of manure per day and a quart of urine. All of this ended up in stables or along the streets. That added up to millions of pounds each day and over 100,000 tons per year (not to mention around 10 million gallons of urine).

By the end of the 19th century, vacant lots around New York City housed manure piles that reached 40 or 60 feet high. It was estimated that in a few decades, every street would have manure piled up to third story levels.

Streets covered by horse manure attracted huge numbers of flies. One estimate claimed that horse manure was the daily hatching ground for three billion disease spreading flies in the United States.

It goes on about the problems of all the horses that were dying in the streets and their carcasses abandoned.

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Still not as big of an environmental problem as cars. Horse diapers and manure roombas would solve it.

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You ever take a ride on one? It’s more of a toy than a vehicle. Like you’re not crossing any organ trail with a model T like people were with a horse and carriage.

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An organ trail is quite a mental image

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Lol whoops, makes the comment pretty comedic though.

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Going 70 km/h “in” a model T sounds absolutely terrifying.

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Well that’s one way to get on the organ road.

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Im glad they specified that it can do all the speeds in between 1 and 25, I was thinking maybe it would instantaneously accelerate from 10 to 15.

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“Timken Roller Bearing Axles”? There’s a company here in the midwest US called Timken, they make belts for vehicle engines and other applications. This stood out to me, because Timken closed their plant here recently after about 40 years of operation. So, uh, thanks for surviving all these years, Timken? Mixed feelings.

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OP

Wild! Founded in 1899, and they specialize in roller bearings, so probably the same company from the ad. They split into two companies in 2014 according to wiki, and then there were mergers and stuff, so it’s a little jumbled. But they still do bearings for modern vehicles.

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25mph in this sound ludicrous.

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Making an electric replica of this sounds really intriguing.

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There were quite a few electric cars around back then. Making one of those would be a lot easier, I think. Getting an original is probably a bit out of most people’s price class though:

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1910-baker-electric/

In 1900, the majority of cars sold were electric, but thats mostly because all cars were really just expensive toys for the rich. Once they became actual transport, petroleum and gasoline started to win hands down over the battery tech from back then.

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We had in mind a maximum speed that was reasonable and fast as anybody should ride; namely, 25 miles per hour.

Imagine people today, tooling around at 25 MPH, which is much faster than people can walk or run, but not dangerous. We wouldn’t have built so much sprawl. Far, far fewer traffic fatalities and injuries. Far less gas burned.

Impatience and greed destroy us.

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When the first cars started selling, they were really just toys for the rich. Several places required a flagman to signal they were coming, so a guy had to walk in front of it all the time when in a town or city.

Also, going 40km/h in this (using a very generous definition of the word “in") on 1900s roads sounds absolutely terrifying.

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