Read the text and characterize the stages of automobile history Wheels of Change – The Car of the Future

At the dawn of the 20^thcentury, when the automobile was as fresh as the personal computer is today, innovation was the norm. New propulsion systems, fuel, designs, and means of manufacturing cars came about rapidly

over a few decades. The car was changing the world, and the building industry’s most famous figures were inventors and innovators like American Henry Ford, Henry Leland, and Charles Kettering.

It is a measure of success of these pioneers that the privately-owned automobile travelling on public highways is the primary transportation system in most industrialized nations. The automobile has had an enormous impact on where people live and work and how they conduct their daily lives, and the millions of cars sold worldwide each year reaffirm their role as a symbol of freedom and affluence (благосостояние).

But despite all the benifits (выгода) the Automotive Age brought with it pollution, traffic jams, oil dependence, and safety problems. Consumers and government regulators around the world are pushing the automotive industry toward a future of constant innovation in search of safer vehicles that emit fewer pollutants and rely on different sources of energy.

Heritage of Invention

By the most accepted dating, the automobile as we know is more than 110 years old. A pair of German engineers, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, who separately built primitive cars propelled by internal-combustion engines in the late 1880s. The two pioneers founded companies that later merged (сливать,объединять) into the Daimler-Benz company, maker of Mercedes-Benz cars. Germany and France were the early leaders in the development of this new invention. It was not until 1896 that the Duryea brothers built the first American cars in Massachusetts and Henry Ford drove his first creation, the so-called quadricycle near Detroit, Michigan. The United States auto industry traces its birth to that year.

Like Daimler and Benz, the Duryeas and Ford chose the spark-ignition, internal-combustion engine to propel their “horseless carriages”. There were competing alternatives, the most prominent of which were steam engines (the well-known and developed technology used in railroad locomotives and ships) and electric power. Steam engines required the driver to plan ahead, boiling water and building up pressure for at least an hour, often longer, before beginning the journey. Although they were successful developments, steam required a reputation for being dangerous, due to several explosions that were widely publicized by advocates of competing propulsion system.

Unlike the early internal-combustion car, electric vehicles did not require a strong upper torso to crank the engine over by hand, nor did they require smelly, flammable (легко-воспламеняющийся) fuel. So pioneering electric vehicles had strong backers (сторонник), particularly among women living in cities. The disadvantage was that electric cars could travel only a short distance before they needed recharging, due to the limitations of battery technology. In the first decade of the 20^thcentury, a single battery charge only could last about 130 km (about 80 miles).

In 1911 Charles Kettering made a compact electric motor. The technology quickly found its way into the 1912 Cadillac automobile, which featured the first self-starting engine. Within four years, most American drivers started their gasoline-fueled car engines with the push of a button or twist a switch.

An important exception was Ford’s famous Model T car. That was an important exception, since the Model T was putting America on wheels. Prior to the Model T’s introduction in 1908, cars were mostly playthings (игрушка) for the wealthy. Ford’s vision was to make the car affordable (доступный) to the average person. He made that possible not by cheapening the quality of his product, but by manufacturing it more efficiently through the use of assembly lines. The assembly line had been used in other industries for production of consumer goods (потребительскиетовары). But Ford perfected its use for so large and complex a machine as car.

Over the 15 years it was produced, the Model T’s price kept dropping as Ford found ways to reduce the costs (затраты) of building cars. The Model T became one of the biggest-selling cars of all time, and Ford’s assembly-line innovation spread throughout the world.