History of Nash
A brief Pre-Met auto history
8/19/01
Biography of: CHARLES NASH
D.O.B.: January 28, 1864 (DeKalb, IL)
D.O.D.: June 6, 1948 (Beverly Hills, CA)
Location: Forest Lawn Glendale; Great Mausoleum;
Sanctuary of Courage
He headed Nash Motors and made it into one of America’s largest auto makers.
In 1897 he drove his first automobile. He then joined William Durant and David D. Buick in forming the Buick Motor Co. By 1908, Nash was Buick’s president and general manager.
The 52-year-old Nash bought the Kenosha company and incorporated it as the Nash Motor Co. in July 1916. His plan was to build a reliable, but simple car for the average working man.
He also pioneered buying cars through financing since most Americans couldn’t pay cash for a new automobile and dealers couldn’t afford to carry them on credit. He was once quoted as saying in 1930 “Before I’ll recognize a union, I’ll close the plant and throw the key in Lake Michigan.”
Well, he eventually had to recognize a union. With the changing times he could do nothing else.
AUTOMOBILES
The automobile was initially perfected in Germany and France toward the end of the nineteenth century by such men as Nicolaus Otto, Gottlieb Daimler, Carl Benz, and Emile Levassor.
The 1901 Mercedes deserves credit for being the first modern motorcar. Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it achieved a speed of fifty-three miles per hour. Nothing illustrates the superiority of European design better than the contrast between this first Mercedes model and Ransom E. Olds’s 1901-1906 one-cylinder, three horsepower, tiller-steered, curved-dash Oldsmobile. But the Olds sold for $650 and the 1904 Olds output of 5,508 units surpassed any car production previously accomplished.
J. Frank and Charles E. Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, designed the first successful American gasoline automobile in 1893. Thirty American manufacturers produced 2,500 motor vehicles in 1899, and some 485 companies entered the business in the next decade. In 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T and William C. Durant founded General Motors. In 1913, the United States produced some 485,000 of the world total of 606,124 motor vehicles.
Cycle and Automobile Trade Journal called the four-cylinder, fifteen-horsepower, $600 Ford Model N (1906-1907) “the very first instance of a low-cost motorcar driven by a gas engine having cylinders enough to give the shaft a turning impulse in each shaft turn, which is well built and offered in large numbers.”
The four-cylinder, twenty-horsepower Model T, first offered in October 1908, sold for $825. Its two-speed planetary transmission made it easy to drive, and features such as its detachable cylinder head made it easy to repair. Its high chassis was designed to clear the bumps in rural roads. The Model T runabout sold for $575 in 1912, withdrawn from production in 1927, its price had been reduced to $290 for the coupe and 15 million units had been sold.
The number of active automobile manufacturers dropped from 253 in 1908 to only 44 in 1929, with about 80 percent of the industry’s output accounted for by Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, formed from Maxwell in 1925 by Walter P. Chrysler. Most of the remaining independents were wiped out in the Great Depression, with Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, and Packard hanging on only to collapse in the post-World War II period.