Oct 9, 2008

Driving History Isn't Easy

As we celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the Ford Model T, one might fear that thefts of the vintage car would be on the rise. But more than one Model T owner has joked that he’s not too worried about somebody stealing his historic car. “If you don’t own one, you probably wouldn’t be able to drive one,” said Mike Skinner, a Model T owner and board member of the group restoring the car’s birthplace, the old Piquette Plant in Detroit.

He’s not kidding either. The simple car that started the automotive revolution globally doesn’t exactly have an intuitive human-machine interface, as you might describe such things today. For example, while the Model T does have three pedals on the floor, none of them is an accelerator. From left to right, they’re the clutch (for the two forward gears), a pedal for reverse gear and the brake. The accelerator that we find on the floor in today’s cars is, instead, a little lever on the right side of the steering column, where the turn signals are on a modern car. It’s right across from a similar left-side lever, which is the spark advance, something your current vehicle does for you automatically.

Speaking of automatically, how about cranking the car to start it? Today’s cars use an electric motor to start the gasoline engine, but when the Model T was introduced, that idea still hadn’t been perfected. So to start the car you must spin an actual crank that sticks out below the radiator. There’s a right way to do that and a wrong way, too. Crank it incorrectly -- with a thumb wrapped around the crank instead of under it -- and the crank can break that thumb or your forearm. Of course, if you haven’t set the long, floor-mounted hand brake to the left of the driver’s seat, the car can run over you as it’s cranked, so a sore thumb will be the least of your problems.

Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich., is offering daily demos on four special 1914 Model Ts. They were hand-built by Ford Motor Co., using old blueprints and methods plus new parts, for its 2003 centennial.

“It’s such an exact copy, it even leaks oil in the same place as an original one,” said operator and driving instructor Paul Labadie.