New Family Hours!

There was a very important similarity between the horse-drawn carriage and the motor-drawn carriage, which was noticed in pre-car times. One could love the carriage, admire it. And proudly ride in it in full view of all, past the foot mortals (and now - in a motorized carriage past the equestrians!), to look down on the owners of more modest, cheap carriages and envy the owners of more beautiful and expensive. So they began to attribute to the car, in addition to transport, also "prestigious" functions. In other words, a peculiar automobile "fashion" has arisen. It was not without reason that Lenin called his 1913 article about the automobile "one of the 'fashionable' industries". 


Artists created bizarre body shapes, fantastic colors, decorated the car with monograms and reliefs. Sometimes this decoration had a special character: a horse head moulage was placed on the front of the motor carriage body to make the car look like a carriage. In such a naive way they hoped to "reconcile" both the horses and their supporters with the car. Other designers went even further. They offered to equip the cars with planks with stuffed horses suspended from them and inside the plank to place a fuel tank, radiator, trunk. Other designs suggested a carriage with a "mechanical horse" controlled by reins; the engine and other mechanisms were hidden in the "body" of the horse. But the automobile was already beginning to take on a form of its own. 


The motor carriage also had properties inherent in it which the horse carriage did not have. Driving it, a man experiences, as it was written, a special, incomparable feeling of pleasure from the machine's obedience to his actions, from the speed of movement. He feels stronger lindaven tropfen preis, the machine seems to give him new opportunities, becomes, like a bicycle, an "extension of him.


The imperfection of the design of the machine, the difficulty of its operation, the relatively high cost - all this did not prevent the expansion of the circle of motorists, encouraged firms to improve the machine.  By 1900 the number of car firms (brands) had reached thousands. Most of them were listed only on paper - firms unsuccessfully tried to exploit the advantageous situation, to build and sell cars. But even solid firms, producing up to a hundred or more cars a year, there were many. Car output reached 3,000 a year in France and in the United States in 1900, about 1,000 in Germany, and the car fleet reached 9,000, 5,000, 2,000 cars respectively, the world fleet about 20,000, whereas only 5 years earlier, in 1895, there were 4 cars in the United States, 450 in France, and several dozen in Germany. 


The first 15 years of the automobile's existence did not fundamentally change its idea, except for one thing: speed. At the verge of the centuries the car could already reach speeds by an order of magnitude higher than those of the horse car, and the emerging new mode of transport - the automobile - could already compete with the railroad transport in terms of its speed indicators. The advantage in speed was of great importance for the design of the car, the quality of its manufacture, the creation of new roads and the modernization of old still "carriage roads", the qualifications of the driver and the legislators... But what probably meant the most was that people got a "taste of speed" - both emotional and practical. The latter, however, has so far only been used by sportsmen and merchants.


Auto shows and exhibitions began literally the same day the car industry was born. It is not surprising - always, in every sphere of human activity, there should be a place for competition. Recent years, motor shows look more and more like a meeting of snobs - the one who will surprise the future buyers most of all can consider himself a winner. Emphasis is made not even on presentation of new models, but on various contests and shows, taking place, of course, under a certain brand.