The Rise and Fall of Oldsmobile

Good morning, it’s April 29. On this day in 2004, the last Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line in Lansing, Michigan. The last car, an Alero sedan, was signed by the workers on the line and shipped to Lansing’s R.E. Olds Transportation Museum.

For Olds lovers, April 29, 2004, was a sad day. These aficionadostend to blame General Motors, the car company the Obama administration Treasury Department now (sort-of) owns. But GM produced Oldsmobiles at a profit for the better part of a century, and the demise of the brand serves as a reminder that technological innovation is not a national birthright. It is a trait that must be refreshed with each new generation, and in a global economy that is no small challenge.

In the waning days of the 19th century, a race was on to develop an alternative to the horse and carriage. German and French inventors had been tinkering with designs since the early 1860s. In the 1880s, the pace of innovation increased on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was led by dreamers whose surnames are still familiar to us -- Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz in Germany, Henry Ford and Ransom Eli Olds in the U.S. – while other names have been lost in the mists of memory, such as Charles and Frank Duryea of Springfield, Mass., and the eponymous-sounding J.W. Carhart, an Oshkosh, Wis., physics professor.

The first engines were powered by steam that was generated by gasoline, and Ransom Olds, a 22-year-old Ohio native, built one in his father’s shop around 1886. In 1897, Olds incorporated the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in Lansing and produced four cars. In 1899, he relocated to Detroit, lined up some venture capital, and by 1901 produced 425 models of the Curved Dash Oldsmobile Runabouts.

From the very start, the internal combustion engine was a cultural phenomena as well as a commercial breakthrough. The new machines not only invoked the promise of the 20th century, but symbolized freedom itself. Freedom from the yoke of the farm, freedom to see the country, freedom to go courting -- and to escape the binds of society.

Seventy years before Bruce Springsteen urged “Wendy” to wrap her legs “round these velvet rims” and “strap your hands cross my engines,” turn-of-the-century crooner Billy Murray sang “In My Merry Oldsmobile.” The chorus goes like this:

Come away with me, Lucille

In my merry Oldsmobile

Down the road of life we'll fly

Automobubbling, you and I

To the church we'll swiftly steal

Then our wedding bells will peal

You can go as far as you like with me

In my merry Oldsmobile.

But if it took American know-how and American imagination to mass produce and mass market the automobile – and Ransom Olds was doing it before Henry Ford - the early history of the Olds Motor Company revealed two other truths about unfettered capitalism.

The first is that it doesn’t operate on the Golden Rule. On the contrary, the man with the gold makes the rules. And so, Ransom Olds was forced out of his own company by his investors, who turned around and sold their stake to General Motors before the company was even a decade old.

A second historical lesson is that the superior technology is not always identifiable at the start. In 1899 and 1900, Ransom built electric cars, as did several other automotive pioneers. Petroleum was cheap, however, and its supply seemingly inexhaustible, so the electric car was phased out.

They were brought back many years later by a company named after Kiichiro Toyoda, who visited the United States in 1929 to study the auto industry.