Ah, the good old days.There were a lot of good old days actually, but the ones that I’m talking about were the early part of the twentieth century. That’s when hundreds of people started car businesses. It was very similar to the dot com businesses today, everyone was trying their hand at it.
In the early 1900s there were literally almost two thousand automakers in this country. Obviously, most of them failed for one reason or another, but the lucky few who survived made a fortune.
The Dodge Brothers were part of the more fortunate group of carmakers. They actually went into business in 1900 making and selling auto parts. Apparently, their stuff was so good that they had a steady contract with Henry Ford to supply some of the parts for his popular Model T. The Dodge Brothers saw how good Henry was doing and figured it was time for them to start building cars. And that’s just what they did.
1915 saw the Dodge Brothers’ first car come out of the factory and it was nice. In fact, the new Dodge Model 30 was so nice it competed directly with their erstwhile friend Henry Ford and his ever-popular black car. The Dodge Brothers tried to one-up Mr. Ford by using innovations that would eventually become standard within the auto industry. Their car had a 12-volt electrical system instead of six-volts, which nearly everyone else would use until after the 1940s. The Dodge’s engine had almost twice the horsepower than Ford’s had, and the Dodge Model 30 utilized a steel body rather than wood and used an advanced transmission system that no other manufacturer had.
They competed with Ford all right, and came a close second after only a year in production. People just loved their cars. It didn’t hurt production that the Dodge Brothers sued Henry Ford and won $25 million. That went a very long way in enabling the brothers to build the best car that could be built at the time. Their cars were so durable that the U.S. Army used Dodge vehicles when they went into Mexico in 1916 to chase Pancho Villa. They never caught him but that wasn’t the car’s fault. No one could catch Pancho Villa.
Those were the good old days. However, the Dodge Brothers were only in the car building business for about five years. Not because they weren’t good businessmen, which they obviously were, but because they both died in 1920 in the worldwide flu epidemic. There families sold the Dodge Car Company and their name
