Ford Motor Company sold its first car
On this day · 23 July 1903
A Chicago dentist bought a sputtering two-cylinder runabout, and a near-bankrupt startup became the company that would put America on wheels.
Just over a month after incorporating, the fledgling Ford Motor Company made its first sale on July 23, 1903. The car was a two-cylinder Model A, hand-assembled in a rented wood-frame building on Mack Avenue in Detroit — the company’s very first factory.
The buyer was Dr. Ernst Pfenning, a dentist from Chicago, who paid roughly $850 for the little runabout. The Model A produced just 8 horsepower and topped out near 28 mph, a far cry from the assembly-line empire Henry Ford would soon build.
The sale could not have come a moment too soon: the firm had nearly drained its initial investment.
By the time that first car changed hands, Ford’s bank account reportedly held only a few hundred dollars. Within months, however, the company turned a profit, and within a few years the Model T would reshape global industry. That single 1903 transaction marked the quiet beginning of mass-market motoring.
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