regard the selling of a machine as the real accomplishment and that
thereafter it did not matter what happened to the buyer. That is the
shortsighted salesman-on-commission attitude. If a salesman is paid only
for what he sells, it is not to be expected that he is going to exert
any great effort on a customer out of whom no more commission is to be
made. And it is right on this point that we later made the largest
selling argument for the Ford. The price and the quality of the car
would undoubtedly have made a market, and a large market. We went beyond
that. A man who bought one of our cars was in my opinion entitled to
continuous use of that car, and therefore if he had a breakdown of any
kind it was our duty to see that his machine was put into shape again at
the earliest possible moment. In the success of the Ford car the early
provision of service was an outstanding element. Most of the expensive
cars of that period were ill provided with service stations. If your car
broke down you had to depend on the local repair man--when you were
entitled to depend upon the manufacturer. If the local repair man were a
forehanded sort of a person, keeping on hand a good stock of parts
(although on many of the cars the parts were not interchangeable), the
owner was lucky. But if the repair man were a shiftless person, with an
adequate knowledge of automobiles and an inordinate desire to make a
good thing out of every car that came into his place for repairs, then
even a slight breakdown meant weeks of laying up and a whopping big
repair bill that had to be paid before the car could be taken away. The
repair men were for a time the largest menace to the automobile
industry. Even as late as 1910 and 1911 the owner of an automobile was
regarded as essentially a rich man whose money ought to be taken away
from him. We met that situation squarely and at the very beginning. We
would not have our distribution blocked by stupid, greedy men.

That is getting some years ahead of the story, but it is control by