one of the great achievements.........

      During the early years of the automobile industry, the immediate goal of the engineers and inventors was simply reliability—to get a car to go somewhere and come back under its own power.  Many bright automotive ideas ended with a horse, a towline, and laughter.  Although progress was expensive, American motorists cheerfully paid the bills for it.  In their enthusiasm for individual transportation, they bought cars, reliable or unreliable, and thus provided the source of a substantial portion of the risk capital for experiment and production.  Not many industries have been so well favored by their customers.  In twenty years the reliability of the motorcar in relation to the street and road conditions of the time was pretty well established.  Individual mechanized transportation, one of the great achievements in the progress of mankind, was a commonplace fact of life, and everyone could enjoy it.

-Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years With General Motors