The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Transportation Is a Major Source of Waste
Ford now cites weight as a major source of waste in transportation. A pas-
senger rail car weighs far more than the passengers and their luggage, 
which means only a fraction of the coal, diesel fuel, or electricity delivers 
value to the customers. Kilcarr (2009) reports that an 18-wheel truck that 
can carry 80,000 pounds under current federal regulations weighs 35,000 
pounds empty. The weight of the tractor and trailer are, therefore, almost 
44% nonvalue-adding. Addition of another axle with four wheels and a set 
of brakes would allow trucks to carry 97,000 pounds without any loss in 
braking ability, and without increased pressure per unit area on the road. 
This would reduce the vehicle’s nonvalue-adding share to 36.1%.
* * *
I had been experimenting principally upon the cutting down of weight. 
Excess weight kills any self-propelled vehicle. There are a lot of fool ideas 
about weight. It is queer, when you come to think of it, how some fool terms 
get into current use. There is the phrase “heavyweight” as applied to a man’s 
mental apparatus! What does it mean? No one wants to be fat and heavy of 
body—then why of head? For some clumsy reason we have come to confuse 
strength with weight. The crude methods of early building undoubtedly had 
much to do with this. The old ox-cart weighed a ton—and it had so much 
weight that it was weak! To carry a few tons of humanity from New York to 
Chicago, the railroad builds a train that weighs many hundred tons, and the 
result is an absolute loss of real strength and the extravagant waste of untold 
millions in the form of power. The law of diminishing returns begins to oper-
ate at the point where strength becomes weight. Weight may be desirable in 
a steam roller but nowhere else. Strength has nothing to do with weight. The 
mentality of the man who does things in the world is agile, light, and strong. 
The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight 
has been eliminated. Strength is never just weight—either in men or things. 
Whenever any one suggests to me that I might increase weight or add a part, 
I look into decreasing weight and eliminating a part! The car that I designed 
was lighter than any car that had yet been made. It would have been lighter if 
I had known how to make it so—later I got the materials to make the lighter 
car.
In our first year we built “Model A,” selling the runabout for eight hun-
dred and fifty dollars and the tonneau for one hundred dollars more. This 
model had a two-cylinder opposed motor developing eight horsepower. It 
had a chain drive, a seventy-two inch wheel base—which was supposed to be 
long—and a fuel capacity of five gallons. We made and sold 1,708 cars in the 
first year. That is how well the public responded.

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38  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
Every one of these “Model A’s” has a history. Take No. 420. Colonel D. 
C. Collier of California bought it in 1904. He used it for a couple of years, 
sold it, and bought a new Ford. No. 420 changed hands frequently until 
1907 when it was bought by one Edmund Jacobs living near Ramona in 
the heart of the mountains. He drove it for several years in the roughest 
kind of work. Then he bought a new Ford and sold his old one. By 1915 No. 
420 had passed into the hands of a man named Cantello who took out the 
motor, hitched it to a water pump, rigged up shafts on the chassis and now, 
while the motor chugs away at the pumping of water, the chassis drawn by 
a burro acts as a buggy. The moral, of course, is that you can dissect a Ford 
but you cannot kill it.