CarBrandLogos archive · Oldsmobile · 1901

OldsmobileCurved Dash

Built in numbers on a moving line a decade before the Model T.

Photo: Jackdude101 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The story

A defining chapter in Oldsmobile history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Ransom Olds solved the manufacturing problem before Henry Ford did. From 1901 the Curved Dash runabout was assembled in a Lansing factory from interchangeable parts made by outside suppliers, including transmissions from the Dodge brothers and engines from Leland and Faulconer, with bodies moved between stations on wheeled stands. Nobody had built cars this way at this scale, and more than 19,000 were made before production ended in 1907.

Oldsmobile1903 · none · Public domain

Design and engineering

The car itself was simple to the point of severity: a single horizontal cylinder of 95 cubic inches under the floor, a two-speed planetary transmission, tiller steering, full-elliptic springs front and rear, and the sweeping curved footboard that gave the car its name.

Oldsmobile Curved Dash · Automobil Rundschau Neue Folge 1902 p. 505 · Public domain

In production

It also learned early how to sell itself. Roy Chapin drove one from Detroit to the New York auto show in 1901, arriving muddy and on time, which was worth more than any advertisement. Four years later the song In My Merry Oldsmobile put the car into popular culture, where it stayed.

Legacy

Ransom Olds left the company he had founded in 1904 and started another under his own initials, REO. The Curved Dash is his monument: the first American car built in real volume, and the template Detroit refined for the next twenty years.

At a glance