1. Mass production for the masses
The first gasoline-powered cars were built in Europe in the 1880s, and by the turn of the century many countries had thriving automotive businesses. Henry Ford gets the credit for creating the first affordable, mass-produced vehicle with his Model T, launched in 1908 and built on a conveyor-belt assembly line starting in 1913. About 15 million of them were built before the model was eliminated in 1927, and the price at one point was as low as $280 (U.S.). Now there are about 625 million cars worldwide, and Toyota Motor Corp.'s president recently estimated that demand in developing countries will push that number to one billion by 2010 and 1.5 billion by 2020.
2. Roaring twenties: Canada revs up
The first cars in Canada were produced at a Ford plant in Windsor, Ont., in 1904. That year, 114 were built. Canada didn't get its own domestic car until 1908, when Sam McLaughlin set up a plant in Oshawa at his family's carriage works. But the McLaughlin vehicles weren't entirely Canadian – the engines were shipped from a Buick plant in the U.S. McLaughlin merged with General Motors to form GM of Canada in 1918, and in the 1920s the industry boomed. We were big exporters, sending thousands of cars offshore. But the bubble burst with the Depression and intense U.S. competition, and by the '40s and '50s most Canadian cars were imports.
3. Deal hummed like a well-tuned engine
On Jan. 16, 1965, a new era dawned when the prime minister, Lester Pearson, and the U.S. president, Lyndon Johnson, signed the Canada-United States Automotive Products Agreement, from then on known as the auto pact. It killed off a 17-per-cent Canadian import tax on cars, and ensured that one car would be built in Canada for every one purchased here. The pact held up for 36 years, but was killed off in 2001 after the World Trade Organization ruled it illegal.
4. Oh yes, about that exhaust
Hybrid gas-electric cars may now be all the rage, but they have been around for a long time. As far back as 1899, the Lohner-Porsche vehicle developed in Austria had a gasoline-driven engine, with electric motors in the wheel hubs. Then in 1917, the Woods Dual Power, a car built in Chicago, combined a gas engine with an electric motor. And in 1969, GM developed the experimental XP-883, a tiny car combining a small engine with an electric motor. It even plugged in, like the new hybrids that will be released in the next few years.
5. Road ahead: Toyota in the passing laneWhile sales of hybrids are booming, they still make up a tiny proportion of the worldwide automotive market. Nevertheless, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase has predicted that they'll represent 10 per cent of all new car sales by 2018. Toyota, which kicked off the modern hybrid boom with the launch of the Prius in 1997, expects to sell 500,000 of its hybrids this year, and pump out one million a year by 2010.
