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Alfred Sloan had been as pleased with Knudsen’s success as he was de-lighted with Ford’s continuing difficul ies.Through psychological ob-solescence, GM’s president had guaranteed that his company would remain America’s premiere automobile producer for decades to come.

Having none of his competitor’s scruples about product durability, Sloan did his utmost to fin new ways to decrease durability and in-crease obsolescence. But Sloan was also much less of an autocrat than Henry Ford. His ability to fin the right people, like Knudsen, and then to genuinely listen to what they had to say were great strengths in a volatile market.

In 1926, playing to the competitive edge that styling had given GM in the confli t with Ford, Sloan took the advice of the president of his Cadillac division and hired Harley Earl, a custom car designer. Earl made distinctive roadsters for Hollywood’s elite, including a car for cowboy star Tom Mix that had a saddle on its roof, and a more subtle

$28,000 creation for Fatty Arbuckle that has been described as “softly sculptural.”In 1921 Earl built six Cadillac sports sedans for then-Ca-dillac president Richard Collins. Earl’s large frame and flam oyant per-sonality won him notice, and he became a regular guest at West Coast Cadillac parties. One night, Earl bragged to Collins’s successor, Larry Fisher, that he could make a Chevrolet look like a Cadillac. It was 1925. Fisher thought for a moment and then offered Earl a job.¹⁹

Earl’s custom work blended all of the visible features of the car’s body into one harmonious design. In the industry, this was recognized as a characteristic of the very best luxury cars of the day—the Hispano-Suiza, for example—and it was something Sloan and Fisher wanted to incorporate into their Cadillac line. At Detroit’s GM headquarters, Earl revealed the secrets of his technique to GM executives. He developed fve full-size models for Cadillac, sculpted entirely out of clay. Other de-signers of the period worked in wood and metal, but clay gave Earl the fl wing forms that made his custom creations unique.

Overall, Earl’s models lowered the body and lengthened the wheel-base. The cramped passenger compartment at the rear of the car cre-ated an atmosphere of romantic intimacy, while the length of the car’s body (especially when it was disproportionately assigned to the engine space) created an impression of mechanical power and speed. This im-pression of length and strength was accentuated by the lowered wheel-base, which was the antithesis of practical car design, given the bad roads of the day. Earl was obsessed with the horizontal “through line”

in his cars’ design. This through line was achieved by integrating the belt line under the side windows into an unbroken horizontal rule that ran the length of the car. Earl used a special device called a highlight gauge to measure the angle at which light refle ted from a given car’s through line.²⁰

The 1927 Cadillac LaSalle had strong luxury lines. Earl had relied heavily on the design of the Hispano-Suiza to create a truly beautiful custom sports car. His LaSalle offered much of the Hispano’s styling and most of its features, but at $2,500 it was one sixth of the $15,000 price tag. The success of Harley’s LaSalle in the 1927–28 market confi med Sloan’s strategy of emphasizing styling and fashion change in automobile marketing. In a little known article in Printer’s Ink, Sloan himself wrote: “More attractive products are coming into the market continually and infl ence the purchaser to exchange his car a year or more old for a new car of the latest design.”²¹Delighted with the

LaSalle’s success, Sloan soon created the firs styling department at an American automobile manufacturer. It was called the Art and Color Section, and Sloan appointed Harley Earl to be its head. Thereafter, Earl busied himself in creating incremental modifica ions in GM cars for the annual model change.

Because it was too expensive for GM to change each model com-pletely every year, major redesigns requiring new dyes were put on the three-year styling cycle that would eventually defin the lifespan of all so-called durable goods in America. Between these major styling changes, annual face-lifts rearranged minor features, such as the chrome work. But even these minor moves created the illusion of pro-gress and hastened the appearance of datedness that psychological ob-solescence required. Years later, Earl openly discussed his role in cre-ating what he called planned or dynamic obsolescence: “Our big job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934 the average car ownership span was 5 years: now [1955] it is 2 years. When it is 1 year, we will have a perfect score.”²²

In the spring of 1927, after the fif een-millionth car rolled off the line, Ford Motor Company shut down production of the Model T forever, in order to retool for the Model A. Since Alfred Sloan was not yet a household name, the New York Times described what was hap-pening as “the fi ht for the national automobile championship between Henry Ford and General Motors.”²³When Ford’s new car was re-vealed on November 30 of that year, the American press swooped down on Dearborn, Michigan, to watch Charles Lindbergh, the na-tion’s most recent hero, demonstrate the Model A’s modern features.

Publicity photographs of the event depict a youthful, clear-eyed Lind-bergh sitting tall behind the wheel of the new Ford Tudor with an eleg-ant older woman smiling graciously beside him. She is Gertrude Ederle, Queen of Romania.

With the joint endorsement of American and European royalty, the Model A became an overnight success. Its features included safety

glass in the windshield, as well as aluminum alloy pistons,heat-treated chromium steel gears,and anti-friction bearings throughout—all of which made the car run quieter and smoother. The body was cush-ioned against the chassis at all points with rubber and hydraulic shock absorbers to make the ride comfortable for the ladies. The nine and a half inch clearance to the road gave the car fashionably low lines, and all seven body types were available in four colors.The Fordor sedan was available in seven. To top it all off, the price of the Model A was lower than that of comparable Chevrolet models.Four hundred thou-sand orders for the new car poured in nationwide before any dealer-ship saw delivery of the new cars.²⁴

Historians do not know for sure how much the Model A cost Ford Motor Company. Estimates of the design costs alone range as high as

$18 million. Added to that was the cost of completely shutting down production for six months in order to retool and produce the new car.

Ford later guessed that his total costs were in the region of $100 mil-lion. But some historians regard this low figu e with skepticism, put-ting the real cost of the Model T’s obsolescence, including shutdown, loss of sales, and complete retooling, at about $250 million.²⁵

Whatever the actual number was, the Model A was a very expensive lesson in psychological obsolescence, but one that Henry Ford still did not completely grasp. Despite the fact that Ford hired a new agency to create ads promoting the Model A as a “smart and stylish car”and de-picting it in elegant settings in order to create a classier

im-age,America’s foremost advertising historian reminds us that Ford was still unwilling to accept the full implications of psychological obsoles-cence and repetitive consumption: “On the eve of its unveiling, he con-tradicted the implications of his advertising by proclaiming his inten-tion to make the new car ‘so strong and so well-made that no one ought ever to have to buy a second one.’”²⁶

Gradually, as the novelty of the Model A wore off, Ford sales de-clined once again. In 1930 cosmetic changes were introduced to the

Model A body types. But still,Harley Earl’s increasingly stylish Chevro-lets, with their six-cylinder engines after 1928, wore down Ford’s mar-ket lead.In Auto Opium, a comprehensive and readable study of the history of automotive design, David Gartman observes that by 1931 Ford sales were one third of their 1929 level, forcing the company once again to shut down production and revamp its line.²⁷

What came next must have made Alfred Sloan smile. In 1932 Ford introduced the firs low-priced V-8 in fourteen different models. The Model A had proven to be a costly and unnecessary interim step in Ford’s reeducation. Ford production now went over to the GM strategy of creating superficia ly different models on standardized running gear. Still, Ford sales fell again in 1932. The following year the com-pany fina ly adopted GMs policy of changing the style of its cars regu-larly on an annual basis. Psychological obsolescence was now the rule for U.S. automakers. And because car production was America’s fla ship industry, this lesson was quickly copied in all other areas of manufacturing.