Every new car starts as a drawing. Designers go from sketches to clay models to hand-built prototypes before the factory builds a new car. They make big clay models of a new car, and they cut and shape the clay by hand.

Karl Benz made one of the very first cars in the 1880s. It could go only about 10 miles per hour at best. Karl Benz applied for a patent on 29 January 1886 for his motor vehicle. The patent paper is now called the automobile's 'birth certificate.' Bertha Benz took one of her husband's cars on the first long-distance journey in car history, without telling him first.

Before Ford's moving line, workers built each car by hand while it stayed in one place. Ford's moving assembly line first ran at his Highland Park plant in Michigan in October 1913. A rope and winch pulled the chassis of each Model T along a short track while workers added parts as it passed. Ford was not the first carmaker to use an assembly line. Ransom Olds built cars on an assembly line before Ford did. Ford's moving line combined ideas from still assembly lines like Olds's. In March 1901 a fire burned Olds's Detroit car factory to the ground. By the end of that year Olds had still built 425 Curved Dash cars. What was new in 1913 was a line that moved the car to the workers.

Ford first tried the line on a small part. A magneto took 20 minutes to build, and after the line it took five. The Model T line kept getting faster. At first it cut the build time from 12.5 hours to under 6, and within a year to 93 minutes.

Henry Ford wanted to make cars that ordinary families could buy. A new Model T cost $850 when it first came out. Later the price fell to $260, so many more families could buy one.

Many people think the Model T was always black, but it came in colors in its early years and again in 1926-27. The years from about 1914 to 1925 were the black ones. In the black years the Model T's paints were really color varnishes, and more than 30 kinds of black paint were used at once. Early Model T bodies were painted with several coats of varnish, and each step had to dry for a long time before the next.

Today a car's paint is put on in layers. Primer makes the surface smooth and even, so the color goes on well. The base coat gives the car its color. A clear coat on top protects the color from sunlight and from air that can dull it.

Body parts are made from big rolls of steel or aluminum. The rolls are cut into flat pieces. Big presses squeeze the flat metal into the shapes of car parts such as doors and side panels. A press line can run up to 18 strokes a minute. One press shop can make more than 10,000 car parts in a day.

Toyota's way of building cars rests on two ideas: just-in-time and jidoka. Sakichi Toyoda built a loom that stopped by itself when a thread broke. That idea became jidoka.

Old cars are recycled. Over 12 million cars are recycled in the United States in a year. Their steel is melted and made into new steel, which can become cans, appliances, buildings or new cars. Cars are the most recycled thing people buy, because nearly all the cars that leave the road are recycled.

Words to know

• prototypes: test models
• jidoka: self-stopping idea
• varnish: shiny coating
• loom: cloth maker